577BOOK REVIEWThe Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 577–581, 1999.

BOOK REVIEW

George Sher, Approximate Justice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield,1997, 185 pp. ISBN 0-8476-8754-6, $24.95 (Pb).

George Sher’s Approximate Justice is a collection of excellent essays innon-ideal theory, the study of how best to arrive at justice when the means,such as knowledge, needed to do so perfectly are not in adequate supply.Sher tackles a series of problems of this sort including: preferential hiring,predicting performance, trade-offs between rights-violations and injustices,feminist critiques of traditional female roles, subsidizing abortion whenmany citizens object to the practice, and punishing wrongdoers. He proceedsmore or less in the same fashion with each. He starts by identifying theproblem generally, and goes on to point out and rectify the variousinfelicities in the prevalent formulations of the problem. Armed with asatisfactory statement of the problem, Sher surveys a number of popular orpromising responses, refutes them, and then presents and defends his own.All of this is done with an admirable clarity of thought and statement, alarge awareness of the philosophical and empirical complexities, and ahumane and liberal spirit. Sher ends up with a limited defense of preferentialtreatment for blacks. He makes interesting and creative observations aboutthe related issues of transworld personal identity, group entitlement,predicting performance, and the fairness of lotteries. He points out thedifficulties in assessing neutrally the value of traditional female roles. Healso offers some new defenses of his earlier positions on economic and penaldesert and argues that refusal of public funding of abortions is a faircompromise in light of widespread opposition to abortion. Advancedscholars and beginning students can learn much from Approximate Justice,not only about the issues tackled, but also about lucid and economicalphilosophical writing.

Many of the essays in Approximate Justice draw on the doctrine of naturaldesert for productive effort which Sher set out and defended in his book,Desert. This is particularly true of the essays in which he discussespreferential treatment for groups that suffered injustice in the past. In theopening essay of the collection, “Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights,” Shertries to defend the claim that, ceteris paribus, entitlement to recompensefor ancient wrongs fades with the passage of time. He formulates the

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problem as one in which we compare the actual course of events in the worldWa in which some individual, X, is discriminated against with a rectifiedworld, W

r, in which X has not been discriminated against. We see what X

has in Wr and determine how much of that should transfer over to W

a. Writes

Sher:

Let us begin by considering a normative judgment that plainly does notcarry over from a rectified world to our own [actual world]. Suppose thatX, a very promising student, has been discriminatorily barred fromentering law school; and suppose further that although X knows he willbe able to gain entry in another year, he becomes discouraged and so doesnot reapply. In a rectified world W

r, which lacks the initial discrimination,

X studies diligently and eventually becomes a prominent lawyer whoenjoys great prestige and a high salary. In that world, we may suppose,X is fully entitled to these goods. However, in the actual world, W

a, the

compensation to which X is entitled appears to fall far short of them ortheir equivalent. Hence our normative judgment does not fully carry overfrom W

r to W

a (p. 21).

For Sher, X is not entitled in the actual world to the rewards he would haveearned in the nondiscriminatory world because what X ends up with in W

r

is at least in part a function of the efforts he made in Wr, and, since he did

not make those efforts in Wa, he should not be entitled to the rewards hewould have earned in Wr. Although Sher mentions the possibility, he doesnot seriously consider the moral implications of the fact that X’s failure tomake efforts in Wa was caused by his discouragement due to the dis-crimination he suffered there. However, suppose that X had been on the wayto making the efforts in W

a that he makes in W

r, but was prevented from

doing so by being wrongfully kidnapped and imprisoned. In that case, wemight well think X entitled to the rewards he would have had. If wrongfullyimposed physical barriers have this effect, then it seems that wrongfullycaused psychological barriers ought to do so as well. Sher does notadequately consider this possibility because, given his doctrine of naturaldesert for productive efforts, the link between desert and efforts is for himso strong that it blocks from view the positive things that might be said infavor of circumventing the link.

Moreover, Sher’s argument for the fading of entitlements is based onextending, over several generations, the argument just considered. While someX in a rectified world would be entitled to the rewards that would have comedown to him due to the efforts of several generations of his forebears whodid not suffer discrimination, X’s counterpart in the actual world would beentitled to less due to the failure of the generations since discrimination to

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make the efforts that would justly earn the rewards. But, if wrongfully causeddiscouragement could have the effect in one generation, it could have the sameeffect over several generations, and X’s counterpart in the actual world mightwell deserve the rewards he would have had in W

r.

In a subsequent essay, “Justifying Reverse Discrimination in Employment,”Sher does explicitly consider, and then reject, the idea that a person mightdeserve preferential treatment because of having been discriminatorilydeprived of the opportunity or means to make efforts that the person would havemade and been rewarded for in a non-discriminatory world:

Even if there were a way to afford a disadvantaged person just enoughpreferential treatment to make up for the efforts he was prevented frommaking by his environment, it is not clear that he ought to be afforded thatmuch preferential treatment. To allow this, after all, would be to concedethat the effort he would have made under other conditions is worth just asmuch as the effort that his rival [for a given job] actually did make; andthis, I think, is implausible. . . . Because actual effort creates desert in away that merely possible effort does not, reverse discrimination to restoreprecisely the competitive position that a person would have had if he hadnot been prevented from working harder would not be desirable even if itwere possible (p. 50).

The previous objections and diagnosis apply here. Sher’s commitment to adoctrine of natural desert for productive efforts keeps him from seeing howa person wrongly prevented from making those efforts might nonethelessdeserve the condition he would have had, if he had been able to make thoseefforts. For this reason the linchpin of Approximate Justice is the essay, “Effort,Ability, and Personal Desert,” in which Sher reprises the argument he madein Desert against John Rawls’s rejection of natural desert in A Theory ofJustice.

At issue is the view, attributed by Sher to Rawls, “that because no onedeserves either his native talents or his ability to exert effort, no one can besaid to deserve any advantages made possible by his talents or abilities” (p.65). Sher takes Rawls to mean by this “that nobody ever deserves anything”because the various unearned bases of desert are “arbitrary from a moral pointof view” and give their possessor “an unfair advantage” (pp. 70 & 76). Againstthis, Sher argues that Rawls’s view is based on an unduly narrow focus on “acompetitive model of desert-acquisition,” but that there are numerous otherways of coming to deserve things: “Extending effort, acting wrongly, andexhibiting virtue are not variant forms of winning [a competition]. Hence,where they are concerned, the notion of unfair advantage is hopelessly out ofplace” (p. 76).

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Sher’s argument works against the view that he has attributed to Rawls,but, though Rawls’s words lend themselves to this attribution, there is a betterway to interpret Rawls on desert. The better interpretation has textual supportin A Theory of Justice, but that is less important than the fact that theinterpretation is a plausible, and arguably superior, alternative to the doctrineof natural desert for productive efforts. Basically, the idea is that, whether ornot people naturally deserve something because of their productive efforts,what or how much they deserve is derivative from a conception of economicjustice. To distinguish this from Sher’s doctrine of natural desert, we maycall it the justice-derivative doctrine of desert.

The reason that what people deserve for their productive efforts is derivativefrom a conception of economic justice is simple and all too often overlooked.The reward that a person deserves for her productive efforts does not flowfrom her efforts, but from the productive efforts of others, normally fromthose who benefit from her productive efforts. The money a person receivesfor her productive efforts is only of value to her as a claim on the productiveefforts of others. Consequently, what she deserves depends on what is a fairrecompense from others for the benefits they receive from her. This amountsto saying that what a person deserves is derivative from a conception of thejust distribution of economic benefits and burdens. Economic desert is areward for contribution. A doctrine of natural desert for contribution-producing effort can tell us no more than that there should be a reward. Butthis tells us very little. To give a value to the reward, we need a fair standardof exchanges between contributions and rewards, and that is a standard ofeconomic justice.

Since the normal reward is money, which is a promiscuous claim on theproductive efforts of everyone else in society, the terms on which our effortsare exchanged must be just to us all. The procedure Rawls follows in theoriginal position, determining what standard for the distribution of benefitsand burdens is reasonable to all concerned, neatly satisfies the demand. Thejustice-derivative conception of desert for productive efforts is superior tothe doctrine of natural desert. The doctrine of natural desert, leaves out thefact that what people get for their productive efforts is the result of otherpeople’s productive efforts. This suggests that Rawls’s procedure has moregoing for it than the steady reliance on intuitions about natural desert thatcharacterizes Sher’s approach.

Most important for present purposes is the fact that if Rawls’s procedureis appropriate for determining economic desert, the way is opened to differentpossible answers to the questions considered earlier about the desert of thosewho have, for reasons of discrimination, not made the efforts that normallyearn people rewards. Once it is accepted that determining desert requires thatwe ascertain what distribution of benefits and burdens all could agree to, it is

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plausible to suppose that people who did not know if they would be victimsof discrimination might agree to a principle of insurance that would providerecompense to those who, due to discrimination, failed to make normal efforts.The recompense would be commensurate to what they would have earnedhad they not suffered discrimination. This would imply that those peopledeserved that commensurate recompense, even though they did not make theefforts that normally would have led to such desert.

It is important to note that the justice-derivative doctrine applies toexchanges of productive efforts, not to punishment for crimes. We can holdthe justice-derivative view with respect to economic rewards and still believethat there is a valid doctrine of natural desert for intentional harmful acts, atleast, for acts of violence and their kin, such as, deceit and betrayal. This isironic since, when it comes to deserved punishment, Sher defends ajustice-derivative view. In the final essay in his book, “Deserved PunishmentRevisited,” Sher defends a variant of the view associated most famously withHerbert Morris, according to which punishment is justified in order to take backfrom law-breakers the unfair advantage they took when they simultaneouslybenefited from the self-restraint of law-abiding people and did not restrainthemselves. Sher does a splendid job of refining and defending his viewsagainst the objectors. However, the unfair advantage view fails, nonetheless,because it is a justification of restitution, not punishment. If I wrongly tookan advantage from you, I would rightly have that advantage taken away fromme and then be punished for taking it. Ironically, then, Sher defends a naturaldoctrine of desert in the economic realm where it is inadequate, and ajustice-derivative doctrine in the realm of punishment where it is inappropriate.Yet he does it all so well and so clearly that his essays are models ofphilosophical writing from which all can profit.

Jeffrey ReimanDepartment of Philosophy and Religion

American University4000 Massachusetts Avenue

NW Washington, DC 20016-8056USA

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