Abstract
Egalitarian liberal political philosophers have been at pains to show that
there is a nonnegligible “place” for liberty within the framework of an egalitarian
theory of justice. Thus, many have insisted that, when redistribution is required in
order to achieve greater equality, assets should be transferred in the most abstract
form possible, ideally through a system of cash transfers. In this article we argue that
this strategy has the potential to generate significant violations of neutrality. The
problem arises from the fact that individuals with certain rates of time preference
often want to use social institutions as self-binding mechanisms and as a result may
exhibit a preference for in-kind benefits or other institutional arrangements that are
frequently misclassified as paternalistic. We argue that egalitarians who rely on cash
transfers as a way of accommodating the demands of liberty do so at the expense of
neutrality.