Looking for Silver Linings

Prakshal Jain from the Gokhale Institute writes in:

Hello Sir
Hope you are doing well

Current fiscal and Monetary measures (not stimulus as Parchure Sir mentioned) that are undertaken by Government to infuse money and ensure consumption of essential goods in the hand of public to fight the lockdown situation is actually a blessing.
Our economy needed these reforms since a very long period of time and government has been ignoring it, so can this injection result in some sort of economic upliftment?
Secondly, can more measures like these to the various sectors can help us fight economic slowdown?

I’m treating this as an extremely Rawlsian take. Read more about Rawls here, and his most famous book here.

Rawls’s positive distributive thesis is equality-based reciprocity. All social goods are to be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution would be to everyone’s advantage. The guiding idea is that since citizens are fundamentally equal, reasoning about justice should begin from a presumption that cooperatively-produced goods should be equally divided. Justice then requires that any inequalities must benefit all citizens, and particularly must benefit those who will have the least. Equality sets the baseline; from there any inequalities must improve everyone’s situation, and especially the situation of the worst-off. These strong requirements of equality and reciprocal advantage are hallmarks of Rawls’s theory of justice.

I understand Prakshal as asking if the corona virus has made our government (and indeed, governments the world over) more Rawlsian in its outlook, and if that is, on balance, a good thing.

Three things come to mind:

• First: It is a given that the poor will be the most badly hit in these times. See here for a list of recommendations (each of which is worthy of greater debate and potential implementation), follow this Twitter handle to get a sense of how bad things are (or are going to get). Any government would have no choice but to help out the poorest sections of society: it is a moral imperative. From that perspective, yes, the government is more Rawlsian right now than as of a week ago, and that is a great, great thing.
• Second: The crucial part is the phrase “on balance”. The government is more Rawlsian right now because of the corona virus lockdown, and it is all but certain that the lockdown will do more harm than the government will do good where the economic well-being of the poorest of the poor is concerned.
  Let me be clear: this is not me accusing the government of not doing enough. This is me saying that the problem is far too big for anybody to handle. So even if you were a person who thought we should be more Rawlsian, this is surely far too high a price to pay.
• Third: And this relates to Prakshal’s final question (will more such initiatives help?), absolutely yes. Governments, NGO’s, civil society – everybody can and must chip in to help out.

Prakshal, if this doesn’t answer your question, please let me know. Thank you for writing in!

Author: Ashish

Blogger. Occasional teacher. Aspiring writer. Legendary procrastinator. View all posts by Ashish