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The same reasons which make it no longer necessary that the poor should depend on the rich, make it equally unnecessary that women should depend on men; and the least that justice requires is that law and custom should not enforce dependence.
J. S. MILL1
I.
INTRODUCTION
In 1848, reflecting on the attempts made in France 'to carry Socialism into practical effect, by associations of workmen manufacturing on their own account', J. S. Mill noted how they had begun paying equal wage rates per hour but then moved to payment 'by the piece'.2He described this decision as 'a compromise with the selfish type of character formed by the present standard of morality and fostered by the existing social institutions'.3For, as he explained,
the proportioning of remuneration to work done was really just, only in so far as the more or less of the work is a matter of choice: when it depends on natural difference of strength or capacity, this principle of remuneration is itself an injustice: it is giving to those who have; assigning most to those who are already most favoured by nature.4
Mill, however, also noted that 'until education shall have been entirely regenerated', paying 'by the piece' was 'far more likely to prove immediately successful, than an attempt at a higher ideal'.5Returning to this topic in 1861, Mill noted how little agreement there was regarding whether those who produce more because of their talents or skills should receive higher remuneration. People had different intuitions and appealed to conflicting, but not wholly implausible, principles. Consequently, Mill concluded that the only way in which the matter could be settled was by appealing to expediency rather than solely to intuitions about justice.6He remarked, however, on how quickly people invoke the need for incentives when it comes to objecting to more egalitarian arrangements, when the same objection applies to 'nine-tenths of the business' of our unequal society where most individuals do not 'reap the benefits of their own exertions. . . .[Instead] from the Irish reaper or hodman to the chief justice or the minister of state, nearly all the work of society is remunerated by day wages or fixed salaries'.7Expediency thus...