From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2006 - 23:07:09 EDT
> http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009068 > Don't miss this paragraph: Yet the tone here is wrong. As Kant also said, persons are not to be made instruments for the gain of others. Suppose the wage of the lowest- paid workers was foreseen to be reduced over the entire future by innovations conceived by entrepreneurs. Are those whose dream is to find personal development through a career as an entrepreneur not to be permitted to pursue their dream? To respond, we have to go outside Rawls's classical model, in which work is all about money. In an economy in which entrepreneurs are forbidden to pursue their self-realization, they have the bottom scores in self-realization--no matter if they take paying jobs instead--and that counts whether or not they were born the "least advantaged." So even if their activities did come at the expense of the lowest-paid workers, Rawlsian justice in this extended sense requires that entrepreneurs be accorded enough opportunity to raise their self-realization score up to the level of the lowest-paid workers--and higher, of course, if workers are not damaged by support for entrepreneurship. In this case, too, then, the introduction of entrepreneurial dynamism serves to raise Rawls's bottom scores. _____________________ Entrepreneurial capitalism justified in terms of the subjective magnitude of self realization! It's hard to see how the self realization and the happiness and the civic and cultural participation of the least advantaged are not set back by the rising wealth inequalities of entrepreneurial capitalism in a so called winner take all society. I guess we'll need to be persuaded that the least advantaged don't want much in terms of their own self realization to believe that they are not damaged by being left so far behind. Perhaps their present time preference is too strong to invest much in the project of self realization, so the little self realization they have is all they wanted in the first place??? Rakesh
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