Abstract

My dissertation examines arguments for and against egalitarian theories of distributive justice. In it, I present a theory of equality according to which justice requires equal access for all to a set of basic resources, including health care, education and occupations. ;There are seven chapters. The first contains a discussion of the place of distributive ethics in political philosophy. In the next two chapters, I reply to what I consider to be the strongest moral objections to egalitarian justice. The first of these is the libertarian critique of equality. Here I am concerned to rebut the claim that our rights to liberty would be violated by government initiatives promoting equality. In Chapter Three, I address several liberal objections to egalitarianism. These rest on a premise against which I argue, namely that once everyone's basic needs are met, there would be nothing morally troubling about even large-scale inequalities between people. The three chapters that follow all explore egalitarian arguments concerning the best way to understand and justify egalitarian justice. I begin by arguing against the tendency to identify distributive equality with equality of outcomes, and instead show why equality of access is a much more plausible kind of view. In the fifth chapter, I examine the debate in the literature concerning "the metric of advantage." Here I argue for a version of equality of resources based on the idea of access to basic resources. In Chapter Six, I outline in greater detail my own theory of equality. I argue that justice requires us to provide people with equal access to health care and education as well as to occupations. In explicating the notion of equal access to occupations, I suggest that such access ought to be free from exploitation. To this end, I present what I think is a new theory of exploitation in which I distinguish between two forms of that evil: exploitation on the basis of one's class position and exploitation on the basis of one's talents. The concluding chapter reflects briefly on the question of the feasibility of an egalitarian society