Value-pluralist egalitarianism

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 99, Issue 11, 2002, Pages 577-599

  Carter, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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EID: 5044234947     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3655751     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. I refrain here from discussing Larry Temkin's views on the differing ways in which a situation can be regarded as equal or unequal. For a critique of Temkin, see my "Simplifying 'Inequality'," Philosophy and Public Affairs, XXX, 1 (2001): 88-100.
2. "Equality of What?" in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (New York: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 353-69.
3. "What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare," Philosophy and Public Affairs, X, 3 (1981): 185-246
4. and "What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs, X, 4 (1981): 283-345.
5. "Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare," Philosophical Studies, LVI (1989): 77-93.
6. "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics, XCIX (July 1989): 906-44.
7. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000).
8. "What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare," p. 242.
9. Interestingly, this argument seems to tell equally against equalizing basic capabilities. Hence, it appears to be just as telling against Elizabeth S. Anderson's development of Sen's "capability egalitarianism" - "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics, CIX, 2 (1999): 287-337.
10. Equality or Priority? The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence: Kansas UP, 1995).
11. Sovereign Virtue, p. 297.
12. Arguing for Equality (New York: Verso, 1987).
13. "What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources," p. 331.
14. Dworkin asks us to "[i]magine...a society newly dedicated to equality of enjoyment in which, when resources are redistributed in order to achieve equality of enjoyment, Jude has far less money than anyone else because his wants are so simple and so inexpensively satisfied. But one day (perhaps after reading Hemingway) he decides that his life, for all its richness and enjoyment, is a life of less overall success than it might be, and proposes to cultivate a new taste for some challenging sport, such as bullfighting. Suppose that after he does so he finds himself seriously frustrated by his lack of funds with which, for example, to travel to Spain, and asks for more funds through a further redistribution after which he would still, as things fall out, have less than anyone else. Do we now have any grounds for saying that he is undeserving of the increase, when we know that if it is denied he will have both less funds and less enjoyment than anyone else? I doubt anyone will want to say this.... Jude asks only that something closer to an equal share be put at the disposal of his [life]. We need the idea of fair shares (in this particular case the idea of an equal share of resources) in order to express the force of this..." - "What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare," p. 239.
15. If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000), p. 177, where Cohen, in the attached endnote, immediately refers the reader back to his "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice."
16. See my "Moral Theory and Global Population," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCIX, 3 (1999): 289-313.
17. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971).
18. Rawls has come to admit that this is a lexical ordering - Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia, 1996), p. 7.
19. A Theory of Justice, p. 45.
20. Political Argument (New York: Humanities, 1965).
21. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 39. It is worth noting that nothing I am arguing presupposes a mysterious faculty that "intuits" moral properties. And neither does Rawls's idiosyncratic use of " intuitionism" have any such implication.
22. As Barry writes: "the principle of equal utility, if interpreted strictly, would require us to say that a situation of equally shared misery was morally preferable to a situation in which everyone was very happy but some were a little more so than others. It would seem more reasonable to say that we should be concerned with both the total amount of utility and its distribution, permitting a trade-off between the criteria of maximization and equalization" - Theories of Justice (Berkeley: California UP, 1989), p. 79.
23. For a not wholly convincing attempt to deal with this objection, see Norman Daniels, "Equality of What: Welfare, Resources, or Capabilities?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, I, Supplement (Fall 1990): 273-96.
24. Interestingly, in the second volume of his Treatise on Social Justice, Barry writes: "A number of attempts have been made to determine 'the currency of egalitarian justice'. Each of these is successful in pointing to examples that support the particular currency proposed and do not fit some rival currency. The common error lies in supposing that there is one answer waiting to be found...: justice is not to be defined in terms of the distribution of one fungible quantity" - Justice as Impartiality (New York: Oxford, 1995), p. 145.
25. It is not surprising, however, that they should all seek a single metric. Psychologists have accumulated considerable evidence indicating that human beings are somewhat limited in their ability to weigh a number of factors together while keeping the various trade-offs to the fore of their thinking. See Richard B. Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (New York: Prometheus, 1998), p. 76.
26. For example, many egalitarians would surely agree with the following considered judgment: "It seems right...that a person who suffers from physical disabilities making it difficult and expensive for him to enjoy any of the normal pleasures of life should receive special assistance, and an adequate notion of equal treatment might well require such assistance. There may be controversies about the level of aid justified by such disabilities, and the principle of equal satisfaction may set this level too high, but the general tendency to recognize such claims does not seem wrong" - T. M. Scanlon, "Preference and Urgency," this JOURNAL, LXXII, 19 (November 6, 1975): 655-69, here p. 659. But it is unlikely that egalitarians would consider this general tendency to be right, while regarding equal satisfaction as too demanding, unless they valued equality of resources and/or a high level of average utility alongside equality of (or equal opportunity for) welfare.
27. Compare: "A characteristic dispute about values in society, such as some issue of equality against freedom, is not one most typically enacted by a body of single-minded egalitarians confronting a body of equally single-minded libertarians, but is rather a conflict which one person equipped with a more generous range of human values, could find enacted in himself" - Bernard Williams, "Conflicts of Values," in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge, 1981), pp. 71-82, here p. 73.