Golfer drives home the message of social justice

Rory McIlroy's inclusive approach to success recalls US thinker John Rawls on the quest for justice and fairness, writes Vincent Browne.

The joy over Rory McIlroy's victory in the US Open was not just that an Irishman had achieved so much or that so many of us were all delighted he had recovered so spectacularly from the psychological meltdown in the US Masters.

It was also because he seems such a decent fellow, an impression enforced by his spontaneous expression of gratitude afterwards to his parents and to others who helped him along the way in his golfing career.

His remarks reminded me of Wilt Chamberlain, who, as far as I know, may also have been a decent guy, as well as being one of the greatest players ever in US basketball history.

He became the first big earner in the game and a national hero in America. I came across a reference to Wilt in a book that had a huge influence in America and, ultimately, elsewhere as well, including here. It is Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, who was a Harvard philosopher and the ideologue of the Reagan era. The book was in part a response to the work of another Harvard philosopher in the 1960s and 1970s, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice.

Rawls had argued that we could work out fair and objective principles of justice through a thought experiment that would reveal the rules that should govern society – rules or principles on which we would all agree – if we did so by eliminating those factors that bias our judgments: our social position, income, gender, capacities, education and health.

He argued that we would all agree, from such a vantage point, on certain basic liberties, with which the state could not interfere, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and democracy, plus an equal distribution of wealth, subject only to those inequalities in wealth that ultimately benefited the least well off.

In contrast, Nozick argued the case for a minimal state that would have no role at all in what he called "distributive justice". He used another thought experiment, involving Wilt Chamberlain, to illustrate his point. Chamberlain's reputation and excellence as a basketball player, Nozick suggested, meant that many people would choose to go to games to see him play – and pay extra for doing so.

Nozick asked what could possibly be wrong with this, and why the state should interfere with this voluntary transfer of wealth to Chamberlain by depriving him of part of it in order to give it to others, through social benefits.

The answer, I think, is suggested by McIlroy.

Chamberlain did not come out of nowhere. His aptitude was shaped by his childhood in Philadelphia and the people he met there, who encouraged him and trained him. Then there were the family and friends who gave him security and support, the web of competitions and trainers who brought him through his early career, then agents, managers, marketers, team-mates and all the rest. In other words, society.

An Irish example might be Riverdance .

The success of Riverdance was certainly due in part to the entrepreneurial abilities of Moya Doherty and John McColgan and others who created that dance spectacular. But they were not alone. Others in RTÉ at the time of the Eurovision Song Contest helped inaugurate Riverdance – and there were the dancers themselves. But not just these, either. There was the whole background nexus of Irish dancing all over the country: the dance teachers, the parents who ferried them to and from dance classes and often paid for them, the organisers of competitions – that whole culture of Irish dance from which Riverdance derived.

And wouldn't it be absurd if the proceeds of that Riverdance success were not distributed widely and fairly throughout that whole dance community, and wouldn't it be such an injustice if those impresarios, however gifted, were to make a disproportionate "killing" from the tradition and the hordes of people and dancers involved in that entire dance culture? (Incidentally, I have no idea that this is so but knowing the impresarios slightly I would assume they have shared the wealth all this has generated widely and generously, notably via the dancers themselves.)

For all wealth is created through social co-operation, through wide nexuses of interconnections. The claim that any one or a few persons are "entitled" to vast fortunes or even modest fortunes on the success of "their" enterprise is absurd. It is through social co-operation that this comes about, and it is society at large that should benefit.

But in the last four decades, from the 1970s, the idea has emerged that there is a strong entitlement on the part of entrepreneurs or "owners" to the financial proceeds of ventures in which they are engaged, as though they alone were responsible for that success. This idea has poisoned our political culture.

It is all the more delightful, therefore, that a young man of talent, modesty, and generosity should inadvertently give the lie to that idea, in that generous acknowledgment of how many others had participated in that spectacular achievement we watched from Maryland on Sunday night.