Knowledge, not incentives

How useful is an egalitarian ethos in facilitating social cooperation in a political community? Both G.A. Cohen and David Estlund offer thought experiments to argue for the importance of personal motivation and commitment for achieving fair and just outcomes. I challenge these conclusions and offer parallel examples which illustrate how personal motivation and commitment, at the scale of a political community, are practically enveloped by knowledge and coordination problems. Our capacity to cooperate with fairness at scale is limited primarily by our cognitive capacities rather than lack of goodwill towards others. Distributive justice is established and stably reproduced through our conduct as democratic citizens within a basic structure of institutions. Uncoordinated personal conduct cannot make a practical contribution. Moreover, my argument can be rendered as a fact-insensitive principle in line with Cohen’s conceptual framework.