Equality, priority, and compassion

In recent years there has been a good deal of discussion of equality’s place in the best account of distribution or distributive justice. One central question has been whether egalitarianism should give way to a principle requiring us to give priority to the worse off. In this article, I shall begin by arguing that the grounding of equality is indeed insecure and that the priority principle appears to have certain advantages over egalitarianism. But I shall then claim that the priority principle itself is ungrounded and that the priority principle should itself give way to a sufficiency principle based — indirectly, via the notion of an impartial spectator — on compassion for those who are badly off.