Egalitarianism

Liberal egalitarian jurisprudence and critical legal studies have often been at odds, despite sharing a core of set of political and analytical commitments. This paper makes the case for their conciliation in the 21st century on the basis that both traditions have much to offer one another. Liberal egalitarians offer the theoretical tools for developing an egalitarian normative approach to law, and critical legal theorists offer a vital realism about power.

Derek Parfit held that in evaluating the future, we should ignore the difference between necessary persons and merely possible persons. In this article, I look at one of the most prominent alternatives to Parfit's view, namely Michael Otsuka and Larry Temkin ‘shortfall complaints’ view. In that view, we aggregate future persons’ well-being and deduct intrapersonal shortfall complaints, giving extra weight to the complaints of necessary persons. I offer here a third view. I reject Parfit's no difference view in that I (...) register a difference between necessary and possible persons. But I also reject the Shortfall View and replace its intra-personal complaints with an inter-personal complaints mechanism. I argue that the value of a population is its aggregate prioritarian value minus the egalitarian complaints that necessary persons hold. I show that the egalitarian view has all the explanatory power of the Shortfall view in easy cases, while significantly improving on it in three sorts of tough cases. (shrink)

Indirect discrimination (or disparate impact) is one of the focal points of current antidiscrimination policies. However, few political/moral philosophers have paid substantial attention to indirect discrimination until recently. This contribution provides an overview of the two philosophical questions in this context: the definitional question (DQ) and the moral question (MQ). DQ concerns what distinguishes indirect discrimination from direct discrimination and inequality. Conceptually, either (1) indirect discrimination is not a genuine subtype of discrimination; (2) it is a subtype of discrimination secondary (...) to direct discrimination; or (3) it is a subtype of discrimination independent of direct discrimination. A more substantial distinction between direct and indirect discrimination can be drawn according to the discriminator’s intention, the disproportionateness of intergroup disadvantage, and so forth. MQ addresses what makes indirect discrimination morally wrong. Conceptually, either (1) indirect discrimination cannot be morally wrong qua discrimination in its own right; (2) it can be morally wrong qua discrimination in its own right, where the wrongness must be connected to past direct discrimination; or (3) it can be morally wrong qua discrimination regardless of past direct discrimination. Substantially, possible wrong-making factors of indirect discrimination include the discriminator’s objectionable intentions, the objectionable message that discriminatory practices may carry, and their harmful effects. This framework is a first step for future works that are necessary to yield a comprehensive insight into the relationship between discrimination and inequality and address contemporary forms of discrimination that tend to be indirect rather than direct. (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)

A growing focus on pleasure in human rights discourse has been used to address patterns of sexual exclusion, often when addressing the problems of people with disabilities (PWD). As convincingly argued by Liberman, however, not all PWD suffer from sexual exclusion, and not all who suffer from sexual exclusion are PWD. Danaher and Liberman have thus argued in various ways for a broader range of measures, addressing sexual exclusion. This article builds on previous research and offers a conceptual framework for (...) addressing sexual pleasure and exclusion in terms of human rights. It argues that human rights aim to safeguard autonomy, which is interpreted as multidimensional. It, thus, divides autonomy into the four dimensions of liberty (freedom from threat and coercion), opportunity (options to choose between), capacity (what an agent is capable of doing) and authenticity (the extent to which choices are genuine). Furthermore, it distinguishes between distinct egalitarian strategies, which offer different problems and possibilities, and may be combined. Thus, there is direct egalitarian distribution, indirect egalitarian distribution, baseline or threshold strategies and general promotion strategies. By way of conclusion, the importance of sexual authenticity as the ultimate aim of sexual rights is emphasised. (shrink)

In “Wheeler and Thompson’s Appeal: refounding utilitarianism through equality between men and women?”, Benjamin Bourcier studies this Appeal in which, in response to James Mill’s article On Government, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson offer a radical critique of utilitarian thought, but also of Mill’s political exclusion of women and legitimization of patriarchy. In contrast to Mill, they defend the political inclusion and equality of women, in order to meet the aspirations of a society of equals and the greatest happiness for (...) all. (shrink)

In the political campaigns preceding the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2023, several parties embraced the idea of 'bestaanszekerheid', promising to restore or strengthen people's security of a basic living standard. This paper analyses this idea from the perspective of different egalitarian principles that we may find in social democratic thought. If we care about equality, should we also care about 'bestaanszekerheid'?

There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people's intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism--the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people's intuitions--are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (...) (good option luck, good brute luck, and bad brute luck) in which the demands of luck egalitarianism and those of a mainstream desert-based view come apart, the latter carries the day. One ramification of these findings is that people's intuitions about justice are moralized; that is, they appeal to particular conceptions of the good. Luck egalitarians must decide whether to embrace these moralized intuitions by adopting desertism--or to resist them. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians claim that a situation is just only if everyone it involves relates to one another as equals. It implies that relational egalitarians believe the ideal of “living as equals” (for short) is desirable, and furthermore, necessary for justice. In this paper, I distinguish three accounts of the desirability of the ideal: the instrumental value account, the non‐instrumental value account, and the non‐consequentialist account. I argue that the former two accounts cannot provide satisfying reasons for being a relational egalitarian. (...) Instead, the ideal of “living as equals” ought to be understood as fundamentally a moral requirement in a non‐consequentialist sense. In addition, a pluralist (though fundamentally non‐consequentialist) approach is welcome. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism assigns a central role to personal responsibility in egalitarian justice. In the context of healthcare, luck egalitarianism is the view that the distribution of medical and healthcare resources—or common resources in general—should respond to the (im)prudence of individuals. Recently, Joar Björk, Gert Helgesson, and Niklas Juth have argued that it is impractical to use luck egalitarianism as a normative framework in healthcare because it has no reasonable way of dealing with the imprudent. In response to their argument, this (...) paper first suggests that the epistemic problems of applying luck egalitarianism to the healthcare context raised by Björk et al. can be circumvented by using the exemption system as a policy application of luck egalitarian healthcare justice. This paper then shows that an _ex ante_ policy, a tax system with refunds, can reasonably be adopted as a luck egalitarian institutional design of healthcare policy. We argue that the proposed conception of luck egalitarianism can deal with the problem of differential option luck. Finally, we show that the threshold problem for the definition of imprudence does not refute the proposed _ex ante_ policy. (shrink)

This article evaluates the moral implications of two leading theories on biodiversity preservation/conservation (Paul Taylor's biocentric egalitarianism and J. Baird Callicott's holistic communitarianism). Taylor argues for the moral equality of all members of the Earth's community of life, calling for an ethic of respect for nature to conserve biodiversity. Callicott argues for the moral consideration of ecosystems to maintain their integrity, stability, and beauty. The article makes two major claims. First, we need a plausible account of moral egalitarianism to disrupt (...) ethical anthropocentrism. Second, the ethics of respect for nature requires a critical bottom-up character-based ethical theory to be morally forceful. These missing elements are central to the ubuntu philosophy about personhood and are significant for enriching egalitarian-communitarian solutions to biodiversity loss. (shrink)

Countries with federal institutions often face demands for more political autonomy from their member states. To answer these demands, some have proposed recognizing a right to internal self-determination, constrained in multiple ways. Although interesting, this proposition — defended by theorists of multinational federalism — might be insufficient in resolving the existing inequalities between peoples living in the same federation. This is the thesis for which I will argue in this paper. I will argue that Will Kymlicka's concept of internal self-determination (...) remains indeterminate and opens the door to stronger interpretations of the concept than he intends. (shrink)

This paper analyses the temporal unit of egalitarian concern. In the intertemporal context, the differences between egalitarian views can be appreciated not only in inequality analysis but also as regards the ideal egalitarian distribution to be established. In this paper, three intergenerational egalitarian principles (Complete Lives Egalitarianism, Corresponding Segments Egalitarianism and Simultaneous Segments Egalitarianism) are analysed and CSE is argued to be the appropriate egalitarian benchmark. The relations between the three principles and other moral ideals, namely maximin and utilitarianism, are (...) also analysed. It is proved that CLE and CSE are compatible with a concern for the worst off and, partially, with a utilitarian concern, while the adoption of SSE implies a worse trade-off between egalitarianism and the other moral ideals. (shrink)

What are the distributive implications of utilitarianism? Is it compatible with a concern for equality, as many utilitarians have argued? We analyse these questions in the context of a pure allocation problem. We consider an infinitely-lived economy and, drawing on the behavioural literature, assume that individuals have reference-dependent preferences: agents’ utility is a function of current consumption and a reference point which captures consumption habits, or the agents’ upbringing. Assuming a history of inequalities in consumption, we show that the utilitarian (...) allocation is equalising: starting from an unequal distribution, inequalities decrease over time at the utilitarian optimum. However, even though agents are in a relevant sense identical, equality does not obtain at any finite time. (shrink)

We analyse the implications of classical liberal and libertarian approaches for distributive justice in the context of social welfare orderings. We study an axiom capturing a liberal non-interfering view of society, the Weak Harm Principle, whose roots can be traced back to John Stuart Mill. We show that liberal views of individual autonomy and freedom can provide consistent foundations for welfare judgements. In particular, a liberal non-interfering approach can help to adjudicate some fundamental distributive issues relative to intergenerational justice. However, (...) a strong relation is established between liberal views of individual autonomy and non-interference, and egalitarian principles in the Rawlsian tradition. (shrink)

Why are architects faced with a long-standing crisis of legitimacy in democratic countries, even though going to an architect is required by law in most of these countries ? Design work and project management have now turned into a competitive partnership within an egalitarian trend. The crisis of the architectural profession results from the undermining of architects' powers relative to other actors. This fact clearly evokes a Tocquevillian paradigm : in democratic societies, the passion for equality tends to abolish all (...) status differences. This article analyzes the relevance of this paradigm, comparing the unexpected consequences professionals complain about to the features of egalitarism described by Tocqueville. Finally, the author raises the question as to why this egalitarian phenomenon affected architects only from the second half of the XXth century on. (shrink)

Construed as a theory of justice, relational egalitarianism says that justice requires that people relate as equals. Construed as a theory of what makes democracy valuable, it says that democracy is a necessary, or constituent, part of the value of relating as equals. Typically, relational egalitarians want their theory to provide both an account of what justice requires and an account of what makes democracy valuable. We argue that relational egalitarians with this dual ambition face the justice-democracy dilemma: Understanding social (...) relations in such a way that renders relational egalitarianism plausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable comes at the price of understanding social relations in a way that makes it less plausible as a theory of justice, and vice versa. We also argue that there is no easy way out of the dilemma and that relational egalitarians, who want relational equality to provide both accounts mentioned, may simply have to set their ambitions lower on behalf of relational equality. (shrink)

This paper provides a characterization of a new class of ordinal poverty measures that are defined by means of the aggregate generalized poverty gap. To be precise, we propose to use the sum of the differences between the transformed fixed poverty line and the transformed level of income of each person below the line as our measure. If the transformation is strictly concave, the resulting measure is strictly inequality averse with respect to the incomes of the poor. In analogy to (...) some existing results on inequality measurement, we show that the only relative (scale-invariant) members of our class are based on strictly concave power functions or the natural logarithm. Moreover, we show that our measures allow for a useful decomposition that is akin to those examined in some earlier contributions. In an empirical analysis, we compare the logarithmic variant of our index to two well-established alternative orderings. Unlike numerous indices that appear in the earlier literature, ours do not explicitly depend on the number of poor or on the total population size, thereby ruling out any direct influence of the head-count ratio on poverty comparisons. (shrink)

The Nash axiom is a basic property of consistency in choice. This paper proposes weaker versions of the axiom and examines their logical implications. In particular, we demonstrate that weak Nash axioms are useful to understand the relationship between the Nash axiom and the path independence axiom. We provide an application of weak Nash axioms to the no-envy approach. We present a possibility result and an impossibility result.

In health care, the provision of pertinent information to patients is not just a moral imperative but also a legal obligation, often articulated through the lens of obtaining informed consent. Codes of medical ethics and many national laws mandate the disclosure of basic information about diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment alternatives. However, within publicly funded health care systems, other kinds of information might also be important to patients, such as insights into the health care priorities that underlie treatment offers made. While (...) conventional perspectives do not take this as an obligatory part of the information to be shared with patients, perhaps through viewing it as clinically “non-actionable,” we advocate for a paradigm shift. Our proposition diverges from the traditional emphasis on actionability. We contend that honoring patients as equal moral agents necessitates, among other principles, a commitment to honesty. Withholding specific categories of information pertinent to patients’ comprehension of their situation is inherently incompatible with this principle. In this article, we advocate for a recalibration of the burden of proof. Rather than requiring special justifications for adding to the standard set of information items, we suggest that physicians should be able to justify excluding relevant facts about the patient’s situation and the underlying considerations shaping health care professionals’ choices. This perspective prioritizes transparency and empowers patients with a comprehensive understanding, aligning with the ethos of respect for the patient as person. (shrink)

-/- This unique book develops an operational approach to preference and rationality as the author employs operators over binary relations to capture the concept of rationality. -/- A preference is a basis of individual behavior and social judgment and is mathematically regarded as a binary relation on the set of alternatives. Traditionally, an individual/social preference is assumed to satisfy completeness and transitivity. However, each of the two conditions is often considered to be too demanding; and then, weaker rationality conditions are (...) introduced by researchers. This book argues that the preference rationality conditions can be captured mathematically by “operators,” which are mappings from the set of operators to itself. This operational approach nests traditional concepts in individual/social decision theory and clarifies the underlying formal structure of preference rationality. -/- The author also applies his approach to welfare economics. The core problem of ‘new welfare economics,’ developed by Kaldor, Hicks, and Samuelson, is the rationality of social preference. In this book the author translates the social criteria proposed by those three economists into operational forms, which provide new insights into welfare economics extending beyond ‘new welfare economics.’ . (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discrimination wrong (when it is): harm and disrespect. These two approaches are employed to analyze whether luck egalitarian healthcare prioritization should be considered wrongful discrimination. Regarding (...) harm, it is very plausible to consider the policies harmful but much less reasonable to consider those responsible for their health disadvantages a socially salient group. Drawing on the disrespect literature, where social salience is typically not required for something to be discrimination, the policies are a form of discrimination. They are, however, not disrespectful. The upshot of this first assessment of the discrimination objection to luck egalitarianism in health is, thus, that it fails. (shrink)

Within democratic theory, electoral competition is typically associated with minimalist and realist views of democracy. In contrast, this article argues for a reinterpretation of electoral competition as an important element of an egalitarian theory of democracy. Current relational egalitarian theories, in focusing on the equalization of individual power-over, present electoral institutions as in tension with equality. Against this view, the article contends that electoral competition can foster equality by incentivizing the equalization of cooperative power. The article develops the normative category (...) of equal opportunity to access cooperative power and shows how it can generate an egalitarian defense of electoral competition. Yet this ideal is not an affirmation of the status quo. Rather, it points to the need to reform electoral systems to make them more competitive and so more likely to foster cooperative power, as well as reforms to provide direct support to associations like unions that equalize cooperative power. (shrink)

McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Confucius to Ayn Rand and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the more (...) moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right's critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. A critical guide to the history of conservative and reactionary thought for students and scholars of political science and political history. (shrink)

It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive justice. We (...) cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen is justly acclaimed for his penetrating and searching critique of the commanding Rawlsian liberal paradigm in contemporary political philosophy. He is also well known for his fervent advocacy of a radical view of economic equality, namely, that “justice requires (virtually) unqualified equality itself.” This essay focuses on two issues at the heart of Cohen’s critique, namely, his argument that economic equality is a moral as well as a political responsibility, and his interrogatory question: “If you’re an egalitarian, (...) how come you’re so rich?” I take up critics’ objection that Cohen’s arguments for what economic egalitarianism requires are overly morally demanding. I also present a puzzle about the critical reception of Cohen’s work: Given the amount and quality of engagement with his arguments on what egalitarianism would look like in a future just society, how come there’s been such scant attention to his reflections on the predicament of the “rich egalitarian” in current-day unjust society? The essay culminates in a tentative answer to this question. (shrink)

I offer two objections to luck egalitarianism. The no-adequate-account objection takes note of the egalitarian insistence that the disvalue of inequality is only one of a plurality of values or disvalues that needs to be considered in arriving at a judgment about the ranking of alternative distributions of welfare. This turn to pluralism places a reasonable demand upon luck egalitarianism to provide an account of how the different sorts of values or disvalues that are supposed to attach to available distributions (...) of welfare are to be aggregated or weighed against one another in that ranking procedure. I contend that the prospects for developing such an account are dim and that some salient responses to this objection misfire. The churlishness-envy objection against luck egalitarianism is that this doctrine countenances envy directed toward the faultless good fortune of others. This objection places a reasonable demand on luck egalitarians to formulate a version of their doctrine that does not underwrite envious responses toward those who gain through brute good luck. I contend that the most auspicious path toward satisfying the demand not to underwrite churlish envy advances a luck egalitarianism that asymmetrically affirms the badness of arbitrary disadvantage rather than the badness of both arbitrary disadvantage and arbitrary advantage. Since this is the strategy pursued in Shlomi Segall’s Why Inequality Matters, I offer critiques of Segall’s initial and revised versions of asymmetrical egalitarianism in support of my conclusion that luck egalitarianism seems unable to rebut or sidestep the churlishness-envy objection. I conclude that luck egalitarianism seems unable to satisfy either of the two reasonable demands upon it that I raise. (shrink)

This essay seeks to answer the question of how the behavior of wealthy advocates of some version of socialism can be reconciled with their advocacy of those ideas. The answer is that the conception of egalitarianism under which they choose to live is one that redistributes income, not wealth, while the egalitarianism that they advocate for others is that in which all wealth is the property of one person who decides how much will be distributed to others.

This essay explains the prevalence of egalitarian beliefs among academic philosophers, individuals who enjoy significant wealth and privilege. I argue that their egalitarianism does not present a “paradox of conviction,” as G. A. Cohen contends, but follows logically from the institutional structure of academic philosophy. This structure creates a “veil of insignificance” wherein philosophy is a moral performance that incentivizes the adoption of egalitarian beliefs. Philosophers also view the world from behind what is termed a “veil of privilege” that incentivizes (...) a public commitment to egalitarianism as a means of distancing themselves from the role of privilege in their life and encourages the hubristic assumption that the practical problems of socialism can be easily overcome with effort or ingenuity. Identity-protective motivated reasoning means that evidence conflicting with egalitarian beliefs is avoided, ignored, or dismissed. These dynamics are reinforced by established actors who gatekeep the profession. (shrink)

Rawlsian theory notoriously claims that basic principles of justice apply to the design of a society’s basic structure. G. A. Cohen found it disturbingly convenient to treat fundamental principles as merely political rather than personal—that is, as applying exclusively to questions of institutional design and saying nothing about how to live. Instead, to Cohen, a sincere champion of egalitarian principles would, as they say, “walk the talk.”.

I argue for an egalitarian conception of market exchange that places the idea of equal power at the center of a procedural evaluation of markets. I explain the fundamental concept of equal power in markets and show that the egalitarian conception gives us a remedial basis for society shaping markets so that they allow a significant place for worker participation in firms. I use the phrase “worker participation” to mean that workers participate in the authoritative direction of the firm. This (...) can include collective bargaining and worker management to introduce the kind of flexibility that is desirable in regulating market economies. Worker participation is a remedy to the presence of rigidities in markets that strongly favor authoritarian firms and that follow from and maintain unequal power in markets. The argument differs from the traditional argument that draws a parallel between state and firm, and so does not entail a general requirement of worker participation. It allows for some degree of participation of owners of capital also in the governance of firms. (shrink)

Libertarianism is a theory of justice that places significant moral weight on exclusive property rights. On this basis, many libertarian philosophers, from Robert Nozick to Michael Huemer, criticize any form of income redistribution. Ironically, some libertarians, following Philippe Van Parijs, Matt Zwolinski, and Charles Murray, have supported the introduction of an unconditional basic income. This essay seeks to prove that this support is not just a political compromise. By contrast, libertarian justice advocates have a strong moral basis for supporting income (...) redistribution in the form of unconditional cash payments. This essay explores one such reason, the Lockean proviso. The Lockean proviso is a moral requirement for the appropriation of unowned resources to leave “enough and as good” for others. There are many interpretations of the Lockean proviso, but the most ambitious are the egalitarian proviso and the sufficiency proviso. Each of them, but for different reasons, requires the introduction of a basic income. The egalitarian proviso establishes the equal rights of all people to natural resources, and therefore requires that all benefits from the ownership of natural resources be shared egalitarianly — in the form of unconditional equal payments. The sufficiency proviso establishes some threshold of sufficiency, and then imposes a restriction on exclusive property rights so that they can’t prevent redistribution in order to raise all people to the threshold of sufficiency. However, while both provisos require a basic income, they diverge on three important dimensions in assessing this basic income: applicability, taxable base, and amount of cash payments. (shrink)

(OPEN ACCESS) In this paper, I criticize two views on how political equality is related to equally distributed political power, and I offer a novel, pluralist account of political equality to address their shortcomings—in particular, concerning their implications for affirmative action in the political domain, political representation, and the situation of permanent minorities. The Equal Power View holds that political equality requires equally distributed political power. It considers affirmative action—e.g., racial or gender electoral quotas—, representation, and more-than-equal power to permanent (...) minorities pro tanto objectionable. The Equal Status View, in contrast, holds that political equality concerns equal relations and status, and it is only contingently related to equally distributed power. I argue that while the Equal Status View is right that equal power can be insufficient for—or even objectionable from the viewpoint of—political equality, it is wrong to conclude that equal power has no independent significance in an account of political equality. My pluralist account shows that political equality entails not only status-based requirements but also independent egalitarian requirements to distribute political power equally. This account provides a finer-grained understanding of affirmative action in the political domain. It justifies affirmative action but holds that it should only be used to realize equal political status until thorough-going social reform allows us to maintain both equal political status and equally distributed political power at the same time. Similarly, representation should be amended with power-balancing institutions, and permanent minorities should enjoy equal status with minimal compromise to power equality. (shrink)

This article examines G. A. Cohen’s endorsement of a hybrid ethical theory and its relationship to his critique of John Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism. Cohen claimed that Rawls’s appeal to special incentives was a distortion of his own difference principle. I argue that Cohen’s acceptance of a personal prerogative (the central element of Samuel Scheffler’s version of a hybrid ethical theory) has several untoward consequences. First, it illuminates how any reasonable challenge to Rawls’s liberalism must recognise Thomas Nagel’s arguments concerning the (...) problems that arise when one attempts to implement a political theory analogous to a hybrid theory of ethics. Second, it undermines Cohen’s critique of Rawls. Third, it undermines the plausibility of Cohen’s ethos-driven social egalitarianism. The article concludes that, despite Nagel’s concerns, the most plausible form of egalitarianism—one that can accommodate the requirements of a hybrid ethical theory—will be Rawlsian, rather than Cohen’s ethos-based system. (shrink)

This paper expounds and defends a relational egalitarian account of the moral wrongfulness of vote markets according to which such markets are incompatible with our relating to one another as equals qua people with views on what we should collectively decide. Two features of this account are especially interesting. First, it shows why vote markets are objectionable even in cases where standard objections to them, such as the complaint that they result in inequality in opportunity for political influence across rich (...) and poor people, are inapplicable. Second, it specifies the sense in which, politically speaking, we should relate as equals, and in doing provides a richer version of recent relational egalitarian accounts of the ideal of democracy. (shrink)

This article—a tribute to philosopher Bat-Ami Bar On—argues that states have obligations to not only resettle refugees, but also to put into place laws, policies, and procedures that are likely to ameliorate exclusionary attitudes and socio-political stances of existing members toward refugees and other forcibly displaced persons. The article begins with a recollection of Bar On, who encouraged the author to pursue the well-being of refugees as a worthy philosophical topic. The article then argues that refugee camps do not serve (...) the purpose of justice; therefore, resettlement must be sought. Resettlement, in turn, raises several questions that egalitarians must take more seriously. In the end, equitable resettlement of refugees requires a broad based ethics of inclusivity and equality that bolsters community willingness to share spaces and “live and let live” in the face of cultural differences. (shrink)

Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person’s standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken (...) in conjunction with the observation that semiotic objections are generally flimsy, failing to identify anything wrong with a practice as such and having limited capacity to generalize beyond particular contexts. GPI Working Paper No. 3-2019. (shrink)

The first-order condition of the Nash bargaining solution equates the ratio of utilities to the ratio of marginal utilities. It turns out that this common ratio plays a role in determining whether the Nash solution, roughly speaking, is “more utilitarian” or “more egalitarian.” More specifically, I propose a sense of proximity to utilitarianism and/or egalitarianism according to which, in bargaining problems with distinct utilitarian and egalitarian points, the Nash solution is closer to utilitarianism if the aforementioned ratio is smaller than (...) one, and closer to egalitarianism if that ratio is greater than one. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...) together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)

The chapter explores whether, or to what extent, recent work in experimental philosophy puts pressure on the idea that the concept of causation is ‘egalitarian’. Causal selection – where experimental subjects tend to rate the causal strength of (for example) a norm-violator more strongly than a non-norm-violator – is a well established phenomenon, and is in prima facie tension with an egalitarian conception of causation; it also, indirectly, puts prima facie pressure on the idea that causation is a worldly phenomenon (...) whose obtaining is independent of facts about norms. The chapter explores both the various psychological mechanisms and the broadly pragmatic approaches to explaining causal selection. It argues that the answer to the question whether or not the concept of causation is egalitarian is currently significantly empirically underdetermined, and suggests some avenues for further investigation. (shrink)

Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic tendencies of representative government have recently paid more attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy political equality fully, (...) their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality. Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs. (shrink)

This article is concerned with social and political equality. In its prescriptive usage, ‘equality’ is a highly contested concept. Its normally positive connotation gives it a rhetorical power suitable for use in political slogans (Westen 1990). At least since the French Revolution, equality has served as one of the leading ideals of the body politic; in this respect, it is at present probably the most controversial of the great social ideals. There is controversy concerning the precise notion of equality, the (...) relation of justice and equality (the principles of equality), the material requirements and measure of the ideal of equality (equality of what?), the extension of equality (equality among whom?), and its status within a comprehensive (liberal) theory of justice (the value of equality). First published Tue Mar 27, 2001; substantive revision Mon Apr 26, 2021. (shrink)