An Account of Contributive Justice by Kimberly Wen-Chun Chuang A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Elizabeth S. Anderson, Co-chair Professor Peter A. Railton, Co-chair Professor Allan F. Gibbard Professor Daniel E.
Little Associate Professor Ishani Maitra Kimberly W. Chuang kwchuang@umich.edu ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7364-6457 © Kimberly W. Chuang 2018 i For my mother. And in memory of my father (“well you go up we follow you but you go up we follow you but you go up we are following you but you are gone last” - Frank O’Hara, “For David Schubert”).
And for family. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I've been the fortuitous beneficiary of a lot of luck. And while it was luck that consistently positioned me as a beneficiary, over and over again the benefits in question were entirely deliberate and voluntary expenditures of time, effort, and compassion on the part of others. I've got a lot of people to thank.
I'll try to not do it too effusively. What follows will be characterized by some measure of organization and grouping, though perhaps not very much of it. I owe much to the members of my committee, without whom there wouldn’t be much of a dissertation: to Liz, whose incisive feedback helped to mould me in the image of a more competent philosopher. The feedback in question was always turned around with impossible speed.
To Peter, to whom I owe the initial germ of this very dissertation. If there’s even a sapling’s worth of work here—to needlessly press the plant analogy—I owe it to Peter. Peter’s abundant generosity with ideas helped me through corners into which I’d written myself more times than I could count. To Dan, who has believed firmly in what projects I’ve brought to him—this firm belief has, in turn, buoyed me through those projects—and who is unfailingly generous with his time and encouragement.
Thank you for your incredibly many kindnesses. To Ishani, for consistently perspicuous dissertation feedback. To Allan, for remarkable and kind encouragement over the years. Thanks are owed for departmental support: to Laura Ruetsche, who gently shepherded me through the entirety of my time here.
I’m not sure how I had the good fortune to warrant your guidance from my first year onward—guidance that was unfailingly patient, humorous, and sometimes conveyed from exceptionally remote locales—but it’s no exaggeration to say that it iii got me through the degree. To Jude, who has allowed me to pester her for the better part of a decade now: thank you for warm conversation, supportiveness, and your willingness to navigate steep driveways for sake of my occasional lapses in bipedalism (more on that later). To Molly: thank you emphatically, for everything—for less solitary Thanksgivings, for Californian solidarity, for warmth and support of the familial stripe. Thanks are also owed to Annette Bryson, who is an absolute paragon of strength and fortitude.
And thanks are owed to Johann Hariman for meaningful conversations. And thanks are owed for institutional support: to Ida Faye Webster and Jean McKee, without whom my (literal) degree completion would’ve been impossible. Thank you both for your compassionate intervention. To Charlotte O’Connor, who helped me figure out more effective ways to work: thank you for your warmth and willingness to be troubled on weekends.
To Mika Handelman, for all of her work. I also wouldn’t be anywhere without my earliest mentors at the California State University of Los Angeles, which I attended through the auspices of the Early Entrance Program. David Pitt was the professor with whom I took my very first philosophy course as an undergraduate. He continued to advise and support me through two subsequent undergraduate institutional moves, and I couldn’t have asked for a more affable introduction to philosophy.
His course is the only reason why I have any grasp of Lockean substratum at all. Henry Mendell was the professor who first cued me into the realization, at age fourteen or fifteen, that something had to change dramatically about my writing if it was to be up to (philosophical) snuff (“Kimberly, this [style of writing] is self-indulgent. He was also responsible, in large part, for my eventual move to Tufts—I owe him much for this. And thanks are owed to my professorial mentors at Tufts University.
White for devoting inordinate amounts of time to the facilitation of at least one independent study, the design of an Analytical Marxism course, and an entire graduate school admissions cycle. Thank you for your patient mentoring. I certainly wouldn’t have ended up at Michigan without it. And many thanks are owed to George E.
Smith as well, who contributed considerably to the iv sharpening of my philosophical wits. And to Jody Azzouni, with whom long conversations helped to unravel philosophy of language for me. Thanks are also owed to Paul Gowder, who influenced the decision to re-ally myself with political philosophy, even after I’d spent some time thinking of myself as a potential meta- ethicist. Much gratitude is owed to James Molnar, Anthony DiClaudio, and Kabir Soorya—to friends.
And to Jack Rohman, who I still think about often. Thanks are owed to climbing friends. I suspect that what may have happened here were the inadvertent effects of climbing itself as a selection factor: talented climbers, belayers and spotters—which all of you unequivocally are—have to be people who appreciate the gravity of being positioned to maim or kill one’s climbing partners. One possible consequence of such selection is that you’ve all been, individually and collectively, an extraordinary community.
Thank you, Ken Garber, for always inquiring and extending earnest help and support. Thanks are owed to Hugh Garton for kindly shepherding me to the hospital when I folded my foot into my shin and temporarily found myself peering at the bottom of my own sole. To Billy, Matt, and Emory for warm company and solemn concern that evening as my ankle ballooned and reached the proportions and color of a cantaloupe. To Matthew Schiffert, for contending, patiently and compassionately, with the stir-crazed outcomes of my being unable to walk for nearly two months.
To Carson Schultz, Chari Cortez, and Timothy NeCamp for remarkable friendship and climbing company. And my inordinate gratitude for family. For my mother, who traded in her own prospects entirely for the possibility of advancing mine. I wouldn't really be anything—or be anywhere, for that matter—without her.
For Damian Wassel, who, for years and years was an absolutely indefatigable source of support, and who is, unequivocally and genuinely, family. Whenever I’m working, I’m always—in the back of my mind—trying to hold myself to emulating the sort of clarity that you evince in your own work. v For Jeffrey Yang, Phoebe Lee, Uncle Vigor Yang, Aunt Dorothy Chuang, and (presently, though soon-to-no-longer-be) wee Claire: Jeff, I remember clearly meeting you and your mother over dinner in Boston, very much aware that you were the extent of extended family that I had Stateside. The same uncertainty applies here too: I’m not sure how, exactly, I struck you then as someone in whom to invest time in the form of careful, and sometimes boisterous, mentoring.
The good results of your influence are too many to list, and so I’ll only mention a couple: (a) that earnest, well-motivated ambition isn’t hubris, and (b) that I’m at least a bit more capable than I think myself to be. Phoebe, thank you for compassionately fielding the various kerfuffles into which I’ve gotten myself, and for your indefatigable good cheer. Uncle Vigor and Aunt Dorothy Chuang: thank you, thank you for being so good to me. For Jonathan Bye, who I had the exceptionally good fortune to meet in this past year.
Our shared inventory of rites that we’ve endured individually includes: one, a Californian bar exam (to which I cannot claim to have contributed to in any way), and, two, the possible completion of a doctorate. In my case, I’m not sure that I would’ve gotten through these last few months without your help. The outcomes, in any case, would’ve been questionable. I hope sincerely that you do not perish on a mountainous peak.
Pursuant to that hope, I hope also that my saying that doesn’t constitute some horrifyingly prescient omen. And to anyone I inadvertently omitted: please forgive me, the final submission deadline for this dissertation is nearing. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF TABLES x ABSTRACT xi CHAPTER ONE: MAKING CONCEPTUAL SPACE FOR PRINCIPLES OF CONTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 1 I. Public goods 3 II.i How do the first and second accounts of public goods interact? How can they be reconciled? 17 III.
Reconstructing the Murphy and Nagel argument 19 III.i Rejecting efficiency as the sole criterion for determining public provision: the procedural objection 22 III.ii Rejecting efficiency as the sole criterion for determining public expenditure: proposing at least three different types of public good, two of which resist determination by efficiency 24 IV. Civic cultural goods 30 IV.i Arguments against efficient determinations of the financing and delivery of civic cultural goods 32 IV.ii Ways that culture itself, as a good, militates in favor of public financing and delivery 35 V. Conclusion 38 CHAPTER TWO: DEFENDING A PRINCIPLE OF ABILITY AS A PRINCIPLE OF CONTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 39 I. Introduction 39 vii II.
Background on traditional norms of tax fairness, and a rejection of the benefits principle 42 III. Utilitarian versions of ability-to-pay 49 IV. Why do we want a non-utilitarian principle of ability-to-pay? 58 V. Affirming common projects as shared ends 66 VI.
Beginning to construct an account of ability to contribute from capability theory 69 VI.i Opportunity cost as a measure of ability 79 VI.ii The loss of disvalued capabilities 89 VI.iii Tying up loose ends in an account of ability to contribute in terms of opportunity cost 93 VII. Implications of the opportunity cost view for income as tax base and the realization principle 96 VIII. In-kind non-tax exactions 102 IX. Conclusion 102 CHAPTER THREE: TAX CONTRIBUTIONS AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY 104 I.i What makes something assessable for contributive legitimacy 105 II.
Legitimacy as justification 108 III. Two dimensions of contributive legitimacy 121 III. Substantive component of contributive legitimacy 122 III.ii Determination of individual tax liabilities and contributive justice 123 III.iii Mode of extraction and rule of law 133 III.iv Tax revenue use and the condition of common benefit 151 IV. The criterion of perceived just extraction 157 IV.i Perceived just extraction as perceived reciprocity 162 V.
How contributive legitimacy might relate to more comprehensive theories of political legitimacy 171 viii VI. Conclusion 172 BIBLIOGRAPHY 174 ix LIST OF TABLES TABLE I.1 Taxpayer Contributions Given their Individual Marginal Valuations 23 III.1 Possible Interpretations of the Benefits Principle 126 x ABSTRACT In The Myth of Ownership, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel argue that achieving fairness in taxation is principally a matter of distributive justice.1 Distributive justice can be understood as being concerned with what is owed to people as a matter of justice. For Nagel and Murphy, fairness in tax schemes is subsumed to the question of distributive justice: fairly allocated tax liabilities are just those that are compatible with the preferred theory of distributive justice. Subsuming assessments of tax fairness to distributive justice, however, overlooks the following possibility: that the question of how we ought to divvy up tax liabilities, and the burdens associated with running a society more generally, requires different, non-distributive considerations of justice.
These are considerations of justice that aren’t essentially about distributive justice at all. I argue here that the division of burdens in a society is specifically a matter of contributive justice. Contributive justice is concerned with what people owe as a matter of justice, rather than what is owed to them. It makes the division of burdens itself evaluative salient in assessments of fairness.
Even a comprehensive specification of distributive justice leaves indeterminate how the burdens of running a society should be fairly divided up.