:The paper seeks to defend Telic Egalitarianism by distinguishing two distinct categories into which typical objections to it fall. According to one category of objections TE isgroundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad. The other type of objections to TE focuses on itscounterintuitiveimplications: it is forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants, or between us and worse-off aliens from other planets. The paper shows that once (...) we unpack these two types of objections to TE they become much less persuasive. (shrink)

Some people are worse off than others. Does this fact give rise to moral concern? Egalitarianism claims that it does, for a wide array of reasons. It is one of the most important and hotly debated problems in moral and political philosophy, occupying a central place in the work of John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, G. A. Cohen and Derek Parfit. It also plays an important role in practical contexts such as the allocation of health care resources, the design of (...) education and tax systems, and the pursuit of global justice. Egalitarianism is a superb introduction to the problem of contemporary egalitarian theories. It explains how rival theories of egalitarianism evaluate distributions of people’s well-being, and carefully assesses the theoretical structure of each theory. It also examines how egalitarian theories are applied to the distribution of health and health care, thus bringing a deceptively complex philosophical debate into clear focus. Beginning with a brief introduction to basic terminology, Iwao Hirose examines the following topics: Rawlsian egalitarianism luck egalitarianism telic egalitarianism prioritarianism sufficientarianism equality and time equality in health and health care. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, this is an ideal starting point for anyone studying distributive justice for the first time, and will also be of interest to more advanced students and researchers in philosophy, economics, political theory, public policy, and public health. (shrink)

Some contractualist egalitarians try to accommodate a concern for numbers by embracing a pluralist strategy. They incorporate the belief that the number of people affected matters for what distribution one ought to bring about by arguing that their primary contractualist concern for justifiability to each may be outweighed by aggregative considerations. The present contribution offers two arguments against such a pluralist strategy. First, I argue that advo- cates of the pluralist strategy are forced to abandon the rationale behind the criterion (...) of universal acceptability. Second, I show that pluralist contractualists will be unable to avoid the dreaded conclusion that originally motivated their contractualism. Ultimately, these arguments matter for the nature of egalitarian- ism. They should give those in search of sound distributive principles a reason to make sense of their egalitarian commitment in a non-contractualist way. If a sound set of distributive principles includes comparative and relational princi- ples, while contractualist egalitarianism does not lend itself to being pluralistically combined with non-individualist principles, telic egalitarianism may after all be part of the truth in distributive ethics. (shrink)

I develop the recent claim that prioritarianism, and not only its egalitarian competitors, must be committed to an impersonal outcome value (i. e. a value that makes a distribution better even if this does not affect anyone’s welfare). This value, that I label telic priority and that consists in the goodness of benefits going to the worst off recipients, implies implausible judgments that more than compete with ‘pure’ (Parfit) egalitarianism’s applause in leveling down scenarios. ‘Pure prioritarianism’, an axiological (...) theory that would consist in an unqualified commitment to telic priority only, must therefore be developed into a pluralist version of the priority view. Contra Parfit, prioritarianism and egalitarianism are on a par concerning the relationship between their pure (and implausible) formulations and their pluralist (and plausible) versions. The final section explains why telic priority always assigns preference to the worst-off (and not merely to the worse-off). (shrink)

In an important piece of work Derek Parfit distinguishes two different forms of egalitarianism, ‘Deontic’ and ‘Telic’. He contrasts these with what he calls the Priority View, which is not strictly a form of egalitarianism at all, since it is not essentially concerned with how well off people are relative to each other. His main aim is to generate an adequate taxonomy of the positions available, but in the process he draws attention to some of the different (...) problems they face. I shall argue that there are forms of egalitarianism overlooked by Parfit which avoid the problems encountered by Deontic and Telic Egalitarians. (shrink)

This brilliant and challenging book provides an overview and defence of 'luck egalitarianism', one that helpfully connects debates on luck egalitarianism to debates on what aspects of our lives egalitarians should try equalise (the 'equality of what?' debate/the debate on the 'metric' of equality) and on what respect, if any, it makes sense to see each other as equals. The book illuminates different conceptions of luck, as found in the philosophical literature, clarifies the difference between telic and (...) deontic equality, and explains the 'levelling down' problem and the way that this affects luck egalitarians, and egalitarians more generally. For these reasons, the book provides a handy introduction to a range of philosophical debates about equality amongst analytic philosophers, whether or not one is particularly interested in luck egalitarianism. However, this is not an easy book to read, and while it is advertised as suitable for advanced undergraduates, I find it hard to imagine using it in any undergraduate course I have taught in the United States, England, France or Switzerland. But this is definitely a book that masters and doctoral students should be able to read by themselves and that will be helpful for teachers preparing classes on luck egalitarianism or on equality more generally. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the use of survey data or intuitions about single person cases as a dialectically neutral data point for favouring telic egalitarianism over prioritarianism has dim prospects for success. We take as a case study Otsuka and Voorhoeve (2009)'s now well known paper and show that it either is either argumentatively irrelevant or question-begging, depending on whether the survey data about people's judgements concerning single-person cases is interpreted as being prudential or moral in (...) character. We suggest that this problem is likely to generalise to other ways of trying to use intuitions or survey data about single-person cases, where those data or intuitions are not just treated as further direct moral intuitions about prioritarianism and telic egalitarianism. (shrink)

Telic egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. In its canonical form, the objection purports to show that it is not, in itself, an improvement if inequality is reduced. In a variant that is less often discussed, the objection is that telic egalitarians are committed to believing that sometimes one ought to reduce inequality, even when doing so makes no one better off. The standard egalitarian response to this ‘all things considered’ variant of the levelling (...) down objection is to embed egalitarianism in a pluralist consequentialist moral theory. In section 1, I briefly recapitulate this familiar strategy. In section 2, I argue that this standard pluralist consequentialist response is inadequate. The inadequacy of the standard response, I argue, stems from the fact that the following are jointly inconsistent: (1) a commitment to levelling down's impermissibility; (2) standard pluralist egalitarian consequentialism; (3) inequality being of non-trivial importance; and (4) the most plausible measures of inequality's badness. In section 3, I show that egalitarians can better respond to the all-things-considered levelling down objection by embedding egalitarianism in a nonconsequentialist moral theory. (shrink)

According to telic egalitarianism, it is, in one respect, noninstrumentally bad if some people are unfairly worse off than others. This paper is about two ambiguities in telic egalitarianism. The first ambiguity concerns the so-called temporal unit of egalitarian concern. This is the question of whether inequality during whole lives, inequality during certain segments of lives, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. The second ambiguity concerns the so-called currency of welfarist egalitarian concern. (...) In the present context, this is the question of whether inequality in overall welfare, inequality in some of the constituents of welfare, or some combination of these, is what generates egalitarian concern. In this paper I argue that the debates about how these two ambiguities are to be resolved are not unrelated. The same reasons that, according to some telic egalitarians, support rejecting the whole-lives-only view about the temporal unit of egalitarian concern support rejecting the overall-welfare-only view about the currency of welfarist egalitarian concern. (shrink)

Abstract Following Temkin's Inequality I take my point of departure in an individualistic approach according to which a situation is bad in respect of inequality to the extent individuals in it have egalitarian complaints. After having criticised some of Temkin's notions of inequality, I argue that there are two proper egalitarian conceptions, the Equal Share Conception and the Place Conception. The first concerns how much welfare an individual can claim to have in order to have what she should have in (...) virtue of equality. The second concerns an individual's egalitarian complaint in so far as it depends on her place in a situation's distribution of welfare. I argue that the first conception can be employed in a defence of Telic Egalitarianism against Derek Parfit's Levelling Down Objection and that the second one can explain why this objection may seem so convincing. I also argue that Telic Egalitarianism, understood according to the first conception, in one respect is preferable to Parfit's Priority View. (shrink)

What we think about equality as a value will influence how we think genetic interventions should be regulated. In this paper I utilise the taxonomy of equality put forth by Derek Parfit and apply this to the issue of genetic interventions. I argue that Telic Egalitarianism is untenable and that Deontic Egalitarianism collapses into the Priority View. The Priority View maintains that it is morally more important to benefit those who are worse off. Once this precision has (...) been given to the concerns egalitarians have a number of diverse issues must be considered before determining what the just regulation of genetic interventions would be. Consideration must be given to the current situation of the current situation of the least advantaged, the fiscal realities behind genetic interventions, the budget constraints on other programmes egalitarians believe should receive scarce public funds and the interconnected nature of genetic information. These considerations might lead egalitarians to abandon what they take to be the obvious policy recommendations for them to endorse regarding the regulation of genetic therapies and enhancements. (shrink)

Some people believe that the equality of people's well-being makes an outcome better, other things being constant. Call this Telic Egalitarianism. In this paper I will propose a new interpretation of Telic Egalitarianism, and compare it with the interpretation that is proposed by Derek Parfit 1995 and widely accepted by many philosophers. I will argue that my proposed interpretation is more plausible than Parfit's. One of the virtues in my interpretation is that it shows his Levelling (...) Down Objection does not undermine Telic Egalitarianism. I also believe that my interpretation better explains the important similarity and difference between Telic Egalitarianism and his proposed Priority View. (shrink)

Telic sufficientarians hold that there is something special about a certain threshold level such that benefiting people below it, or raising them above it, makes an outcome better in at least one respect. The article investigates what fundamental value might ground that view. The aim is to demonstrate that sufficientarianism, at least on this telic version, is groundless and as such indefensible. The argument is advanced in three steps: first, it is shown that sufficientarianism cannot be grounded in (...) a personal value. Neither, secondly, is it committed to the person-affecting view, the view that says that nothing can be better if there is no one for whom it is better. This, in itself, is of interest because some sufficientarians reject egalitarianism precisely for its alleged incompatibility with the person-affecting view. Sufficientarians' disavowal of the person-affecting view implies that their view, similarly to egalitarianism, must be anchored in some impersonal value. But crucially, and this is the third step of the argument, there is no apparent value that can fit that role. We must conclude, then, that telic sufficientarianism is groundless. (shrink)

This paper introduces a symposium on Equality versus Priority. It explains how cases involving risk are key to distinguishing these views and discusses a 'social egalitarian' critique of both 'telic egalitarians' and 'telic prioritarians'.

This article distinguishes between a telic and a deontic version of Derek Parfit's influential Priority View. Employing the distinction, it shows that the existence of variations in how intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts should be resolved fails to provide a compelling case in favour of relational egalitarianism and against all pure versions of the Priority View. In addition, the article argues that those variations are better understood as providing counterevidence to certain distribution-sensitive versions of consequentialism.

Prioritarianism can usefully be seen as a corrective to both egalitarianism and utilitarianism. It allegedly corrects for egalitarianism insofar as it tends toward equality but seems immune to the Leveling Down Objection. It allegedly corrects for utilitarianism insofar as it emphasizes improving peoples' lives but is distribution-sensitive, favoring benefiting those who are worse off over those who are better off, other things equal. The best way to understand the view and assess its prospects is to see whether on (...) closer examination it can indeed avoid the pitfalls of the two more traditional views it might replace. What emerges from such a closer examination is that prioritarianism must be very carefully specified to avoid the Leveling Down Objection. More significantly, to clearly avoid problems associated with utilitarianism, prioritarianism must be formulated in deontic rather than telic terms. It is not clear, however, that such a deontic prioritarianism has any advantages over deontic egalitarianism. (shrink)

In his article, ‘What Should Egalitarians Believe?’, Martin O’Neill argues, amongst other things, that egalitarians should reject both Telic and Deontic Egalitarianism and that they should adopt in their place a version of Non-Intrinsic Egalitarianism, specifically, the Pluralist Non-Intrinsic Egalitarian View. The central purpose of my article is to challenge O’Neill’s assumption that he can defend each of the various propositions that make up his position simultaneously. I do this with two arguments. First, I argue that in (...) order to justify why egalitarians should adopt a version of Non-Intrinsic Egalitarianism, O’Neill is bound to rely on forms of egalitarianism that are either Telic or Deontic, and so he is no longer able to affirm that egalitarians should reject both Telic and Deontic Egalitarianism. Second, I argue that by allowing the inclusion of non-egalitarian reasons into the Pluralist Non-Intrinsic Egalitarian View, O’Neill opens the floodgates to an indefinite number of other non-egalitarian reasons, such that it is scarcely credible that the Pluralist Non-Intrinsic Egalitarian View really is an egalitarian view after all. (shrink)

It is often argued that relational egalitarianism has a fundamental problem with intergenerational justice when compared to other theories of justice such as utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and luck egalitarianism. Recently, Timothy Sommers argued that there is no such comparative disadvantage for relational egalitarianism. His argument is quite modest: it merely aims to reject the claim that there could be no way to extend relational egalitarianism to intergenerational justice. This may be called the ‘No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis’. The (...) present article challenges Sommers’s argument in two ways. First, I show that Sommers fails to provide a reasonable constraint on causal efficacy, which is crucial to his argument for our relation (not relationship) to future generations. Second, I show that the chain-relatedness problem casts a shadow over Sommers’s argument for the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis. More specifically, compared to the other theories of justice, relational egalitarianism (as it stands) can less easily justify that present persons have duties to future others. This is because relational egalitarianism cannot appeal to a specific principle in regard to the duties in question, because its principle is sensitive to current context and practice. I conclude that the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis does not hold much promise. (shrink)

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a (...) class='Hi'>telic structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels. (shrink)

This chapter explains a key tenet of the moral theory that I call Kantsequentialism. That tenet is Kantian Telicism: the view that a subject’s will along with the value of things determine their legitimate ends, which include all their discretionary ends (say, mastering kung fu or traveling the world) as well as the following four obligatory ends: (a) never manifesting a lack of recognition respect for a person, (b) the well-being of every other existing sentient being, (c) the maximization of (...) the impersonal good, and (d) the minimization of the risk of any personal or impersonal disaster. This tenet is crucial because, on Kantsequentialism, what an agent morally ought to do is a function of what's best in terms of achieving their legitimate ends. (shrink)

Telic monism in logic is the thesis that there is one single philosophically primary goal to logic. A different way to put it is that there is only one canonical application to logic. This thesis is widely present—implicitly or more explicitly—in the literature on the philosophy of logic, yet has not been examined nor argued for extensively. In this paper I will present and critically examine telic monism. One prominent candidate for the canonical application of logic, namely the (...) formal codification of logical consequence in natural language, will be challenged directly. The critique will then be generalized by appealing to a practice-based philosophy of logic. The general argument I put forth here claims that we have no principled reason to assume there to be just one primary goal to logic. Rather, I claim that it is more plausible that there actually is a variety of goals, purposes and applications to logic, without one of them enjoying primacy over the others. If this argument succeeds, at least one of the consequences is that it allows for a kind of logical pluralism that has previously been deemed insignificant, namely logical instrumentalism. (shrink)

To build a bridge between the approach of ideal and non-ideal social ontologists to the study of social phenomena, Åsa Burman has recently introduced the important notion of telic power and differentiated it from deontic power. This paper aims to analyse and criticise telic power. We argue that Burman is correct in keeping deontic power and telic power conceptually separated, and we agree that combining these two concepts in explanations proves theoretically illuminating. We suggest that telic (...) power is especially useful to explain how social conflict can break out. However, we contend that the relation between teleological normativity and telic power has not been fully clarified and requires further investigation. Also, we disagree with Burman on the reasons why deontic power and telic power are conceptually distinct. Finally, we contend that Burman’s thesis that these two forms of power have different conditions of existence is very doubtful: in the social world, telic power is normally not, and probably cannot be, ontologically disjoined from deontic power. We suggest that the telic and deontic dimensions of social normativity support each other in shaping social power. (shrink)

How should we decide which inequalities between people are justified, and which are unjustified? One answer is that such inequalities are only justified where there is a corresponding variation in responsible action or choice on the part of the persons concerned. This view, which has become known as 'luck egalitarianism', has come to occupy a central place in recent debates about distributive justice. This book is the first full length treatment of this significant development in contemporary political philosophy. Each (...) of its three parts addresses a key question concerning the theory. Which version of luck egalitarian comes closest to realizing luck egalitarian objectives? Does luck egalitarianism succeed as a view of egalitarian justice? And is it sound as an account of distributive justice in general? The book provides a distinctive answer to each of these questions, along the way engaging with the leading theorists identified in the literature as luck egalitarians, such as Richard Arneson, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, as well as the most influential critics, including Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, Samuel Scheffler, and Jonathan Wolff. (shrink)

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by (...) alethically affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be (...) the mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen tackles all the major questions concerning luck egalitarianism, providing deep, penetrating and original discussion of recent academic discourses on distributive justice as well as responses to some of the main objections in the literature. It offers a new answer to the “Why equality?” and “Equality of what?” questions, and provides a robust luck egalitarian response to the recent criticisms of luck egalitarianism by social relations egalitarians. This systematic, theoretical introduction illustrates the broader picture of distributive justice (...) and enables the reader to understand the core intuitions underlying, or conflicting with, luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

Pragmatist Egalitarianism argues that a deep impasse plagues philosophical egalitarianism. It sets forth a conception of equality rooted in American pragmatist thought--specifically William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty--that successfully mediates that impasse.

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that aim to counteract the distributive effects of luck. This article explains luck egalitarianism's main ideas, and the debates that have accompanied its rise to prominence. There are two main parts to the discussion. The first part sets out three key moves in the influential early statements of Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen: the brute luck/option luck distinction, the specification of brute luck in everyday or theoretical terms and (...) the specification of advantage as resources, welfare, or some combination of these. The second part covers three later developments: the democratic egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism, the luck egalitarian acceptance of pluralism, and luck egalitarian doubts about the significance of the brute luck/option luck distinction. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism’s commitment to neutralizing brute luck inequalities is thought to imply that the elimination of disabilities is an appropriate way to eliminate the unchosen disadvantage that often accompanies disabilities. This implication is not only intuitively objectionable to some, especially those concerned with disability justice, but is subject to objections from relational egalitarians that should be taken seriously. This paper defends the claim that disability elimination is not a natural implication of luck egalitarian theories of justice and that luck (...) egalitarians can avoid the related relational egalitarian objections. I take this to be the case because luck egalitarians can consistently endorse three commitments that, together, take disability elimination off the menu of possible ways to redress the disadvantage of persons with disabilities. These three commitments are: i) the rejection of the view that disability intrinsically makes a person worse off; ii) the endorsement of the fundamental equality of all persons; and iii) the view that luck egalitarianism advances a theory about the arrangement of social institutions. (shrink)

In the past few decades, there has been a growing literature on relational egalitarianism. Relational egalitarianism is a view on the nature and value of equality. In contrast to the dominant view in recent debates on equality—distributive egalitarianism, on which equality is about ensuring people have or fare the same in some respect—on the relational view, equality is a matter of the terms on which relationships are structured. But what exactly does it mean for people to relate (...) as equals? And why are relations of equality valuable? Relational egalitarians have offered quite different answers to each of these questions. In this article, I draw attention to some key issues that underlie these disagree- ments, and I offer a taxonomy of different viewpoints that have emerged in the recent literature on these matters. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it (...) might be required to leave future generations better off than we are, even if it would come at no cost to ourselves. Finally, I argue that following another, broader, version of luck egalitarianism would require us to level down future generations and possibly even ourselves, which is a problem for those persuaded by the levelling‐down objection. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism says that moral equals should relate as equals. We explore how moral unequals should relate.

Calum Miller recently argued that a commitment to a very modest form of egalitarianism—equality between non-disabled human adults—implies fetal personhood. Miller claims that the most plausible basis for human equality is in being human—an attribute which fetuses have—therefore, abortion is likely to be morally wrong. In this paper, I offer a plausible defence for the view that equality between non-disabled human adults does not imply fetal personhood. I also offer a challenge for Miller’s view.

A Telic Theory of Trust approaches trust as a kind of aimed performance, capable of not only success but also of competence and aptness. J. Adam Carter shows how this illuminate the nature of trust, the difference between good and bad trusting, and practices of cooperation in general.

A standard formulation of luck-egalitarianism says that ‘it is [in itself] bad – unjust and unfair – for some to be worse off than others [through no fault or choice of their own]’, where ‘fault or choice’ means substantive responsibility-generating fault or choice. This formulation is ambiguous: one ambiguity concerns the possible existence of a gap between what is true of each worse-off individual and what is true of the group of worse-off individuals, fault or choice-wise, the other concerns (...) the notion of fault. I show that certain ways of resolving these ambiguities lead to counterintuitive results; and that the most plausible way of resolving them leads to a theory of distributive justice in which responsibility plays a role significantly different from that in standard luck-egalitarian thinking. My main conclusion here is that luck-egalitarianism is best formulated as the view that it is [in itself] bad – unjust and unfair – for an individual to be worse off than others if, and only if, her being worse off does not fit the degree to which she is at fault in a not purely prudential sense. (shrink)

In her recent, provocative essay “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Elizabeth Anderson argues against a common ideal of egalitarian justice that she calls “ luck egalitarianism” and in favor of an approach she calls “democratic equality.”1 According to the luck egalitarian, the aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own. In the ideal luck (...) egalitarian society, there are no inequalities in people’s life prospects except those that arise through processes of voluntary choice or faulty conduct, for which the agents involved can reasonably be held responsible. Anderson asserts that the adherents of luck egalitarianism, which can be elaborated in many different ways, include John Roemer, Erik Rakowski, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Gerald Cohen, Richard Arneson, and Philippe Van Parijs.2 In contrast, according to the democratic equality conception, justice as equality requires an end to oppressive social relationships. In the ideal society of democratic equality, the social conditions of everyone’s freedom are secured, each stands to every other in a relationship of fundamental equality, including equal respect, and all have real freedom to participate in democratic self-government. (shrink)

In "Egalitarianism Defended," Larry Temkin attempted to rebut criticisms of egalitarianism I had made in my article, "Equality, Priority, and Compassion." Temkin's response is interesting and illuminating, but, in this article, I shall claim that his arguments miss their target and that the failure of egalitarianism may have implications more serious than some have thought.

The difference between the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons requires that there be a shift in the moral weight that we accord to changes in utility when we move from making intrapersonal tradeoffs to making interpersonal tradeoffs. We examine which forms of egalitarianism can, and which cannot, account for this shift. We argue that a form of egalitarianism which is concerned only with the extent of outcome inequality cannot account for this shift. We also (...) argue that a view which is concerned with both outcome inequality and with the unfairness of inequality in individuals‘ expected utilities can account for this shift. Finally, we limn an alternative view, on.. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, many political philosophers have rejected the idea that justice is fundamentally about distribution. Rather, justice is about social relations, and the so-called distributive paradigm should be replaced by a new relational paradigm. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen seeks to describe, refine, and assess these thoughts and to propose a comprehensive form of egalitarianism which includes central elements from both relational and distributive paradigms. He shows why many of the challenges that luck egalitarianism faces reappear, once we (...) try to specify relational egalitarianism more fully. His discussion advances understanding of the nature of the relational ideal, and introduces new conceptual tools for understanding it and for exploring the important question of why it is desirable in the first place to relate as equals. Even severe critics of the distributive understanding of justice will find that this book casts important new light on the ideal to which they subscribe. (shrink)

This paper argues that egalitarian theories should be judged by the degree to which they meet four different challenges. Fundamentalist egalitarianism, which contends that certain inequalities are intrinsically bad or unjust regardless of their consequences, fails to meet these challenges. Building on discussions by T.M. Scanlon and David Miller, we argue that egalitarianism is better understood in terms of commitments to six egalitarian objectives. A consequence of our view, in contrast to Martin O'Neill's “non-intrinsic egalitarianism,“ is that (...) egalitarianism is better understood as a family of views than as a single ethical position. (shrink)

Decision-makers face severe uncertainty when they are not in a position to assign precise probabilities to all of the relevant possible outcomes of their actions. Such situations are common—novel medical treatments and policies addressing climate change are two examples. Many decision-makers respond to such uncertainty in a cautious manner and are willing to incur a cost to avoid it. There are good reasons for taking such an uncertainty-averse attitude to be permissible. However, little work has been done to incorporate it (...) into an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. We aim to remedy this lack. We put forward a novel, uncertainty-averse egalitarian view. We analyse when the aims of reducing inequality and limiting the burdens of severe uncertainty are congruent and when they conflict, and highlight practical implications of the proposed view. We also demonstrate that if uncertainty aversion is permissible, then utilitarians must relinquish a favourite argument against egalitarianism. (shrink)

In "Equality, Priority, and Compassion," Roger Crisp rejects both egalitarianism and prioritarianism. Crisp contends that our concern for those who are badly off is best accounted for by appealing to "a sufficiency principle" based -- indirectly, via the notion of an impartial spectator -- on compassion for those who are badly off" (p. 745). A key example of Crisp's is the Beverly Hills case (discussed below). This example is directed against prioritarianism, but it also threatens egalitarianism. In this (...) article, I respond to the Beverly Hills case. I also challenge the wide person-affecting principle and Crisp's welfarist restriction, which some believe underlie the Levelling Down Objection against egalitarianism. My aim in this article is to defend egalitarianism by illuminating both its nature and appeal. (shrink)