Why Not

In 2009, Princeton University Press published a short book entitled Why Not Socialism? (hereafter WNS) by the late Canadian political philosopher G.A. Cohen. In it Cohen attempts to articulate a compelling moral argument in favour of socialism by asking his readers to imagine the best possible way of organising a camping trip. According to Cohen, on the best camping trip the resources the group use – pots, pans, fishing rods, etc. – would be under collective control and shared understandings will arise about who will fish, cook and wash up, etc. based on people’s enjoyment of such activities. This ensures that ‘there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection’ (WNS: 4). This makes the trip uniquely enjoyable: each camper enjoys ‘a roughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that she contributes, appropriately to her capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing of others’ (WNS: 4–5). Two key socialist principles are realised on Cohen’s camping trip. The first of these, socialist equality of opportunity, ‘seeks to correct for all unchosen disadvantages, disadvantages that is, for which the agent cannot herself reasonably be held responsible, whether they be disadvantages that reflect social misfortune or disadvantages that reflect natural misfortune’ (WNS: 17–18). Thus when socialist equality of opportunity prevails ‘differences of outcome reflect nothing but difference of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers’ (WNS: 18). This principle, as many readers will know, is the central intuition behind the philosophical position known as ‘luck-egalitarianism’ with which Cohen is closely associated. The second, the community principle, ‘constrains the operation of the egalitarian principle by forbidding certain inequalities that the egalitarian principle permits’ (WNS: 12). It captures the fact that on the best possible camping trip ‘people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another’ (WNS: 34–35). Even if certain inequalities would be permitted by the first principle, the second ensures that inequality between the campers can never be too great because this would preclude them from empathising with each other in the most attractive way possible.