Keywords

JEL Classification

All modern political theories assume that persons are in some relevant sense moral equals, entitled to equal concern, respect or treatment, and that a theory of justice must interpret and reflect that moral equality. This commitment is sometimes dubbed the ‘egalitarian plateau’, and it has been a common foundational moral assumption since Locke. Contemporary theories differ in how they interpret the egalitarian plateau. Two kinds of theory of justice are usually counted as egalitarian. Theories of distributive equality concern themselves with the relative standing of individuals in the distribution of benefits and burdens; theories of relational equality concern themselves with the relative standing of individuals when they face each other in the public sphere.

The Metric

One key question concerns the metric of equality: what, precisely, is it that egalitarians should seek to equalize? The literature falls into three main camps. Resourcists argue that people should be equal in the space of resources, meaning that they should have equal opportunity for achieving holdings of alienable goods. How are holdings priced? Ronald Dworkin imagines a hypothetical auction in which persons with equal holdings of some currency bid for available goods until markets clear (Dworkin 2000). The distribution after the auction is equal if no one prefers anyone else’s bundle of goods to her own; the distribution is then said to pass the ‘envy test’. The intuitive idea is that the price of some good is set by the opportunity cost to others of that good. We have to tailor our preferences to our resources; equality is achieved when all face the same budget constraint, not when all achieve equal satisfaction.

Equality of resources has difficulty with the intuition that those with less socially valued talent, and in particular those with serious impairments, should receive compensation. Two strategies are available. One is to adopt a view that talent is socially constructed, so that much of the disadvantage faced by the less talented and the impaired is a consequence not of their lack of talent but of the fact that social institutions are maladapted to their natural endowments (Pogge 2003). This view allows resourcists to call for the reform of social institutions in the name of equality, without demanding compensation for impairments. The problem with this strategy is that some mental and physical impairments intrinsically cause disadvantage; there is no feasible set of social arrangements that would not make it more difficult for people with the impairments to derive satisfaction from resources. So an alternative strategy is to make the cut between persons and resources in a different place, regarding talents as resources and disabilities as resource-deficits. Dworkin’s own version of this strategy proposes compensating the less talented with additional income, the amount calculated by looking at the insurance that talented individuals would have bought against a lack of talents if they had no knowledge of their probability of having the talents.

An alternative metric is welfare; egalitarians of welfare would seek to equalize levels of welfare (understood sometimes as idealized preference satisfaction, sometimes in terms of internal states such as happiness). This view handles talent-inequality in a straightforward manner; the less talented and the disabled should be compensated up to the level where they enjoy as much welfare as anyone else. But it faces the problem that there is no reason for people to moderate their preferences; since welfare is a direct target, those with expensive tastes receive more resources than those with inexpensive tastes, which is widely regarded as intuitively unfair. An alternative view – equality of opportunity for welfare – deals with this problem by seeking equality of welfare except when inequalities are the result of voluntary well-informed choices rather than bad luck or circumstances outside the agent’s control (Arneson 1989). Again, the less talented are straightforwardly compensated for the way in which they find it harder than others to derive satisfaction, but those who cultivate expensive tastes are not. However, those with non-cultivated expensive preferences are also compensated, even if they could easily be overcome; this view does not see lack of talent, and disability in particular, as morally more urgent than expensive preferences. (See Roemer 1986, for an argument that equality of resources implies equality of welfare.)

All of the views deploying an ‘opportunity’ metric, including Dworkin’s resourcist view, presume the desirability of holding people accountable for their voluntary choices, but compensating them for deficits that are beyond their control. Views of this kind are sometimes referred to as varieties of ‘luck egalitarianism’. Inequalities resulting from voluntary choice are acceptable because they reflect a deeper sense in which we are equal as moral agents; choice legitimizes inequality, brute luck does not. (For an elegant attempt both to conceptualize and operationalize equality of opportunity tout court, see Roemer 1998.)

The main rival account – namely, the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum – focuses on the preconditions of agency (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000). Equality of capabilities demands that people be equal in the space of the functionings or livings that they are substantively able to achieve. Walking is a functioning, so are eating, reading, mountain climbing, and chatting. ‘The concept of functionings… reflects the various things a person may value doing or being – varying from the basic (being adequately nourished) to the very complex (being able to take part in the life of the community)’ (Sen 1999, p. 75). But when we make interpersonal comparisons of well-being we should find a measure that incorporates references to functionings but also reflects the intuition that what matters is not merely achieving the functioning but being free to achieve it. So we should look at ‘the freedom to achieve actual livings that one can have a reason to value’ (Sen 1999, p. 73) or, to put it another way, ‘substantive freedoms – the capabilities – to choose a life one has reason to value’. The idea is that people should be equal in this space.

The capabilities approach avoids the problems of the standard welfarist approaches by focusing on choice (thus treating inequalities arising from voluntary choices differently from those arising from circumstances). It avoids the difficulty resourcist accounts have with unequal talent by focusing on functionings; talent deficits are compensated for by looking not at what others would pay to avoid them but at the valuable activities the deficits deprive people of access to. Some theorists place the capabilities account in the welfarist camp (Williams 2002) but it is not implausible to think of it as a variant of resourcism, distinguished by its approach to the valuation of talents.

A major recent development in the debates about egalitarianism has involved criticisms of luck egalitarianism. Each of the luck egalitarian principles, taken alone, imposes heavy costs on those who endure misfortunes for which they can be held responsible, even if those costs place the agent below the threshold for full participation in social affairs. An alternative has developed which is best described as ‘relational egalitarianism’. Relational egalitarianism is not directly concerned with equality in terms of the distribution of any particular currency, but endorses the idea that individuals should have equal standing in the public sphere. This vague idea has several instantiations. Elizabeth Anderson (1999, p. 304) talks of seeking ‘a social order in which persons stand in relations of equality’; Nancy Fraser (1998, p. 30) says that ‘Justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers’. Both fill out their theories with more details. According to Fraser (1998, p. 24), ‘It is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction, simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of interpretation and evaluation in whose construction they have not equally participated and that disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them’. A third variant of relational egalitarianism spells it out specifically in terms of political equality, the idea being that it is particularly important that people enjoy equal availability of or opportunity for political power or influence (Christiano 1995). This variant is typically less hostile than other variants to luck egalitarianism.

Each of the views reviewed in this section allows inequality along some dimensions. Relational egalitarianisms allow such inequalities of income, wealth, welfare or capabilities as are compatible with equal political influence, or interaction as peers, or ‘equal opportunity for participation as a peer’. These permitted inequalities may be great or very small, and how great or small may vary by social context. Principles demanding equality of opportunity are consistent with great inequalities in outcome, and consistent also with some being very badly off in absolute terms. While equality of opportunity conceptions place no limit on how badly off someone may be as a result of her own imprudent choices, equality of social standing demands that no one fall below the threshold needed for equal participation, even if she makes numerous imprudent choices.

The Distributive Rules

Do egalitarians even care about equality? Principles demanding equality of X seem vulnerable to an obvious objection. In some dynamic situations it is possible to produce more of X by distributing X unequally, and to ensure that even those with least have more than under an equal distribution. For example, we can sometimes produce more wealth by judiciously attaching higher income to more productive positions in the economy, and to longer work hours; the higher income acts both as a signal and as an incentive to produce more. That greater production can be turned to the benefit of those with least. But, the objection goes, it would be perverse to prefer an equal situation in which everyone has less to one in which everyone has more, even if we have to sacrifice equality for the sake of that additional product.

This is known as the ‘levelling down’ objection to equality. Egalitarians make two distinct responses. The first is to concede the argument, abandoning ‘equality’ and replacing it with ‘giving priority to the interests of the least advantaged’. John Rawls’s difference principle, which states that ‘social and economic inequalities are to be arranged to the maximum benefit of the least advantaged’, embodies one variant of this response, a variant that gives absolute priority to the prospects of the least advantaged (Rawls 1971, 2001). A weaker variant in this family of views, usually known as ‘prioritarianism’, simply says that it is more urgent to provide benefits to those with less advantage than to those with more (Parfit 2000).

An alternative response is to assert value pluralism. This response acknowledges that priority to the least advantaged is an important value and perhaps more important than equality, so that when it comes to policy or action prioritarian principles should govern. But it says that equality nevertheless matters some; there is one way in which an unequal distribution is worse than an equal distribution, even if, all things considered, it is better; the way in which it is worse is that it is unequal and for that reason unfair (Temkin 2002). This response is bolstered by the observation that there is nothing eccentric about endorsing a principle that values distributions that benefit nobody; the retributive principle of proportionality between punishment and crime, for example, calls for harming the criminal even when there is no gain to anyone else in harming him.

Some reject principles of equality and priority on the grounds that all that matters for the purposes of justice is that all have enough. Sufficientarian theories are not usually counted as within the egalitarian family, because they eschew any fundamental concern with relativities. Relativities may matter in determining what is enough for people to live a decent life in any given social environment, but ultimately what matters is not where someone ranks in the distribution of resources (or anything else) but whether she has enough. However, as suggested above, sufficientarian principles also have a place in some variants of egalitarianism. While relational egalitarianism places no principled limits on the level of material or welfare inequality, and gives no general priority to the least advantaged, it does set a floor – all must have sufficient resources to be full participants in social interaction. Equality of political influence demands that all have sufficient resources, personal and financial, to play an equal role in political life, but, as long as it is possible to insulate politics from residual inequalities of wealth, it is not concerned with equalizing or prioritizing benefit to the least advantaged.

Many theories of justice that do not fit the above characterizations of egalitarianism nevertheless incorporate some elements of egalitarian thinking. John Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, prioritizes the principle that certain basic liberties (not including strong property rights) be equally distributed, then demands that within that constraint fair equality of opportunity should be implemented, and then that social and economic inequalities be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged in so far as that is possible without jeopardizing the equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity principle (Rawls 1971, 2001). Michael Walzer’s (1983) theory of ‘complex equality’ takes seriously widely shared intuitions that different goods are subject to different distributive rules. For example, while income should be distributed according to productive contribution, as will tend to result from market interactions, the inequalities this norm generates should be prevented from translating into unequal access to certain key goods like health care and educational opportunities, the distribution of which should be governed by need and the requirements of equal opportunity respectively. It is unclear in what sense Walzer’s ‘complex equality’ is genuinely an egalitarian position, since it is in principle consistent with unequal and coinciding distributions of all goods that are not themselves governed by egalitarian norms.

Priority and equality coincide in practice for one class of goods: positional goods. These have the property that the contribution an individual’s share of the good makes to her absolute position is determined by how much of the good she has relative to others. The credentialing aspect of education is a paradigm case; how useful a degree is in landing a job (as opposed to the learning one achieved in the process of getting the degree) depends entirely on the credentials of one’s competitors for that job. (Other cases are detailed in Hirsch 1976.) Those who give priority to the worst-off will countenance inequalities in positional goods only in so far as they are required by or result in the least advantaged benefiting overall (Brighouse and Swift 2006).

The Scope of Equality

Whatever the right distribuendum, and whatever the appropriate distributive principle, it is a further question who should be equal to whom. Some limit the application of their egalitarianism to members of the same society or system of cooperation, or to those subject to the same coercive structure (Nagel 2005), or hold that it is states that owe their citizens a particular duty to treat them with equal concern and respect (Dworkin 2000). Others believe that egalitarian principles should apply to all human beings, irrespective of the relations that obtain between them. If we restrict the application of egalitarian principles to schemes of cooperation, that does not exclude the possibility of a global egalitarianism, since most now accept that in the modern world social cooperation extends well beyond national boundaries (Julius 2006). But consider this version of Derek Parfit’s divided world case. All the people in A are half as well off as all the people in B, but A and B have no knowledge of or contact with each other (Parfit 2000). Is there anything regrettable from the perspective of injustice about this inequality? If so, then the scope of justice is cosmic, not simply social. In the stated version of the divided world case this difference is motivationally inert, since the people in B do not have the relevant knowledge. But, if they did, cosmic egalitarianism would give them a reason to try to find a way to contact and interact with the people on A, while intra-societal egalitarianism would provide them with no such reason.

The divided world case brings out another difference in orientation. Where members of A and B have no interaction, or even knowledge of each other, equality can be valued only intrinsically rather than because of its effects on members of A or Often, however, inequality with respect to some goods is devalued, and equality valued, instrumentally, because of its absolute effects on those subject to the unequal distribution – usually its effects on the relatively disadvantaged. Thus, for example, economic inequalities are thought to undermine the fairness of legal or political processes, or occupational or other status hierarchies are claimed to harm the health of those on the lower rungs. Those who value equality intrinsically would hold that there is a reason to level down for the sake of equality or fairness, whereas instrumental egalitarians might seek the more equal distribution of some goods, not for egalitarian reasons stricto sensu, but to eliminate the bad effects of certain kinds of inequality.

The Subject of Justice

A further dividing line between egalitarians concerns the subject of justice. Rawls stipulates that the subject is the ‘basic structure of society’, which consists of some of the central, interaction-shaping institutions of a society: for example, the constitution, the legally recognized forms of property, the structure of the economy, the design of the legislature, and the judiciary. The idea is that these institutions govern the division of the advantages that accrue from social cooperation, and they assign the basic rights and responsibilities to citizens. So a society is just when those institutions are arranged according to the correct principles.

Rawls officially exempts individual actions and motives from evaluation from the perspective of egalitarian justice, as long as individuals obey the rules set by a just basic structure. But this has the consequence that a society in which talented individuals take advantage of the prerogatives not to serve the least advantaged that are built into the principles that he thinks justice requires of coercive institutions is no less just than one in which they are much more strongly motivated by the desire to benefit the least advantaged through their choices regarding work. A society with an egalitarian governing ethos, on this view, is no more just than one without, even when the least advantaged are much better off. But the motivations and actions of talented individuals affect the prospects and status of others in ways that have ‘profound and pervasive influence on persons’ (Rawls 2001, p. 55), which is Rawls’s central reason for focusing on the basic structure. So some egalitarians regard justice as commenting not only on the broad coercive outline of society, but also on less officially coercive institutions such as a society’s ethos (Cohen 1997). For a powerful defence of an account intermediate between Cohen’s and Rawls’s, see Julius 2003).

Other Values

Most egalitarian theorists are value pluralists; they believe that equality (or priority) of their preferred metric matters, but so do other principles. Observing that equality or priority is sometimes in conflict with liberty or privacy or efficiency does not require us to reject one of the conflicting values. It requires us, instead, to evaluate reasons for considering one of the values more morally important than the others, and, in the light of that evaluation, to establish which should give way in different conflicts. Unless the relationship between values is one of lexical priority (in which case the prior value always trumps subordinate values, which can be pursued only when there is no conflict), different trade-offs between values will be mandated in different conflicts. But lexical priority is unlikely to hold between genuine values. If a value matters at all, it is hard to believe it could never be the case that a very large amount of it was greater than a very small amount of a conflicting value however great that conflicting value is.

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