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158 Chapter 10
beings value a vast array of goods. And we value each good in our own
and its own particular way. This first claim about pluralism and the
qualitatively different ways in which we value goods suggests a second
claim. Human goods are often incommensurable. It is fair to say that
the things we value most in life — friends, lovers, work, beauty,
nature, and yes, money — cannot be compared with one another. Put
differently, while we may be able to compare the virtues of friends
with friends, the virtues of lovers with lovers, the virtues of work with
work, the virtues of certain objects of beauty with other objects of
beauty, and certainly the virtues of more money with less money,
there is no single template against which we can measure claims of
friendship, love, work, beauty, nature and money. They may compete
with one another. But they compete in a way not easily assessed.
Indeed, justice may require us to refrain, in so far as it is possible,
from attempts to measure these competing goods by a single
yardstick. Michael Walzer puts our second complex claim thus:
There has never been a universal medium of exchange. ... [T]here has
never been a single criterion, or a single set of interconnected criteria
for all distributions. Desert, qualification, birth and blood, friendship,
need, free exchange, political loyalty, democratic decision: each has
had its place, along with many others, uneasily coexisting, invoked by
competing groups, confused with one another. 16
From these observations, Walzer draws the following conclusions.
First, goods, like people, have shared meanings in a society, because
goods, like people, are a product of social, political, economic,
educational, religious and linguistic practices which generate
meaning. Second, it is the shared meaning of a good which
determines, or should determine, its distribution. Third, and perhaps
most importantly for Walzer, when the meanings of social goods are
distinct, their distributions must be autonomous. That is, for each
good there exists a set of criteria and procedures deemed to be
appropriate for its distribution.
Walzer’s view may need to be qualified. The demands of justice
— even in a world of plural and incommensurable goods — are, in fact,
far more complex than Walzer’s account allows. First, spheres of
human activity do overlap and thereby complicate the criteria for the
distribution of any particular social good. Second, to the extent that
some spheres of activity are inextricably linked, it is inevitable that
the distribution of one good will influence the distribution of another.
Third, given the spontaneous, evolutionary manner in which most
spheres of activity have come into being — meaning they are never the
product of a single agent — the criteria for the distribution of a social
good are rarely going to be clear or conflict-free. The criteria for
16 Spheres of Justice (1985) 4.