Online research in philosophy

Dworkin wonders, in so far as we might be for equality, to some degree, what would we be for? He thinks equality is a complex, multi-faceted ideal. One facet is distributional equality. Here the question is, concerning money and other resources to be privately owned by individuals, when is the distribution an equal one? Equality of welfare “holds that a distributional scheme treats people as equals when it distributes or transfers resources among them until no further transfer would leave them more equal in welfare.” Equality of welfare is a utilitarian version of egalitarianism.

In chapter 1 of Sovereign Virtue Ronald Dworkin argues against the claim that insofar as we care about distributive equality (equality in the distribution of resources to be privately owned), what we should care about is equality of welfare. This says that a distribution of resources in a society is equal just in case it results in all members of society having the same level of welfare (utility, well-being, personal good).

Here is a picture of a society that one might suppose to be ideally just in its distributive practices: All members of the society are equally free to live in any way that they might choose, and institutions are arranged so that the equal freedom available to all is at the highest feasible level. What, if anything, is wrong with this picture? One might object against the insistence on equal freedom for all and propose that freedom should instead be maximinned, or leximinned, or maximized, or distributed according to some alternative norm. In this essay I wish to set aside the choice of distributive norm. The question for this essay is whether freedom in any sense is the aspect of people's condition that is the right basis of interpersonal comparison for a theory of distributive justice. I approach this question by analyzing some rival conceptions of freedom.

Although the concept of equal opportunity has received scant attention from theological ethics, it attracts widespread approval in the U.S. popular culture and has been examined extensively by contemporary moral philosophy. Amartya Sen's conception of capabilities as "freedom" or "real opportunity" corrects deficiencies in both popular and philosophical conceptions of equal opportunity that ignore interpersonal variations in mental, physical, and psychological abilities beyond agents' control. Recent theologically informed conceptions of love and common grace affirm and revise Sen's conception of equal capability as equal opportunity. The resulting understanding of equal opportunity is quite different from some uses of this concept and could be an important criterion for a just society.

This thesis argues that a particular version of equal opportunity for welfare is the best way of meeting the joint demands of three liberal egalitarian ideals: distributional equality, responsibility, and respect for individuals’ differing reasonable judgements of their own good. It also examines which social choice rules best represent these demands. Finally, it defends the view that achieving equal opportunity for welfare should not only be a goal of formal public institutions, but that just citizens should also sometimes be guided by it in their everyday life. The version of equal opportunity for welfare it defends differs from some well-known contemporary versions in the following ways. First, it rejects a definition of welfare as the degree of satisfaction of a person’s preferences, because, it argues, this conception of welfare cannot adequately deal with preference change. Instead, it suggests that we should adopt a conception of welfare based on a list of goods and conditions that are recognised as valuable from the perspective of a variety of different conceptions of the good. Second, it argues that individuals’ prima facie claim to an equally valuable share of the world’s resources—a claim which is based on their equal moral worth—is limited to situations in which giving one person a more valuable share means that someone else ends up with a less valuable share. It also argues that in situations where we can improve at least one person’s situation without worsening anyone else’s, we generally do not fail to respect each person’s equal moral worth by doing so, even if this leads to inequalities. Third, it defends a distinct view of responsibility, which justifies social arrangements that give people certain options with reference to the value that individuals can achieve (but don’t necessarily achieve) through their choices from these options.

This article introduces the concept of a Moment of Equal Opportunity (MEO): a point in an individual’s life at which equal opportunity must be applied and after which it need not. The concept of equal opportunity takes many forms, and not all employ an MEO. However, the more egalitarian a theory of equal opportunity is, the more likely it is to use an MEO. The article discusses various theories of equal opportunity and argues that those that employ an MEO are problematic. Unjust inequalities, those that motivate the use of equal opportunity, occur throughout people’s lives and thus go unrectified after an MEO. However, it is not possible to abandon the MEO approach and apply more egalitarian versions of equal opportunity throughout a person’s life, since doing so entails problems of epistemology, efficiency, incentives, and counter-intuitive results. The article thus argues that liberal egalitarian theories of equality of opportunity are inconsistent if they support an MEO and unrealizable if they do not.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s interesting criticisms of the ideal of equality of opportunity for welfare provide a welcome occasion for rethinking the requirements of egalitarian distributive justice.1 In the essay he criticizes I had proposed that insofar as we think distributive justice requires equality of any sort, we should conceive of distributive equality as equal opportunity provision. Roughly put, my suggestion was that equality of opportunity for welfare obtains among a group of people when all would have the same expected welfare over the course of their lives if each behaved as prudently as it would be reasonable to expect her to behave. My specific proposal was more demanding, holding that when an age cohort reaches the onset of responsible adulthood, they enjoy equal opportunity for welfare when for each of them, the best sequence of choices that it would be reasonable to expect the person to follow would yield the same expected welfare for all, the second-best sequence of choices would also yield the same expected welfare for all, and so on through the array of lifetime choice sequences each faces. (In the jargon of my 1989 essay, equal opportunity for welfare obtains when everyone faces effectively equivalent sets of life options.).