I’m not looking for the obvious moral explanation, but the philosophical basis behind that line of thinking. Thanks!
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The human condition implies sympathy. By default, we’re social animals.
As wealth increases, the relative value of each individual dollar decreases. A billionaire’s money might fluctuate by millions day to day without affecting them meaningfully, whereas someone broke can have their entire future changed by thousands or hundreds of dollars.
While a concrete limit to the disparity between the two is hard to decide upon, as the gap widens, the point of one person getting even more money lessens, while the remaining amount of money becomes more rare among those who don’t have it.
At some point the practicality of a single person getting more money becomes impractical when others basically have to survive on it, for one reason or another.
While a single person can theoretically do greater things with money than countless others with the same amount spread amongst them, at some point it is impractical to expect a very human, single mind to be able to compete with the efficiency of a multitude of minds individually assigning the same funds. That is to say, a single person might be good or bad or have any number of flaws, a thousand, ten thousand, a million people deciding ‘normalizes’ where the funds go.
IE., one person might squander it on egotism or piss it away gambling or etc etc., but it is exceedingly overall unlikely for a multitude of people with money to simultaneously use it poorly.
The law of averages makes dips and spikes flatten out to uniformity across millions or billions of different decisions. Political decisions aside, predictability begets safety in society. Like how they say when you are driving, ‘don’t be kind, be predictable.’ Sometimes even the best of intentions can be worsemore damning than simply doing what is most expected.
It could be that one cannot find a philosophical basis for what is rooted in morality. Your question may mistakenly presuppose this. A moral principle, or in your words “the obvious moral explanation”, whatever it is, may be more philosophical than you are allowing. A related question might be why the need for philosophical arguments or principles for that which is so easily explained in moral or even sociological terms?
The argument not true. So, any argument for your point could easily be disproven.
There is no true philosophical reason for the argument.
Rawls Theory of Justice comes to mind as being somewhat relevant. Apologies if i misrepresent anything , it’s a long time since I studied it. I’m not sure my explanation is eli5 though?
Rawls started with a kind of thought experiment – imagine you were going to be born into a society but didn’t know who you would be …. Whether you would be rich or poor, disabled, clever , black or whatever. How would you like that society to be organised in a way that gave you the best chance to fulfil your potential and have a happy life whoever you turned out to be?
I’ve always found that a pretty powerful idea. He thought it meant that the principles you came up with would be fair because you wouldn’t want to be biased towards any particular group.
He claimed that in that position you would want to improve the prospects of the worse off if possible. Because that could be you.
He went on to develop certain principles.
Everyone should have as much liberty as possible as long as it doesn’t infringe on the liberty of others.
Social and economic inequalities should only be accepted if those who are worse off are still better off than they would have been without those inequalities.
And lastly if such ‘beneficial’ inequalities do exist they should not be such that they restrict the worse offs access to political power , to political office.
Now one might ask to what extent in a society like the USA these rules are achieved of broken?
Does the amount of inequality mean that those with the most in some ways impinge on other peoples liberties?
Does the amount of inequality actually still benefit the worse off – they still do better than they would if they were less inequality?
Does the amount of inequality restrict political positions and power to those who are better off?
Like /u/Mkwdr, Rawl’s theory of justice comes to mind. I’m not entirely sure what distinction you’re making between a moral explanation and its philosophical basis though – or perhaps the problem is that there are multiple moral explanations which rest on different bases – for example a Christian and a Marxist probably have different arguments as to why wealth inequality is a bad thing.
Here’s another approach, a simple utilitarian one. From this perspective the aim of the economy is to maximise utility, or happiness, for people.
There’s a thing in economics called “diminishing marginal utility of wealth”. The means that the extra happiness a person gets from each extra unit of wealth goes down. In other words, if you’re a billionaire and you get an extra £1,000 it makes no difference to your life. If you’re in abject poverty and you get £1,000 it could radically change your life.
So a more equal distribution of wealth will generate more happiness. In fact, people can be happier with a more equal distribution even if the total amount of wealth is lower. (I believe this is borne out in international surveys.)
Of course, there may be other factors justifying inequality, which most philosophies would acknowledge, but in itself it’s an inefficient distribution of wealth for making people happy.
I do not know how you would separate morality from philosophy in this context.
People stop being likely to gain any more happiness or satisfaction from money after they reach a point of income somewhere around 250 thousand dollars a year. Based on that, it can reasonably be argued that any yearly amount of money beyond this is useless to them- increasing that amount would no longer help with whatever problems they have finding happiness, and that money would be better served getting other people to that marker, assuming you assign more utility to human hedonics than to the right of rich people to use the money they accrue.
There are many. There are countless ways and means approaching this topic from many different perspectives. What do you want religious? Abrahamic? Buddhist? Secular? We can start from Plato and we can even skip Marx and the lot to modern thinkers with all having unique views.
But this modern perspective of justifying disproportional wealth is based on individualistic perspective. But here are the major questions all philosophical frameworks tend to analyse
But lets start from something very simple: like land. What gives anyone right to own any land? You might say the bought it, fair enough. What gave the person who sold it right to own it? You might say the inherited it. What gave that person… and so and so forth we end up to time before any member of the homo species had set a foot on that plot of dirt. What then gives that first upright ape ownership of that land? And why would it carry to this day? Now this is just one line of questioning and from this you can find many answers.
Right look at another way of thinking about this. We all share this planet. No matter how rich you are or your father was, you are still sharing this planet. You are sharing the water, the air, the land, and all the resources in it. By what justification should you say that you have the right to consume or control more of it than an equal share? Because you actions of using resources or polluting affects everyone, just like everyone’s actions of doing those things affects you. How is it justifiable for anyone to consume or hold on to more than anyone else? Why are they allowed to consume and hold more than a uncontacted tribe on Sentinel Island?
But lets think about money and wealth for a moment. What are the stocks you own actually and what is their value? Well they are part ownership of their company and their value is part of the value of the company. Ok… what is the value of the company. It is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. So what is the value of the stock? Portion of what someone wants to pay for it. So it isn’t actual real value until it is sold and money changes hands, until that it is just potential value. Right so… what is property value then? It is what someone is willing to pay for it… etc… potential value. Right. So we have value that isn’t actually real, it isn’t anything real, it is just potential. You can’t eat a property or a stock. You can own as many deeds or stocks, but you can’t buy bread with them until you transform them to something of value. But if no one recognises your ownership of said things there is no value.
So from here we get to the whole thing about wealth being something others have to recognise. Ok. So why is all this wealth recognised? Currently it is because we have legal frameworks enforced with force by the state on behalf of the owner of the wealth. So we the society itself enforces these wealth differences. Why can it do that? Why should it do that? Currently wealth disparity is actually leading to societies that are unstable, why should society as a collective keep enforcing these claims of ownership when it is actually starting to do harm to it. No revolution has started from fair and just conditions where everyone had bread and equal opportunity.
Problem with our economic system is that it relies on infinite accelerating growth. And there are people who have so much wealth that the wealth itself makes more wealth. There is actually a problem where some people have so much wealth that there are no good places to invest it to anymore which leads them to just put it anywhere that can bring some returns. So most of the wealth of the world goes in to generating more wealth. This wealth is constantly extracted from the system and going up and bringing more with it every time. But… why should this work this way? Yeah it is the best economic system we have had thus far, it is extremely good at creating wealth but it is extremely inefficient at spreading that wealth. With ever growing wealth based on the current *trickle down* thinking more should be going down the pyramid, but it isn’t. People at the lowest steps and poorer than their parents. Yes absolute powerty globally has gone down… etc etc. but does that matter when there are people who can’t afford housing, food, education, healthcare, leisure time? How does this equation actully work when all this wealth is based on excess consumption, but people have less ability to participate in it. You can’t grown economy infinitely on people paying for bread; people only need certain amount of calories and nutrients to survive, and the bread costs the same whether you have 1€ or 1.000.000.000€ to use on it.
Now the common arguments for the justification of wealth gap:
“*But they work harder and managed to amass that wealth*”. There are plenty of people who work hard, in sweatshops doing 16 hour days, in mines risking life and health, people doing 2 or 3 jobs to make a living. Am I not working hard when I do a 8-10 hour day of welding in harsh conditions? Working so hard physically that I start to lose weight and get stress injuries. Am I not working hard enough? Because when I bought some stocks, it took me few clicks and some of them have grown 50-250% in 6 months. I did not work hard for that wealth.
“*But they went to school and learned a skill*” Well I’m a qualified and certified welder and a fabricator, all things I went to school for almost 3 years. I also studied engineering and I am about to graduate, while I worked as a welder this 3 years and I could graduate in about 6 months. Where are my millions and billions? How long until I can have those? Who is giving me them? Do I send an application to someone?
“*My parents worked hard to ensure that I could have…*” If you are about to make this argument, then just stop. Because you will go against the whole justification of working hard, studying, and open up the question of chain of ownership. At the end we will lead to a question about if the future of the society as whole and you as part of it is important, then wouldn’t it make more sense to inject that wealth in to the society increasing the likelyhood that the whole society will do better AND you with it?
Maximizing utility, which can basically be thought of as overall happiness. If that extra $20 gets Person A an extra tablespoon of caviar that he’s not going to enjoy that much anyway, but without it Person B doesn’t have gas money to visit his new grandchild, then there’s more overall happiness between them when Person B has the $20.
I am unsure why you make a distinction between morality and philosophy. There are many different kinds of philosophical arguments such as the argument from marginal utility. If you have more money you are going to lose less happiness giving away $1 compared to a poor person receiving it. Therefore giving money to the poor and taking it from the rich would increase happiness. Of course this makes the assumption that we ought to increase happiness which I am unsure why you would believe that is the case. It also poses other problems when it comes to the increase of happiness as we could also assume that the rich person could have spent the money in a way that improved society better than the poor person.
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