Philosophy & Public Affairs

Philosophy & Public Affairs 30.1 (2001) 72-87

Must Egalitarians Choose Between Fairness and Respect?

Timothy Hinton

I

In a recent article, Jonathan Wolff argues that egalitarians are forced to choose between the values of fairness and respect. ¹ According to Wolff, a properly egalitarian conception of fairness requires us to tailor the distributive shares of different individuals in ways that appropriately reflect the costs their choices impose on other people. In addition, egalitarian fairness mandates that we distribute resources so as to eliminate the effects of sheer bad luck on people's lives. Wolff notes that realizing this last demand would require some people to acknowledge embarrassing facts about themselves, concerning, for instance, their lack of talent. Making people do such things is obviously likely to undermine their self-respect. And so, Wolff concludes, egalitarians should be willing to sacrifice fairness to secure equal respect for all.

Of course, it is not news that a commitment to egalitarianism might require us to sacrifice other non-egalitarian values. It is often said, for instance, that equality and efficiency are incompatible and must be traded off against each other. But Wolff's thesis is both novel and radical, for he claims to find a genuine conflict of values within the heart of what he calls "the egalitarian ethos."

Wolff's argument is, for this reason, well worth considering in its own right. In addition, it raises several deeper issues about the conception of fairness currently dominant among philosophical egalitarians. Their view has two main components, each of which, so I shall argue, ought to be [End Page 72] rejected. The first is the characterization of equality at work in Wolff's argument. According to this, justice is achieved by eliminating the effects of brute luck, while simultaneously holding people responsible for the choices they make. Second, on the basis of this characterization, egalitarians who take this view reject John Rawls's difference principle on the grounds that it is not sufficiently sensitive to the effects of both luck and choice on people's lives. Consequently, they advocate replacing this principle and its group-centered approach with principles that enjoin a fine-grained, person-by-person allocation of distributive shares.

My aim is to show that Wolff's dilemma affects only those egalitarians who embrace this view of fairness. I agree with him that a properly egalitarian understanding of respect is indeed inconsistent with implementing such a view. For the kind of information needed to distinguish those aspects of a person's condition traceable to luck from those traceable to choice would often have a deleterious effect on his or her self-respect. I deny, however, that the brute luck view is the only one available to egalitarians. Indeed, I think it open to serious criticisms from an egalitarian standpoint. Hence, after briefly rehearsing Wolff's line of argument in section II, I defend its cogency against brute luck egalitarianism in section III. Then, in section IV, I shall bring additional objections to bear against this reading of the egalitarian ideal.

In section V, I present a quite different but independently attractive conception of fairness, which, so I believe, egalitarians ought seriously to consider adopting. According to this view, fairness is understood to consist of equality of status, which is concerned primarily with the moral attributes of the social and economic relations in which people stand. In particular, equality of status seeks to end all forms of exploitation and domination and not to eliminate or ameliorate the effects of bad luck on people's fates. When specified in this way, I believe, egalitarian fairness must be taken as assigning to each person a pre-political entitlement to an equal share of the world's resources.

Having thus addressed the first component of the dominant view of fairness, in section VI, I take up its second: the rejection of the Rawlsian difference principle. Here I argue that that principle, properly understood, is, on the contrary, a defensible normative instrument from an egalitarian standpoint. Then, in the final section, I try to show how implementing the...