Egalitarianism and responsibility

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 225-247

  Arneson, Richard J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Desert; Equality; Prioritarianism; Responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 0142140222     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009874016786     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 7.
2. What counts as a talent depends on the environment. The personal traits that are useful in one environment may be less so, or not useful at all, in another environment.
3. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 185.
4. David Gauthier invokes a similar desert island case to make a similar point in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
5. On such deontological conceptions of equality, see Thomas Nagel, "Justice and Nature," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 17 (1997), pp. 303-321.
6. Larry Temkin,Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13. In a footnote on this page Temkin explains that he uses the expression "through no fault of their own" as an abbreviation for "through no fault or choice of their own." This phrasing introduces the possibility that nonfaulty choice by an agent leading to a lowering of her position below the average level that others enjoy might be morally unproblematic. To my mind this formulation suggests an opportunity-oriented rather than a desert-based view; these are different. Temkin also formulates his position as the claim that "undeserved inequality is always objectionable" (p. 12), but this formulation contains the same ambiguity I note in the text, as it is compatible with the further claim that undeserved equality is always objectionable.
7. The principle of moral meritocracy comes in two flavors, comparative and noncom- parative. The text states a comparative version. According to noncomparative moral meritocracy, there is an absolute scale of moral virtue or deservingness, and corresponding to each level on this scale is an appropriate degree of good fortune. Each person should get what she deserves according to this scale, regardless of what others do or get.
8. See Joel Feinberg, "Non-Comparative Justice," The Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 297-338
9. also Shelly Kagan, "Equality and Desert," in What Do We Deserve? Louis P. Pojman and Owen McLeod (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 298-314. I discuss the ambiguities in the Temkin formulation of egalitarianism in "Comments on Satz and Temkin," presented at the American Political Science Association meeting, September, 1996.
10. Harry Frankfurt, "Equality as a Moral Ideal," Ethics 98 (1987), pp. 21-43
11. reprinted in Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
12. Michael Slote defends the idea that a rationally egoistic person might seek what is less than best for herself. On Slote's view, it can be rational to satisfice, rather than optimize.
13. See Michael Slote, Beyond Optimizing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
14. On prioritarianism, see Derek Parfit, "Equality or Priority?" The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1995.
15. Another issue would need discussion in a thorough treatment. If one modifies prior- itarianism by stipulating that achieving well-being gains for the responsible and deserving is morally important for its own sake, the question arises why one does not further modify the view, by holding that the aggregate amount of deservingness and perhaps its distribution across persons should be added to the values to be maximized. I have here been supposing that being deserving is a matter of doing the best one can with the cards that fate has dealt one. On this view, society cannot, just by reshuffling the deck and getting an individual better cards, improve the likely deservingness of the individual, since one's true deservingness score is adjusted to offset changes in circumstances. But this metaphor needs unpacking.
16. Shelly Kagan, "Equality and Desert," in Louis P. Pojman and Owen McCleod (eds.), What Do We Deserve? A Reader on Justice and Desert (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 298-314.
17. This objection was brought to my attention by Brad Hooker.