RetRIevINg RaWLs foR RacIaL justIce? ( 173 )FEO as Lexically Subordinate and Deontologically
ConstrainedLet me now raise some further problems for Shelby’s assumption that
despite these moves of his, he is still within the parameters of Rawlsianism
as standardly understood. (For the sake of the argument, I will now assume
what I have just contended is false, viz., that FEO can be applied under non-
ideal circumstances.) Rawls’s principles of justice for a well- ordered society
are not conjunctively linked in any arbitrary order (P1.P2.P3 or P2.P3.P1)
but lexically ordered: BL → (FEO → DP). One cannot extract one element
as if it were a discrete module and apply it to a situation and still claim to be
performing a Rawlsian exercise; the relationship of the three is crucial. So
we need to know how Shelby’s proposed use of FEO is related to the other
principles, especially since Shelby is not just extending FEO to educational
opportunity but to wealth also (“considerable redistribution of wealth”).
In standard interpretations of Rawls, the point of FEO is to guarantee as
far as possible in a well- ordered society (modulo the inevitable privileging
by the nuclear family of children of the better- off ) equal chances for the
equally talented, and not have smart working- class kids lose out in market
competition because their class background deprives them, for example, of
“equal opportunities of education.... [T] he school system, whether public
or private, should be designed to even out class barriers.”^61 But in the actual
ill- ordered society that is the United States, such equalization— desirable
as it would be— would not be sufficient to equalize life chances across the
racial divide, because even if poor black kids got the chance to go to better
schools, they would still be hugely handicapped by the fact of intra- class
wealth disparities between white and black households in corresponding
racial quintiles (e.g., the bottom white 20 percent vis- à- vis the bottom black
20 percent). Ever since the 1995 publication of Melvin Oliver and Thomas
Shapiro’s Black Wealth/ White Wealth,^62 differences in wealth have been rec-
ognized as central to the perpetuation of racial inequality, which is precisely
why reparations advocates have made the need to correct or at least some-
what mitigate these disparities central to their arguments.
Now Shelby is well aware of these issues (and indeed cites Oliver and
Shapiro himself ), which is why he argues for a massive redistribution of
wealth. In other words, he is using FEO as if it were a principle of rectifica-
tory justice authorizing wealth transfer. But so far as I can see, he is not
entitled to do this, because such an extrapolation goes far beyond what
Rawls himself intended. An article by Robert Taylor, “Rawlsian Affirmative
Action,” concludes that even under non- ideal circumstances, FEO would
not sanction aggressive affirmative action (bonus points for women and
racial minorities in the applicant pool, targets for admissions and hiring)