Equality of resources and the public goods argument

Abstract

In academic and public debates, defenders of the case for sharing the costs of children (“socialisation”, for short) have often claimed that by having and rearing children parents produce public goods for the rest of society, or perform socially valuable, indeed necessary, labour, and that it would be unfair to parents to not share the costs of children for this reason. Whether a version of this argument (which I loosely refer to as the “public goods argument”) can be defended depends, among other things, on whether there is a defensible normative principle that can vindicate this charge of unfairness: why exactly is it unfair, to producers of public goods or those who willingly engage in socially valuable activities, not to share in the costs of production of those goods? And can this unfairness charge be made about parents? Critics of the public goods argument have claimed that it fails because there is no independently defensible principle that can serve to buttress the claims of parents. This paper examines the possibility of enlisting the ideal of equality of resources defended by Ronald Dworkin to provide the normative underpinning of a version of the public goods argument. Although Dworkin himself does not address the question of how the costs of children should be shared in a just society, and although his view has been taken to be inhospitable to the case for socialisation, I claim that equality of resources can, in fact, provide the bases for that case. In order to argue for this conclusion, the paper does two main things. First, it offers an interpretation of the theory of equality of resources that avoids what I view as certain misconceptions regarding some aspects of that theory. Most importantly, I suggest that the role, in equality of resources, of both people’s identification with their lifeplans or ambitions, and that of the so-called envy test, are more circumscribed than we might think, and that, by contrast, the role of the idea of true opportunity costs as the metric of equality is more central than has generally been noticed. Second, I suggest that, in order to make the case for socialisation, we should focus on a part of the ideal of equality of resources that is generally under-discussed – the view’s treatment of what I call productive fairness. Once we keep these points in mind, I claim, equality of resources, contrary to received wisdom, turns out to be hospitable, not inimical, to one important argument for socialisation.