I’m not looking for the obvious moral explanation, but the philosophical basis behind that line of thinking. Thanks!
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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?
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