G.A. Cohen

Gerald Allan Cohen was a Marxist political philosopher at Oxford who spent much of his career taking Rawls more seriously than Rawls's conservative critics did. His critique was internal rather than external: Cohen accepted the framework of justice as fairness and argued that, rigorously applied, it demanded greater equality than Rawls permitted. The key move was Cohen's interrogation of the incentives argument. Rawls allowed inequalities that served as genuine incentives for productive activity, provided they benefited the least advantaged. Cohen asked: what makes these incentives necessary? If the talented could produce the same output without the inequality-generating incentives — if the surgeon would perform surgery at a lower wage, if the technology executive would innovate for a lower return — then the inequalities are not justified by the difference principle; they are justified only by the fact that the talented extract rents that the basic structure permits. Cohen's critique insists that the difference principle be applied as a genuine test, not as