Equality, luck and hierarchy

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 190-198

  Dworkin, Ronald ^a,b  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 11144332846     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2003.00190.x     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Samuel Scheffler, "What is Egalitarianism?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 5-39. Scheffler's article appeared too late for me to be able to respond to it in a general response I recently published to a variety of comments on my book Sovereign Virtue.
2. See "Sovereign Virtue Revisited," Ethics 113 (2002): 106-43. That article treats in more detail some of the issues I mention briefly here , Scheffler takes the term "luck egalitarian" from Professor Elizabeth Anderson.
3. See Anderson's "What is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337. I discuss Anderson's arguments in my "Sovereign Virtue Revisited.".
4. See Scheffler p. 23.
5. Scheffler, p. 5.
6. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), hereinafter SV.
7. SV, p.140.
8. See particularly SY chap. 2, 8, and 9.
9. See the discussion in SV, pp. 340-46.
10. Scheffler, p. 6.
11. SV, chap. 2 and 9.
12. Ibid.,
13. Scheffler, pp. 18-19.
14. SV, chap. 2 and 9.
15. See also "Sovereign Virtue Revisited," p. 113.
16. Scheffler, p. 21.
17. See SV, chap. 2 and 7.
18. The fullest discussion of the issue is in SV, chap. 7.
19. SV, p. 322.
20. Scheffler, p. 20.
21. SV, p. 290.
22. Scheffler, p. 20.
23. Ibid.,
24. Scheffler also endorses Professor Anthony Appiah's remark that it is difficult to reconcile my view that handicaps are grounds for compensation with a claim I make in a different part of Sovereign Virtue (see SV, chap. 6) which is that people should take their general circumstances into account as "parameters" in deciding how to live. (See Scheffler, n. 40, referring to K.
25. Anthony Appiah, "Equality of what?" The New York Review of Books, 26 April 2001, 63-68.) Appiah did not explain the difficulty he saw; and neither does Scheffler. There is no obvious inconsistency: I emphasized, in my discussion of ethical parameters, that "[w]e cannot describe the challenge of living well, that is, without making some assumptions about the resources a good life should have available to it. We must therefore findsome suitable account of the way in which resources enter ethics as parameters of the good life, and we have, I think, no alternative but to bring justice into that story by stipulating that a good life is a life suited to the circumstances that justice requires" (SV, p. 264).
26. Scheffler, pp. 13-15.
27. Scheffler, p. 34.
28. Ibid.,
29. Scheffler, p. 35.
30. Scheffler, pp. 36-37.
31. SV, chap. 4.
32. See SV, chap. 4 and 10.
33. SV, pp. 194-98.
34. Scheffler, p. 37, n. 76.
35. SY, p.187.
36. Scheffler, p. 31.
37. Scheffler, p. 37.