John Rawls has pointed out that of the three watchwords liberté, égalité, and fraternité, the third has been least used. While the West has had limited success in putting the first two into practice, the third has not been given any definition, much less the plethora of persuasive definitions given to “freedom” and “equality” in the endless debates about them. Rawls proposes that his own theory of justice as fairness at last assigns a meaning to this neglected ideal, and that it is, moreover, a meaning that is well integrated into the mainstream of western liberal discourse.

Rawls and Gandhi can both be read as holding that how a society treats its poorest members is a main criterion for deciding whether it is a just society. But here again I would insist that although the conclusions may be the same or similar, the premises are different. Most importantly, the efficient causes, through which the welfare of the poorest is to be maximized, are different. For Rawls they are economic; for Gandhi they are moral.

Rawls cites Jan Tinbergen and other leading economic writers for the proposition that too much equality hurts the poor, while an adequate dose of inequality helps the poor. (This proposition is not incompatible with the studies by Amartya Sen, John Wilkinson, and others –in which the Indian state of Kerala is usually Exhibit A—which show empirically that a great deal of equality helps the poor and also the whole society.) Although Rawls hesitates to cross disciplinary lines to examine the reasons why mainstream economics has come to this conclusion, he does from time to time allude to some. The phenomenon of inequality making the poor richer is attributed to incentives. Rawls calls the incentives “a concession to human nature.” Material rewards are distributed by the economic mechanisms that the modern West has invented (and which in Rawls’ ideal liberal world it constantly strives to improve) to those individuals who make outstanding contributions to the common good: for example, by spending long arduous years in medical school learning to do ear surgery, or by inventing a comic mouse or a two-tiered hamburger that brings pleasure to billions. If human nature were better, then talented individuals would perform such specialized feats of service to others without material incentives. As human nature is, the poorest class is best served when there is just enough inequality (but no more) to call forth those activities which will result in maximizing the poorest’s welfare.

For Gandhi the efficient causes of the welfare of the poor prominently included the humane in humanity. At Gandhi’s insistence the members of the Congress Party passed resolutions requiring themselves to wear clothes made of khadi, a relatively expensive cloth of relatively poor quality, for the purpose of giving employment to the poorest class. Country people had been idled and thrown into destitution when the spinning and weaving crafts they had used for generations to supplement their agriculture-based survival strategies were destroyed by the competition of cheap imports of British textiles, and to a lesser extent by the products of local Indian mills. The motive for wearing khadi was solidarity with them.