Peter Sloman on Justice

Thank you. Great to be with you.

Okay, thanks. Those are big questions. So, I work in a Politics department in Cambridge – I work mainly on British politics – but I did my PhD at Oxford on the way in which British Liberals thought about economic policy in the period when the British Liberal Party was at its lowest ebb, between the 1920s and the 1960s. So that was really a classic sort of archival project. A few years ago, I published my second book, Transfer State, which is about the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and the way that shaped social policy in Britain over the last century. And now I'm working on the ways in which political parties in Britain, Canada and Australia think about tax and spending when they're preparing for elections and how those things play out in a campaign context. So let me answer that question with a historian’s hat on:

03:17I think historians generally don't think in explicitly normative terms about justice or anything else. Our job is mainly to understand what people thought and did in the past and not to develop our own vision of how the world ought to be. And I guess one of the great virtues of that is that I think it creates an openness to recognizing that concepts like justice or rights or equality have been understood in very different ways: they've meant very different things to different people at different times and in different places. And so, for instance, in recent years, Samuel Moyn over at Yale has done a lot of stuff on the history of human rights. Pedro Ramos Pinto here in Cambridge has been working on the ways in which global inequality has been sort of framed and constructed as a political issue over the last 20, 30 years.

04:17So I guess the historian's contribution to debates on justice is always going to be one, not so much of asking “what is the best way of thinking about justice?”, but “how do different conceptions of justice play out in the real world? What are their implications for policy? What are their implications for everyday life? What are the risks involved in taking particular normative conceptions and trying to make a go of them?” In terms of Christian faith, I guess, yeah, no particular approach I suppose, except that I have been shaped by a biblical vision of what justice might look like and how we ought to relate to other people, and that shapes the way I engage with political debates. I think there's also an imperative to try to be fair and to seek truth in understanding how people have understood the world in the past, and not to go around caricaturing one's research subjects or political opponents, but letting them speak on their own terms. I think that's really important. That's a form of justice to those who are no longer with us and can no longer speak for themselves.

Yeah, thanks. I mean, that's a really interesting question. And, reflecting on this, I suppose I've probably been quite influenced by the work of the Jubilee Centre here in Cambridge and writers like Ron Sider in the US who have pointed to the really rich vision that I guess the Old Testament and particularly the Mosaic law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy give us of what economic justice might look like. I suppose in some ways that's an idealized vision, but it's also a set of prescriptions that were to be taken seriously by the people of Israel in terms of providing for every family to have economic justice and security through the distribution of the land through families and households and so on. And that's underpinned by the principle of the jubilee, which means that when land is sold, it goes back to the original family in the 50th year.

07:11So that land is never permanently alienated, but that sort of resets in every generation. And there's also provision, of course, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, for collecting a tithe every third year, which goes to support the poor and for allowing the poor to glean at the corners of the fields and for debt forgiveness and not taking property permanently from one's fellow Israelite. It’s really not taking advantage of people's economic vulnerability. So I think the people of Israel are called in the Old Testament to a whole ethos of economic behavior that is generous and sacrificial, that recognizes that everything comes from God and that we have obligations to other members of the community. I guess one of the challenges we have as Christians is that Jesus very firmly endorses and recapitulates that ethic in the New Testament without necessarily saying very much about the kind of underlying set of structures that the Old Testament gives us. But of course, the New Testament is a very different context. Israel is living under Roman occupation, and when Jesus comes and proclaims the kingdom, that has all sorts of implications for economic life, but it's not primarily a public policy agenda in a developed way, in the way in which the Old Testament law is.

Yeah, something Christians have grappled with for 2000 years, I suppose, in different ways.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess, in a sense, this is the thesis that I was trying to develop in Transfer State: that cash transfers become one of, if not the main way in which economists, to some extent philosophers, and kind of policy wonks in western governments have come to think about the sort of toolkit governments have for tackling poverty and tackling inequality. And that's very much tied up with ideas about sufficiency, ideas about a poverty line, particular ways of measuring income distribution, for instance, through surveys and so on, which have become very powerful. And I think if you go back to the first half of the 20th century in particular, but really right up to the 1960s and 70s, public policy was much more strongly shaped by trying to make sure that people have particular goods. Clearly trade unions campaigned for what they saw as a kind of fair day’s pay for a fair day's work and for full employment and for in some cases a kind of family wage so that a working man could support his family of two or three children.

10:57Obviously, that was an enormously gendered – in some ways quite patriarchal – view of the world. But then you had governments engaged in subsidizing food, keeping food prices down – particularly during the two world wars – you had governments engaged in controlling rents, in providing council housing, and so clearly there was a much stronger grappling in that era with what you might call the sort of the concrete goods of the real economy. Since the 1960s and 70s, there's been a very strong shift towards marketization and really, I guess, letting the market do its thing in terms of the initial distribution of rewards, of income, of wealth. And then the state steps in through taxes and social benefits in an attempt to make the system fairer in some way, often without really clarifying and justifying what a fair distribution of income and wealth might look like.

Yeah, sure. So in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Brief, he conceptualizes first order justice as being justice where agents act justly in their ordinary affairs, but he also talks about that being rooted in a vision of a social order that is structurally just, that fits with our beliefs or sort of moral intuitions about what a fair society might look like. And then [he] says that second order justice is action designed to rectify violations of first order justice. He talks mainly about both punishment and restitution, restorative justice in a sort of judicial context. But I wonder if notions of compensation might also come in there as a kind of second order way of getting to an approximation of first order justice without necessarily trying to re-engineer the underlying social order in a way that reflects a sort of strong vision. And I think, I mean maybe there is concept stretch going on here, but I think I would say that clearly the Old Testament vision of economic justice is a first order vision.

14:15It's quite a rich first order vision. I think the way in which the British state and other governments early in the 20th century tried to create meaningful work for people – tried to engage directly with questions of food supply and energy supply (of course, that's come back on the agenda recently) and transport and particularly housing – reflects quite a strong first order vision of what society ought to look like. So I guess I think there is a case for saying that we have moved more and more into the realm of second order policymaking: of compensation that is designed to give people cash. And there are good arguments for that. There are economic efficiency arguments for that because when governments try to provide goods collectively or when they engage in detailed forms of economic intervention, that can often be inefficient, sometimes self-defeating, sometimes ineffective. There's also arguments about choice.

15:26Sometimes, when states get involved in trying to dictate the pattern of production and consumption, that can be profoundly paternalistic. And I think many Christians will believe that choice and agency are kind of moral goods that we want to respect. And so I guess giving people money fits in with that, but perhaps there are also risks involved – as policy gets further and further away from a clear vision of what economic justice looks like – that the process of redistribution starts to look quite arbitrary and also politically contingent, that it becomes quite difficult to see why such and such a person pays this amount of tax or receives this amount of money in benefits. It becomes quite difficult to see why, for instance, on a global scale, we have a target for – the UK government has a target, or at least used to have a target – of paying 0.7% of GDP in international aid. These are quite arbitrary figures and they reflect an attempt to achieve a fairer society, a fairer world, without necessarily getting into the weeds of trying to build consensus or agreement on what a fair system might look like.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's really interesting. I mean, I think it's interesting that we often, when we talk about the challenge of reconciling deep normative visions that can't easily be reconciled with each other, we often think in terms of religion or we often think in terms of views of the world. I guess here the division is not so much between Christians and others, it's between the economic left and the economic right, and the various political philosophies that lie between them. I mean, clearly if you look at society through a market lens and your starting point is saying, okay, most people’s work in capitalism, the process of investment, the distribution of income created by capitalism is your starting point and that that is basically fair. Then that's a very different starting point to someone who believes in sort of a strong form of egalitarian political philosophy and says by definition that the presumption should be that every human being has the same set of rights and should have the same kind of living standard, and that it is departures from that kind of baseline that need to be justified.

18:51And of course, in the economic world, we all come to politics with vested interests in a sense. We all come from different walks of life and different agendas, different backgrounds, and we have to recognize that. I suppose then, in politics, there is always going to be a tendency to try to find a kind of path of least resistance – to try to find a way of doing politics and a way of doing economic policy that can command broad consensus and that can reduce those big divisions of economic perspective to divisions which are a bit more manageable. Of course, you have the challenge that in democracy the vote lies with the many, but often economic power lies with the relatively few, and modern governments regard that as something that needs to be negotiated and worked through and recognized rather than a problem that needs to be overcome by changing the distribution of economic power.

20:05What are the risks involved here? I think there is bluntly a risk involved in simply losing sight of what you're trying to do in politics in a contemporary context. I think there are two particular challenges that the focus on redistribution poses. I mean, one is that the process of redistribution requires constant government activity, that because the focus is on income rather than wealth or rather than economic institutions, then you kind of need the whole machinery of taxes and transfers to be operating permanently in order to ensure that everybody has a decent standard of living or something like that. And as soon as it is turned off – and it only takes a change of government for it to be turned off or scaled back – then poverty and destitution can reemerge remarkably quickly. And I mean, I think there's also a risk that because cash transfers and a politics of tax and transfer makes redistribution between citizens seem quite explicit, then it also can create demands for forms of conditionality, forms of stigma, what you might call ‘ordeals’ that people have to go through in order to claim welfare benefits, because they’re seen to be forms of public charity, rather than something that reflects underlying rights to having a decent living, participation in society, that we might want to ground in a richer vision of what a fair distribution of economic resources looks like.

Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting: are there questions of economic justice that we are ignoring or maybe not paying as much attention to in the policy world as we should be? I think yes, absolutely. I mean, in the longer term, there are questions about how you achieve economic justice in the climate transition, how the costs of that are borne fairly. There are questions about what automation is going to do and how we deal with the implications of that for the labour market. I think, in the short term, clearly we have something like a kind of cost of living crisis in the UK that has been exacerbated by the energy shock coming out of the Ukraine War and President Putin's aggression. But I mean, I think even before the pandemic, there were significant problems of destitution in the UK that weren't really being picked up by headline poverty metrics.

23:47I think I saw a statistic in 2018 or 2019 to the effect that something like a third of the British population have savings of less than £500. And so the kind of buffer that would enable people to deal with economic shocks really isn't there in a lot of cases. And so at the minute we see growing reliance on food banks, growing reliance or heavy reliance on payday lending, and things like that. And that is an indictment, I think, of the welfare state and of any vision of society which is designed to give people social rights and to give people the kind of economic power to stand up and assert themselves where necessary against potentially exploitative employers, against potentially exploitative lenders and so on. And I mean, partly that's straightforwardly an issue of the level of social benefits in the UK, which has been whittled away, at least for working aged people, over the last decade.

24:59I think there are also issues of justice in relation to how people are treated by the state in terms of the challenges involved in claiming benefits, including things like disability benefits, which I think most people would agree, disabled people need support. The hoops that they sometimes have to jump through at the moment to get personal independence payments and so on are really, arguably, quite damaging to people's dignity and their sense of self. I think we also need to grapple, and make sure that we grapple, with the impact that poverty and irregular work have on people's cognitive bandwidth and their wider wellbeing, that it can be incredibly exhausting to live on the breadline. And of course, that has implications not only for material life, but also for spiritual life and family life and Christian discipleship. That it's incredibly hard, for instance, if people can't say no to working on a Sunday, then it's very hard for them to go to church. If people don't have regular hours, then it's very hard for them to participate in community activities in a consistent way. If people don't have adequate incomes, then it might be hard for them to tithe and to contribute financially while still being able to feed their children. People shouldn't have to make those kinds of choices. So yeah, I think there are all sorts of issues of economic justice that are issues for politicians, but also issues for the church.

Gosh – I mean, I was thinking about this a little bit beforehand – I think my advice would simply be, don't overthink it. Living as a Christian, living as a scholar, they're great callings. I think I would just say: keep living by faith, keep serving in the church, keep doing your research and teaching. Sometimes these things might come together in very obvious and explicit ways. Sometimes, maybe more often they will come together in ways that are clear to you, but might not always be clear to other people. Sometimes it might not seem like they come together at all, but I think that's kind of okay. And I think if we do our scholarship in a way that is attentive to our Christian faith and what that implies for our lives, and attentive to the ways in which God has been at work in the world, then yeah, there'll be times when we alight on these connections, and that can be really exciting.

Thanks a lot. It's been a pleasure.