BBC: Fair Pay?

What this lecture covers

This short excerpt from the BBC program "Fairness and the Big Society" takes Sandel's classroom method to a London studio audience. He poses a concrete pay-differential question, whether it's fair that a star footballer earns vastly more than a care worker, and lets audience members argue both sides. The clip works as a compact companion to the Harvard lectures' discussions of merit, desert and the market's role in distributive justice.

After watching, you should be able to state the main arguments offered for and against Wayne Rooney's high pay, and connect them to the broader question of whether market outcomes track fairness or social value.

Key ideas

• Scarcity and demand: one argument holds that Rooney deserves his pay because very few people can perform at his level and many are willing to pay to watch him.
• Supply and demand vs. fairness: an audience member challenges whether market outcomes, which reflect supply and demand, are the same thing as what is fair.
• Social value vs. pleasure: another argument holds that care workers contribute something more essential to people's lives, care, than the pleasure Rooney's performances provide, raising the question of how to weigh different kinds of contribution.
• Equal opportunity as a condition of fairness: one speaker suggests that large pay gaps might only be fair if everyone had an genuinely equal chance in life to begin with.

Before you watch

• This clip pairs well with the Harvard lectures on Rawls and the difference principle, which cover the same kind of pay-differential question, such as the David Letterman and schoolteacher comparison, in more depth.

Check your understanding

1. What reasons does the audience give for thinking Rooney's high pay is fair?
2. What reasons are given for thinking it's unfair?
3. Why does one speaker question whether the law of supply and demand determines what's fair?