BEE and Rawlsian justice
Date
2010-11-25
Authors
Thabe, Willie Sibusiso
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Abstract
Abstract
The raison d’être for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and its more recent Broad
Based version is to achieve racial economic equality. This paper evaluates how narrowly
defined BEE – which is limited to the conferring of ownership, management and control of
South Africa’s financial and economic resources to previously disadvantaged individuals –
measures up against Rawls’s theory of distributive justice. The paper argues that the policy
of BEE’s ostensible implementation failures are a consequence of inherent problems in the
conception of this policy – the conflation of individuals, who are real personalities with moral
responsibilities, and the group, which is an abstract entity from a moral point of view. The
paper further argues that the desired goals of directly addressing the economy’s skewed
racial profile and the requisite changes in intra- and inter-firm relational patterns of capital
and control are not adequately served by the BEE policy as currently conceived. It argues
that the levels and patterns of inequality that are exacerbated by this policy are not biased
towards the advantage of the poorest of the poor as envisaged in Rawls’s principles of
distributive justice. Arguments in favour of the current strategy of BEE are evaluated, but
the general gist of the argument is that the policy as currently conceived cannot move South
Africa to greater racial economic equality.