by Martin Butler
In contemporary political debate, particularly with regard to economic relations, the idea of ‘individual responsibility’ has come to encapsulate the standard critique of state regulation or state intervention. The argument goes that citizens should not be overly protected from their lack of responsibility, and that however humane a society becomes, as individuals we should live with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. According to this argument, an overly generous welfare system undermines individual responsibility: human beings have agency and should not be insulated from the real consequences of their lack of ambition, laziness or bad choices. Those that do show individual responsibility and do the right thing should be rewarded.
On the other side is the argument that individual responsibility, although real, plays a minor part in an individual’s success or failure, at least in modern western societies. Other factors, none of which are chosen, such as family background, inherited wealth, social class, upbringing, educational opportunities, generational factors, innate abilities or disabilities, luck, and so on also play their parts. According to this side of the debate it is up to society to level up an intrinsically unlevel playing field. Kant’s categorical imperative can cast light on this debate, pointing to the minimum requirements a society should work towards that would allow us to invoke the notion of individual responsibility in good faith.
Kant’s categorical imperative (first formulation) is a principle which he claims captures the essence of what it is to act ethically. It states that you should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. A ‘maxim’ here is simply a personal principle of action. For my action to be ethical I must accept that anyone else could also chose to perform this action. This outlaws what we intuitively think of as the epitome of unfair or unethical behaviour, i.e. making an exception for yourself. It cannot be one rule for you and a different rule for everyone else. An action is wrong if it cannot be universalised. A thief’s maxim of action might be ‘whenever something is needed, I steal it.’ If this was universalised, the very notion of theft itself would dissolve, since theft depends on a notion of property and ownership. If theft was universal, property rights would become meaningless, so there is something deeply self-contradictory in the idea of theft. This is the essence of its immorality. According to Kant immorality is just irrationality.
The categorical imperative is normally thought of exclusively in terms of individual moral decisions, but it can be applied to the wider issue of political and social policy. How does it relate to the question of individual responsibility? It’s not obvious, but we can start to make the link by examining the key ethical concept of ‘equal opportunities’, often paraded as a kind of ethical gold standard for any society that takes the notions of justice and equality seriously. The aim is a level playing field, allowing everyone to have an equal chance to attain society’s glittering prizes. Individual responsibility is not side-lined, far from it. The individual still has to take responsibility for grasping the opportunities on offer, but the arena in which this is exercised should as far as possible be the same for everyone. Perfect equal opportunities is an unattainable ideal, of course, for all sorts of obvious reasons. Even so, it is the ideal towards which political policy should aspire, or so the argument goes.
But there is an often unnoticed ambiguity in the concept of ‘equal opportunities’. One way of getting to grips with this ambiguity is to consider the contrast between two kinds of exam system. Without wanting to get too technical it’s worth considering the difference between what is called a norm-referenced system and a criterion-referenced system. In a norm-referenced exam, the mark required to gain a top grade is not fixed before the exam. It is established after the exam, to ensure that a pre-defined percentage of the cohort gains this grade. The mark required to get a top grade might change from year to year according to the ability of the cohort. Each candidate is competing against the other candidates to get into that top grade band. If a cohort on average has a high ability, then the mark required to gain a top grade will go up; with a less able cohort this mark will go down. Importantly, it is logically impossible, however able a cohort is, for everyone to get a top grade. Getting a top grade in a norm-referenced system is only possible because others don’t achieve the required mark.
In contrast, in a criterion-referenced system, a candidates’ grade is unrelated to the performance of the other candidates. You need to achieve the required standard – or criterion – to attain a top grade, but your achievement is not dependent on others not achieving this standard. Here, whether you gain a top grade depends on whether you attain a fixed standard. On this system it is completely possible for everyone to gain a top grade.
Both these systems might be regarded as offering an equal opportunity to candidates in an exam, in the sense that whether a candidate gets a top grade depends on how they perform in the exam, nothing more. Both systems are meritocratic. However, the notion of equal opportunity misses the key difference between these two systems. The difference only comes out if we apply the principle of universalisation, which is the essence of the categorical imperative. Actions which cannot be coherently universalised (as with the example of stealing) are for Kant immoral. In the criterion-reference system, if I work hard and get a top grade I can legitimately claim that this action is universalisable. It is possible for everyone to work hard and get a top grade – they just need to reach a required standard. Crucially, with this system the individual is responsible for the outcome of their exam; how everyone else performs is completely irrelevant. In contrast with the norm-referenced system, although everyone has an opportunity to gain a top grade, gaining a top grade cannot be universalised. The logic of the system excludes everyone getting a top grade – just as it is logically impossible for everyone to be above average. So there is a deep difference between the systems despite them both appearing to conform with the ideal of equal opportunities.
I am not of course saying that norm referenced exam systems are immoral! They have their uses in particular circumstances. An exam to gain a place on an oversubscribed university course will of necessity be norm-referenced. What I’m interested in is applying this principle in a wider social context. Rather than thinking of top grades, let’s apply it to a generalised notion of a successful life. What constitutes a successful life very much varies according to culture and period of history, but without being too specific, it’s clear that to live a reasonably good life in modern western society, certain basic material benefits are required: a secure place to live, a form of employment that provides a reasonable standard of living, the expectation of an adequate pension in retirement and so on. We can legitimately argue that our western notion of success has become too materialistic and is environmentally unsustainable (though this is hopefully changing) but this is irrelevant to the point I’m making. The point is that every society has certain norms of what constitutes a reasonably successful life, what poverty is, and what doing very well is.
Many western societies are now starting to look more like norm-referenced systems rather than criterion-referenced systems. If you work hard, show initiative, develop the right talents then it is possible to gain a successful life. But the bar gets raised and considerable family support – e.g. inherited wealth – is often needed. More importantly, this success cannot be universalised because of structural features of the society. There is a kind of structural inequality which means that the possibility of everyone gaining a successful life is ruled out from the beginning, even if everyone behaves in a super-responsible manner. Examples of individuals who have achieved success from lowly backgrounds can be trotted out of course, the implication being that if X can achieve success from a very modest background, then so can anyone. But there is an important ambiguity in the word ‘anyone’ that we saw when considering exam systems. In theory at least, any given individual could achieve success. Modern western societies are not medieval hierarchies where it was structurally impossible for a serf to become an aristocrat. However, ‘anyone’ cannot mean ‘everyone’. However much individual responsibility everyone shows, it is impossible for them all to gain a successful life because of the way society is structured. More responsible individuals does not mean more successful individuals. A good example is the housing market. We might optimistically claim that if every would-be first-time house buyer was super-responsible and lived frugally in order to save a deposit for a house then they could all buy a house. But as we saw with the norm-referenced exam system, the price of housing would go higher still as the demand increased, so the proportion of would-be first-time buyers who could successfully purchase a house would remain the same – despite all of them showing high levels of individual responsibility. (Here I’m discounting the obvious point that many who are able to buy get considerable financial support from their family.) A similar point could be made with regards to employment. If everyone worked hard, studied hard and made wise career choices, would we have a country full of budding professionals or successful entrepreneurs? Of course not. The bar for gaining a professional job would simply be raised higher, and many entrepreneurs who would otherwise succeed, would, in this super-responsible society, end up working on checkouts or flipping burgers.
Those who do gain success may well be from all sorts of backgrounds – there’s no pre-ordained cohort of successful individuals, i.e. those from a particular social class, and that is a positive development. (Although of course, as every sociologist will tell you, family background is a major predictor of success.) That doesn’t change my general point about the non-universalisability of this success.
Nothing in this argument is denying the importance of individual responsibility. But individual success should not depend on others not achieving success. At least with regard to the basic building blocks of a successful life, society should operate as far as possible more closely to a criterion-referenced system than a norm-referenced system.
Why is this important? There are two main reasons. First, the moral argument. The equal opportunities requirement is not enough, as it hides an important ambiguity. It gives a veneer of inclusivity but is consistent with the very opposite. That’s why Kant’s principle is far more useful. Second, and perhaps more important, the pragmatic reasons. The language of equal opportunities can operate as an ideological smoke screen. In a sense the old hierarchical systems were more transparent: the serf could not be blamed for his meagre life. Now, it’s easy to explain those who are not successful in terms of their lack of individual responsibility.
But if a significant proportion of the population are blamed for their lack of success – even though the system guarantees this lack of success – then strong feelings of resentment and discontent are bound to grow. This is at least one of the reasons for the growth of populism within western societies. If the norm for what a successful life looks like is out of step with what most people can achieve, you have a recipe for discontent. There are two ways to change this. One is cultural – changing the norms of what we should expect from life. The other is political/economic – changing what is possible for most in the society. But something is clearly wrong when a society is structured in such a way that only a limited proportion of the population can ever achieve success, while simultaneously telling people that individual responsibility will be rewarded with success. Rather than bolstering the idea of individual responsibility, it undermines it. As the number of responsible individuals increases, more find the ‘success’ they seek receding beyond their reach.
Individual responsibility is important. A deterministic attitude that views success as simply about circumstance and background portrays us as victims and undermines our humanity; Kant would certainly endorse this view. But if we are going to take the idea of individual responsibility seriously then we at least need to ensure that it can deliver the goods, and this can only be done via state interventions of various sorts. The reason this is needed is not because the idea of individual responsibility is being side-lined, but because it should be taken seriously.