Equality, priority and social justice

Ratio

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 178-194

  Norman, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENT   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039282083     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00086     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Derek Parfit, 'Equality or Priority?', (The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1991), p.19. Hereafter referred to as LL
2. A shorter version of the same discussion is his 'Equality and Priority' in Ratio Vol. X (1997)
3. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 227. Hereafter referred to as MF
4. The argument is developed in chapter 9 of MF. That argument is drawn on by John White to generate an argument against the appeal to equality in an educational context, in 'The Dishwasher's Child: Education and the End of Egalitarianism', in Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 28 (1994)
5. J. J. C. Smart provides one well-known example of the attempt to derive utilitarianism from the attitude of benevolence: 'The utilitarian must appeal to some ultimate attitudes .... The sentiment to which he appeals is generalized benevolence, that is, the disposition to seek happiness ... for all mankind, or perhaps for all sentient beings.' (J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism - For and Against, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) p. 7)
6. I defend this interpretation of equality, and in doing so I draw on Parfit's taxonomy of versions of egalitarianism, in 'The Social Basis of Equality' (op. cit.)
7. I have previously argued for it in Free and Equal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
8. and in Studies in Equality (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995)
9. I over-simplify here. I do not mean to suggest that, if the benefits of social cooperation are distributed unequally, it follows automatically that some members of the community are prospering at the expense of others. Some apparent inequalities in the distribution of benefits can be justified by appeal to a principle of compensation: those who make a greater contribution to cooperative endeavours and thereby incur greater burdens are entitled to compensatingly greater benefits. Here what appear superficially to be inequalities are justified by the egalitarian requirement that everyone should benefit equally overall from social cooperation. I would also argue that some inequalities could at least in principle be justified as incentives; here again the justification, appealing to something like a Rawlsian 'difference principle', would itself be a fundamentally egalitarian one. For a fuller account of these complexities, a fuller discussion of the relation between equality of benefits and equality of power, and a fuller defence of my interpretation and justification of equality against rival accounts, see my Free and Equal (op. cit.)