LVADs and the limits of autonomy.

MayJune 2008 To the Editor: Charity Scott’s “Belief in a Just World” (Jan-Feb 2008) contains valuable insight about the shape of public ethical discourse in America. However, she is so concerned with how to “sell” social reform in the short term that her essay misses an opportunity to subject the so-called belief in a just world (“you deserve what you get, and you get what you deserve”) to critical analysis. Where does this ideology come from, and what function does it serve? What causes this resentment and this blindness to the yawning gap between American ideals of justice and our actual social reality? Instead of looking for ways to rectify this blindness, Scott counsels supporters of progressive social programs to cater to it. This belief system promotes selfesteem for achieving lower middle class stability and resentment against taxbased transfer programs. Why? Because these social programs are not financially set up to redistribute downward from the very top, but only from roughly the lower middle on down. Such programs, like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (which are modest, though important for their beneficiaries), are chronically underfunded and controversial. We make people of limited means fight over crumbs and then consider it political progress when we extend health coverage to children who are three times richer than the poorest child, but not four—yet still a hundred times poorer than the children of the top quintile. Supporters of progressive social policy should not cater to the beliefs that mask and perpetuate this state of affairs. They should work to undermine such beliefs by educating people about the true shape of American society. They should continue to ask the most basic— the rudest—political questions of all: who gets what, when, where, and how? Bruce Jennings Center for Humans and Nature