## 1. Preliminary Distinctions


 

Egalitarianism is a contested concept in social and political
thought. One might care about human equality in many ways, for many
reasons. As currently used, the label "egalitarian" does not
necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is
desirable that people's condition be made the same in any respect or
that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An
egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be
treated as equals--as possessing equal fundamental worth and
dignity and as equally morally considerable. In this sense, a sample
non-egalitarian would be one who believes that people born into a
higher social caste, or a favored race or ethnicity, or with an
above-average stock of traits deemed desirable, ought somehow to count
for more than others in calculations that determine what morally ought
to be done. (On the thought that the core egalitarian ideal is
treating people as equals, see Dworkin 2000.) Further norms of
equality of condition or treatment might be viewed as free-standing or
derived from the claim of equality of status. Controversy also swirls
around attempts to specify the class of beings to whom egalitarian
norms apply. Some might count all and only human beings as entitled to
equality of status. Some would hold that all and only persons have
equal moral status, with the criteria of personhood excluding some
humans from qualifying (e.g., the unborn fetus or severely demented
adult human) and including some nonhumans (e.g., intelligent beings
inhabiting regions of outer space beyond Earth). Some would hold that
sentient beings such as nonhuman primates that do not satisfy criteria
of personhood are entitled to equal moral status along with
persons. Some advance other views.




Egalitarianism can be instrumental or non-instrumental. Given a
specification of some aspect of people's condition or mode of treating
them that should be equal, one might hold that the state of affairs in
which the stated equality obtains is morally valuable either as an end
or as a means. The instrumental egalitarian values equality as a means
to some independently specifiable goal; the non-instrumental
egalitarian values equality for its own sake--as an end, or as
partly constitutive of some end. For example, someone who believes that
the maintenance of equality across a group of people fosters relations
of solidarity and community among them, and is desirable for that
reason, qualifies as an instrumental egalitarian. Someone who believes
that equality of some sort is a component of justice, and morally
required as such, would be a non-instrumental egalitarian.




Equality of any sort might be valued conditionally or
unconditionally. One values equality in the former way if equality is
deemed valuable only if some further condition is in place. One might
hold that equality in the distribution of resources among a group of
persons is valuable, but only on the condition that the individuals are
equally deserving.




Equality might be deemed to be desirable or undesirable. A separate
and distinct range of questions concerns whether or not people ought to
act to bring about equality or are obligated to bring about equality
(see Nagel 1991). The discussion to come often merges these questions,
the assumption being that if equality is valuable, that is at least one
good reason for thinking one should bring it about.




For those who regard equality as a requirement of justice, the
question arises, whether this is a timeless unchanging or instead a
variable requirement. Michael Walzer is one who appears to take the
latter view. According to Walzer, a society is just if and only if its
practices and institutions are in accord with the shared values and
cultural understandings of its people. Democratic egalitarianism
becomes a requirement of justice in modern societies, because this
egalitarianism is an underlying important element of people's
shared values and cultural understandings (Walzer 1983). But this
appearance may be misleading. Walzer may hold that everyone at all
times and places has an equal moral entitlement to be treated according
to the shared norms and cultural understandings of one's people
or group. Walzer may also hold that everyone at all times and places
has equal rights against gratuitous assault by people just seeking fun,
whatever the local people's shared beliefs on this matter happen
to be. At any rate, we can identify clear exemplars of theorists who
regard equality of a certain sort as a timeless unchanging moral
requirement. John Locke holds that everyone at all times and places has
equal natural moral rights that all of us ought always to respect
(Locke 1690). The contemporary moral philosopher Thomas Scanlon holds
that all people everywhere equally have the moral right to be treated
according to the outcome of a procedure: what constitutes morally right
and wrong action is set by the principles that no one could reasonably
reject (Scanlon 1998). It is a further question, to what extent this
procedure issues in different non-rejectable principles in different
times and places featuring different circumstances.




Egalitarianism can be formulated with a variety of roles in mind.
For example, an egalitarian norm might be proposed as a fundamental
moral principle. As such, it would be intended as a statement of the
ultimate norm (or as a member of the set of ultimate norms) to which
individual conduct and institutional arrangements ought to conform. An
ultimate norm might or might not be suitable for the role of guiding
individual decision making or of serving as an explicitly recognized
principle regulating institutions and public policy formation in a
particular society. If individual agents and public officials are
liable through limited cognitive ability, limited knowledge, or limited
allegiance to morality to misapply ultimate principles, it might well
be the case that these principles could be implemented to a greater
degree if they were not employed directly as decision-making guides for
individual and public policy choice. (On this issue, see Hare 1981).
Following this train of thought, one might favor as guidelines for
individual and public choice simple, easily understood, readily
implementable rules that are to serve as proxies for the moral
principles that are the ultimate norms. Or one might instead hold that
the ultimate moral principles that fix what is right and wrong are well
suited to be practical decision making guides. The point is merely that
we should distinguish these distinct roles that moral norms might play
and avoid criticizing a norm in one role by standards appropriate only
if the norm is understood to be playing a different role.




Egalitarianism might be upheld as a moral requirement, a component
of what we fundamentally owe one another, or as morally optional, a
desirable ideal that we might permissibly decline to pursue. When
affirmed as morally required, egalitarianism typically figures in a
theory of justice. For the most part the discussion in this entry
concentrates on egalitarianism as a morally required component of
justice, but in considering arguments against a version of
egalitarianism, it is worthwhile keeping in mind the possibility that
the norm in question is morally desirable but not morally
mandatory.




Given some specification of the kind of equality that is under
consideration, it is clear what it means to say of a number of people
that they are equal in the stated respect. If we are concerned with
equal utility, then a group has equal utility when all have exactly the
same. If we are concerned with equality of dollar holdings, then people
are equal when all hold exactly the same number of dollars. But saying
this does not yet suggest a way of determining, in general, whether
inequality is greater in one situation than in another, when different
people hold different amounts of the good that we are concerned to
equalize in the two situations. Inequality can be measured in different
ways, and no measure seems to be strongly supported by common sense
intuition about the meaning of equality. (See Sen 1997 and Temkin
1993). This entry usually abstracts from this issue by supposing that
we can unequivocally determine, for any ideal of equality, how to
measure degrees of inequality across the board.


## 2. Equality of Opportunity




In a hierarchical caste society, positions of advantage are assigned
to people on a basis of birth lineage. If one is a legitimate offspring
of parents who are aristocrats, one will also enjoy the privileges of
aristocratic rank. A historically important form of equality associated
with the rise of competitive market economies is the ideal of equality
of opportunity. This ideal is also known as formal equality of
opportunity or careers open to talents.




Equality of opportunity requires that jobs in economic firms and
options to borrow money for investment purposes such as starting a
business should be open to all applicants, that applications be
assessed by relevant criteria of merit, and that the top-ranked
applicant should be offered the job or option to borrow. The relevant
criteria of merit are to be set so that those who score highest are
those whose selection would best further the morally innocent purposes
of the enterprise. In competitive market settings, the presumption
typically is that the criteria should be related to profitability. The
best applicant for a job or a loan would then be the individual to whom
offering the good in question produces the greatest increase in the
firm's expected profit. (If the firm's owners are risk averse or risk
seeking, the pertinent criterion would be expected profit weighted by
their risk preferences.) A further aspect of the ideal of equality of
opportunity requires that economic firms offering goods and services
for sale should sell to all willing customers, treating all potential
customers evenhandedly as potential sources of profit. Finally,
equality of opportunity requires that purchasers of goods and services
should be responsive only to the price and quality of the goods offered
to them for purchase (and not, for example, to the ethnicity or sex or
sexual orientation of the maker or seller of the good). This
last-mentioned requirement of equality of opportunity might not be
included within formulations of the norm that are intended to be
enacted as law and enforced by criminal or civil law procedures. But to
implement equality of opportunity, an orientation of the hearts and
minds of members of society is needed, not merely legal enactments.
Equality of opportunity would be subverted if the laws effectively
prohibited economic firms from basing decision making on factors other
than expected profitability but consumers would not purchase products
that embodied the skilled labor of women and blacks, so that their
market opportunities are stunted. Moreover, the law might indeed
require firms to hire the best qualified applicant, meaning the one
best able to perform the role being filled, even if hiring the best
qualified in this sense would not be profit-maximizing, due to
recalcitrant consumer prejudice.




Two natural extensions of the equality of opportunity ideal deserve
mention. One is the requirement that student slots in colleges and
universities and competitive private schools should be open to all
applicants with applicants ranked by their ability to learn and other
academic virtues and selected on these academic grounds (provided they
can pay the tuition and fees). A second extension requires that public
sector jobs--other than those reserved for elected officials along
with their staffs--should be open to all applicants with selection
of applicants being made on the basis of the merits of the
applications.




The general idea of equality of opportunity is that the political
economy of a society distributes positions that confer special
advantages and these should be open to all applicants with applicants
selected by merit. The merits of the applications for a position should
track the degree to which the applicant's hiring or selection for
interaction would boost the fulfillment of the morally innocent
purposes of the association as weighted by the association's bosses.
The more general formulation of the notion of merit allows that an
economic firm might legitimately base its decisions on nonmarket values
without engaging in wrongful discrimination that violates equality of
opportunity rightly construed. For example, a maker of fancy surfboards
might sell them by preference to more skilled surfers, and a
mountaineering guide might select clients partly on the basis of their
physical fitness and their perceived enthusiasm for wilderness
adventure. Also, members of the learned professions such as medicine
and law might be bound by legal and cultural norms that require them to
tailor their services to the aims of the profession rather than just to
profitability (e.g., norms that require a medical doctor to refuse to
provide a medical treatment to a potential client who is willing and
able to pay but would not benefit from the treatment).




The ideal of equality of opportunity is the ideal of a political
economy in which each person's prospects as producer depend only on his
initial stock of resources plus his ability and willingness to provide
goods and services that others value plus luck as market fluctuations
are encountered. Moreover, in the role of consumer, each individual
(modulo his location) faces the same array of goods and services on
sale to anyone who can pay the purchase price (and can satisfy the
relevant nonmarket conditions of the seller or maker). Such
characteristics of persons as their supposed race, skin color,
ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and religion play no role in
determining one's life prospects in this public sphere except insofar
as these traits might happen to affect one's abilities and willingness
to offer what others are willing to exchange for money.




In theory, equality of opportunity could be fully satisfied in a
society in which wealth passed along by inheritance from generation to
generation fundamentally determines everyone's competitive prospects.
In this society jobs and positions and so on would be open to all
applicants, but the only applicants who have the skills that qualify
them for desirable posts are the children of the wealthy. They alone
have access to the training and acculturation that confer skills.




A society that establishes and maintains a state educational system
sustained by public funds already goes some way beyond equality of
opportunity and toward provision to all of its members of some
opportunity to develop skills that will enable them to succeed in
competitions for desirable positions regulated by equality of
opportunity. The same can be said of a society that enforces minimal
standards of child rearing to which parents must conform. One can
imagine a society doing more in this same spirit.




A society might institute policies that secure at least a minimally
acceptable threshold of schooling and skill formation for all its
members. An alternative aim is to eliminate entirely the advantages
that family wealth and social status confer on individuals in
competitions regulated by formal equality of opportunity. The
achievement of this aim would render a society classless, in a certain
sense. John Rawls (1999, 63; 2001) has formulated this ideal as a
principle of fair equality of opportunity (FEO). This principle holds
that any individuals in society with the same native talent and
ambition should have the same prospects of success in competition for
positions that confer special benefits and advantages. FEO goes beyond
equality of opportunity by requiring that all efforts by parents to
give their children a comparative advantage in competitions for
desirable positions and posts are somehow entirely offset. In a society
regulated by FEO, socialization is adjusted so that among people
equally willing to work to become qualified for a particular career and
equally endowed by genetic inheritance with latent ability needed for
that career, all have the same chances of success in that career.




FEO also opposes racial and sexual and similar prejudices that work
to deprive disfavored individuals from enjoying opportunities to become
qualified so that they would benefit from formal equality of
opportunity. In some settings, affirmative action policies that aim to
help members of historically disadvantaged groups such as
African-Americans in the U.S. gain desirable employment opportunities
in proportion to their numbers in the population can be regarded as
policies intended to move society in the direction of satisfying
FEO.




Formal equality of opportunity, in so far as it imposes requirements
on firms, universities and colleges, and government as employer, is the
law of the land in many modern democracies, and also entrenched in the
common-sense morality most people embrace. By contrast, fair equality
of opportunity is a controversial principle, which no existing nation
seriously strives to achieve or comes close to achieving.




FEO could not be fully achieved without conflict with other values.
Consider that parents naturally want to help their children develop the
talents needed for competitive success. Some parents control a lot of
resources useful for this purpose; some parents have few such
resources. The ordinary interaction of parents with their children is
then an obstacle to the achievement of fair equality of opportunity. If
society were fully to achieve FEO, then either parental freedom to help
their children in ways that give them a competitive edge would have to
be curtailed or such help would have to be exactly offset by
compensating infusion of social resources toward the education and
socialization of children whose parents are less effective. (See
Fishkin 1983 and Brighouse and Swift 2009).


## 3. Equality of Condition: Equality of What?




A society that satisfied the ideal of formal equality of opportunity
might provide grim conditions of life for those who are unsuccessful in
competitions for positions of advantage. Even a perfect meritocracy
that satisfies the stringent Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity
principle might impose the same grim conditions of life on those who
lack marketable merit and skill. The class of competitive losers might
include some who have adequate native talents but fail to make good use
of them, but some of the losers will be those with the bad luck to be
born without much by way of native talent. The question then arises
whether any further substantive ideals of equality, beyond meritocratic
ideals, should be affirmed. (See Schar 1967.)




One family of substantive equality ideals, equality of democratic
citizenship and civil liberties, is perhaps no more controversial than
formal equality of opportunity. Democratic equality embraces the norm
that law-makers and top public officials should be selected in
democratic elections. All mentally competent adult citizens should be
eligible to vote and run for office in free elections that operate
against a backdrop of freedom of speech and association, and in which
all votes count equally and majority rule prevails. All citizens should
have the same wide rights to freedom of speech, assembly, association,
and religious practice. Criminal justice rules should be applied
evenhandedly to all and should embody the procedural values of the rule
of law.




A controversial extension of democratic citizenship resembles
Rawlsian equality of fair opportunity applied to the political arena.
Call this ideal "equal participation." Equal participation requires
that any individuals in society with the same ambition to influence the
political process and the same talents of political persuasion and
organization should have equal prospects of influence on the democratic
political process. (See Rawls 2005, Lecture VIII, Christiano 1996 and
2008, Walzer 1983, for a criticism, Estlund, 1999, and for a related
view, J. Cohen 1989a.)




The remainder of this section surveys several proposals as to what
(beyond democratic citizenship and civil liberties) should be
distributed equally among the members of society and how equality and
inequality in the distribution of these goods should be measured. The
latter issue can be posed in this way: When various amounts of
heterogeneous goods are held by different individuals, how can one
measure individuals' overall holdings of goods so that it can be
determined when people's overall holdings are effectively equal?


### 3.1 Lockean Rights




The Lockean rights approach is so named because an early prominent
exponent of the doctrine was John Locke (Locke 1690). It might just as
well be viewed as a rejection of egalitarianism rather than as a
version of it. Contemporary Lockeans are also known as libertarians
(see Nozick 1974).




The Lockean view is that every person has equal basic moral
rights--natural rights. Natural rights are rights that one has
independently of institutional arrangements, people's subjective
opinions, and cultural understandings. A person's natural rights give
her a set of claims against all other persons that each person
absolutely must respect. Our understanding of a particular rights claim
or type or rights claim increases if we can determine whether or not it
is forfeitable, waivable by the bearer, and transferable.




The traditional content of Lockean rights is roughly as follows:
Each person has the right to do whatever she chooses with whatever she
legitimately owns so long as she does not violate the rights of others
not to be harmed in certain ways--by force, fraud, coercion,
theft, or infliction of damage on person or property. Each person has
the right not to be harmed by others in the mentioned ways, unless she
voluntarily waives any of her rights or voluntarily transfers them to
another or forfeits them by misconduct. Also, each adult person is the
full rightful owner of herself and each child person has the right to
be nurtured to adult status by those responsible for her creation. It
is generally supposed in the Lockean tradition that starting from the
premise of self-ownership, under actual conditions on earth one can
validly derive strong rights of private appropriation and ownership of
land and moveable parts of the earth (Nozick, 1974).




Property ownership of a thing comprises a bundle of rights, the
central ones being the right to exclude others from the use of the
thing and to control its use oneself. If I own my body, I can exclude
others from using it, and I have the right to decide its movements and
control what may be done to it. The Lockean supposes that in a world in
which self-owning persons confront unowned material resources, moveable
and immoveable parts of the Earth, all persons initially have an equal
right to use the resources, taking turns if there is crowding. The
Lockean supposes this free use regime is provisional. Any individual is
permitted to claim any part of the Earth as her private property
provided her doing so leaves "enough and as good" for
others. Nozick interprets this Lockean Proviso as follows: One's
appropriation and continued holding of a part of the Earth as
one's private property is morally permissible provided that all
persons affected by this claim of ownership are rendered no worse off
by it than they would have been if instead the thing had remained under
free use (Nozick 1974, chapter 7; compare Simmons 1992, chapter 5). (A
different account will need to be given for intellectual property,
property rights in ideas.)




Lockean rights do not single out a state of affairs, that in which
everyone's rights are fully respected, and hold that all people are
obligated to act in whatever ways are needed to bring about this state
of affairs. Each person's right generates a duty to respect that right
on the part of every other person. Rights are constraints on what each
individual may do, and do not set goals that all are together obligated
to fulfill (Nozick 1974, chapter 3).




A more egalitarian variant of Lockean rights doctrine combines the
right of self-ownership with skepticism about the Lockean account of
the moral basis of private ownership rights. Instead the left-wing
Lockean asserts that each person is the full rightful owner of herself
and each adult person has a right to a per capita share of ownership of
the unimproved land and resources of the Earth. In short, this version
of Lockeanism combines robust self-ownership with an egalitarian
account of world ownership. There are several variants to this
doctrine. Critics explore whether or not the doctrine is normatively
stable: Do any plausible grounds there might be for denying Lockean
private ownership of the world also generate grounds for denying
individual self-ownership? Do any grounds there might be for insisting
on individual self-ownership also generate reasons to insist on Lockean
private ownership of the world? (See Steiner 1994, G. Cohen 1995,
Vallentyne and Steiner 2000a and 2000b, and Van Parijs 1995).




The nature of the dispute between the right-wing and left-wing
Lockeans emerges into view when we consider justice across generations.
Suppose at one time the Earth is unowned and persons alive then
appropriate all valuable land. On the next day, new people are born.
What natural rights to land do they have? The left-libertarian holds
that the doctrine of ownership must provide for fair treatment of each
successive generation, and this requires that each new person has a
right to an equal share of the value of unimproved resources or to some
similar entitlement. The right-libertarian holds that the Lockean
Proviso fully accommodates the legitimate claims of new persons. On
this view, there is no fundamental right to an equal share in any
sense. Luck plays a legitimate role in the operation of a natural
rights regime. Granted, it is bad luck for me if I am born uncharming
and lacking in good lucks and others are not voluntarily willing to
enter into romance or friendship with me, but my distressed condition
does not tend to show that my rights have been violated. And granted,
it is bad luck for me if I come late on the scene and those who came
first happen to be far better off in material wealth prospects than I,
but the fact that there are unequal prospects does not tend to show
that my rights have been violated. Provided the Lockean proviso is
continuously satisfied and the appropriations by others leave me no
worse off than I would have been under continued free use, my being
worse off than others gives me no moral complaint against their
property holdings.


### 3.2 Karl Marx on Equal Rights




The Marxian tradition in political and economic thought urges the
desirability of eliminating some of the inequalities associated with
the institutions of a capitalist market economy. Interpreting Karl
Marx as an egalitarian normative theorist is a tricky undertaking,
however, in view of the fact that he tends to eschew explicit
normative theorizing on moral principles and to regard assertions of
moral principles as so much ideological dust thrust in the eyes of the
workers by defenders of capitalism. Marx does, of course, have an
elaborate empirical theory of the evolution of moral principles
corresponding to changes in the economic mode of production.




In "The Critique of the Gotha Program," Marx asserts that in the first
phase of communist society the economy will distribute goods according
to the norm, to each according to his labor contribution. This norm
can be regarded as defining an equal right, but like any such right,
it is defective. One defect is that some individuals are naturally
more able than others, and so the amount of one's labor contribution
will vary depending on factors that vary by luck beyond one's power to
control. For this and other reasons Marx asserts it will be desirable
to discard this norm when a higher phase of communist society is
attained. Then society can move beyond the sphere of bourgeois right
altogether and operate according to the norm, from each according to
his ability, to each according to his needs. Despite Marx's
disclaimer, he seems to be proposing a principle of equal right: Each
has the right to receive economic goods that satisfy her needs to the
same extent provided she contributes to the economy according to her
ability. But Marx would resist the description of this norm as a
principle of justice or moral rights. One consideration in his mind
may be that moral rights ought to be enforced, but when it is feasible
and desirable to implement higher-phase communist distribution, the
implementation can be carried out successfully without any legal or
informal coercion, and hence should not occur through any process of
social enforcement. Or so Marx thinks. (See Marx 1978, Wood 1981,
Cohen, G., 1988 and 1995.)


### 3.3 Income and Wealth




In modern societies with market economies, an egalitarian is
generally thought to be one who supports equality of income and wealth
(income being a flow, wealth a stock). Respecting this usage, this
entry considers an egalitarian in the broad sense to be someone who
prefers in actual or at least non-exotic circumstances that people
should be more nearly equal in income and wealth and favors policies
that aim to bring about such equality.




Money is a conventional medium of exchange. Given an array of goods
for sale at various prices, with some money one has the option to
purchase any combination of these goods, within the budget constraint
set by the amount of money one has. What money can purchase in a given
society depends on the state of its economy and also on legal and
cultural norms that may limit in various ways what is allowed to be put
up for sale. For example, the laws may forbid the sale of sexual
activity, human organs intended for transplant, the right to become a
parent of a particular child by adoption, narcotic drugs, and so on.
What money can purchase also obviously depends on what one is free to
do with whatever one purchases--one may catch fish with the
fishing rod one purchases only with a license and in accordance with
rules issued by the state agency that regulates fishing.




Leaving these complications in the background, one can appreciate
that having money gives one effective freedom to engage in a wide
variety of activities and experiences. One has the option to purchase
any of many commodities and do with them whatever is legally and
conventionally allowed, up to the limit of one's budget. The ideal of
equality of income and wealth is roughly the ideal that people should
enjoy this effective freedom to the same extent.




This ideal is attractive to some and repulsive to others. One
serious objection is that to bring about and sustain the condition in
which all people have the same amount of money would require continuous
and extensive violation of people's Lockean rights, which as standardly
understood include the right to gain more property than others possess
by gift or trade or hard work. Another, closely related objection is
that a regime of equal money could be maintained only by wrongful
interference with people's liberty, because if money is distributed
equally at one time people will choose to act in ways that over time
will tend to result in unequal distribution of money at later times.
(For the first objection, see Nozick 1974, chapter 7, for the second,
see Walzer 1983.)




Another objection to the ideal of monetary equality is that its
pursuit would inhibit people's engagement in wealth-creating and
wealth-saving activity, and in the not very long run would reduce
society's stock of wealth and make us all worse off in the terms of the
effective freedom that was being equalized. Yet another objection is
that people behave in ways that render them more and less deserving,
and monetary good fortune is among the types of things that people come
to deserve differentially.




The advocate of egalitarianism in the broad sense has some replies.
Unless some substantive argument is given as to why Lockean rights
should be accorded moral deference, the mere fact that equality
conflicts with Lockean rights does not by itself impugn the ideal of
equality. Maybe some purported "rights" should not be regarded as
momentous, and their sacrifice to secure equality might be acceptable
on balance. In the same vein, one might hold that the fact that
continuous restriction of individual liberty is needed to satisfy some
norm does not by itself tell us whether the moral gain from satisfying
the ideal is worth the moral cost of lessened freedom. Some
restrictions of liberty are undeniably worth their cost, and some ideal
of equality might be among the values that warrant some sacrifice of
liberty.




Equality might be upheld as one value among others, and increase in
wealth or in wealth per capita may be included along with equality in a
pluralistic ethics. We may want more effective freedom (of the sort
money combined with goods for sale provides), and we may also want this
freedom equally distributed, and then we would need to find an
acceptable compromise of these values to deal with cases when they
conflict in practice. Much the same might be said about the conflict
between the achievement of equality of money and the distribution of
good fortune according to people's differential desert.




Monetary equality can strike one as a misguided ideal for the
different reason that it does not deal in what is of fundamental
importance. The value of purchasing power, equal or unequal, depends on
the value of what is for sale. Imagine that the economy of a society is
organized so it produces only trivial knick-knacks. Freedom to purchase
trivia is a trivial freedom, and rendering it equal does not
significantly improve matters. (Critics of consumerism and consumer
culture are moved by the idea that in actual modern societies, the
economy, responsive to consumer demand, is responsive to demands for
what is not very worthwhile and ignores many truly important human
goods, that either happen to be not for sale or that by their nature
are not suitable for sale on a market.)




Another concern about monetary equality is that purchasing power
interacts with individuals' personal powers and traits, and real
freedom reflects the interaction, which an emphasis on purchasing power
alone conceals. Consider two persons, one of whom is blind, legless,
and armless, while the other has good eyesight and full use of her
limbs. Given equal money, the first must spend his money on devices and
services to cope with his handicaps, while the second may purchase far
more of what she likes. Here equality of purchasing power seems to
leave the two very unequal in real freedom to live their lives as they
choose. But the case of handicaps is just an extreme instance of what
is always present, namely each individual has a set of traits and
natural powers bestowed by genetic inheritance and early socialization,
and these differ greatly across persons and greatly affect people's
access to valuable ways to live.


### 3.4 Capabilities




One response to the problematic features of the monetary equality
ideal is to shift to the notion of real freedom as that which an
egalitarian morality should be concerned to equalize. Real or effective
freedom contrasts with formal freedom. You are formally free to go to
Canada just in case no law or convention backed by penalties prevents
you from going and no one would coercively interfere if you attempted
to travel there. In contrast, you are really or effectively free to go
to Canada just in case this is an option that you may choose--if
you choose to go and seriously try to go, you will get there, and if
you do not choose to go and make a serious attempt to go, you do not
get there. (One might lack formal freedom to do something yet be really
free to do it, if one was able to evade or overcome the legal and
extralegal obstacles to doing that thing.)




Another response to the problematic features of the monetary
equality ideal aims to cope with the thought that freedom of purchasing
power may not be of great importance. The response is to characterize
what we should be equalizing in terms that directly express what is
reasonably regarded as truly important.




Both responses are present in a proposal made by Amartya Sen in
several publications beginning in 1980 (see Sen 1980 and 1992 and the
references cited in Sen 1992). Sen suggests that in so far as we should
value equality of condition, what we should value is equal real
freedom, and more specifically basic functioning capability equality.
People may function--do or be something--in any of a huge
number of ways. Consider all of the different ways that one might
function variously. Many of these are trivial or of little importance;
set these to the side. Consider then basic functionings, functionings
that are essential or important for human flourishing or valuable
agency. Consider all of the packages of functionings that an individual
at a time is really free to choose all at once; these are one's
capabilities at a time. We may also consider an individual's basic
capabilities over the life course. The proposal is that society should
sustain basic capability equality. (Care must be taken in identifying
an individual's capability sets, since what others choose may affect
the freedom one has. One may have the option of choosing the
functioning of attending college, but only if not too many persons in
one's high school cohort make the same choice.)




We might construe "basic capability" as picking out one of the
capabilities needed for a minimally decent life. For example, being
able to obtain enjoyment in life and gain scientific knowledge that
meet threshold levels deemed "good enough" suffice to give one basic
enjoyment and basic knowledge capabilities. Above that threshold level
for each capability, differences in the level of capability that people
can attain do not signify--they do not change the fact that
everyone does or does not enjoy equal basic capabilities. To get equal
basic capability for everyone would be to get each person at or above
the threshold level for every one of the capabilities that are
specified to be necessary for a minimally decent or good enough life.
So understood, the basic capability proposal falls in the family of
sufficientarian ideals; on which, see the section on "Sufficiency"
below.




The capability approach to equality can be developed in different
ways depending on how basic capabilities are identified.




Some theorists have explored the capability approach by tying it to
an objective account of human well-being or flourishing. The aim is to
identify all of the functionings needed for human flourishing. For each
of these functionings, the ideal is that each person should be
sustained in the capability to engage in every one of these
functionings at a satisfactory or good enough level. (See Nussbaum
1990, 1992, and 1999.)




Another use of the capability approach ties it to the idea of what
is needed for each person to function as a full participating member of
modern democratic society. Each person is to be sustained throughout
her life, so far as this is feasible, in the capabilities to function
at a satisfactory level in all of the ways necessary for full
membership and participation in democratic society. (See Anderson 1999
and Walzer 1983.)




It should be noted that the capability approach as described so far
might seem to involve the assumption that anything whatever that
reduces or expands an individual's real freedom to function in ways
that are valuable should trigger a response on the part of a society or
agency that aims to establish and sustain capability equality. This
appearance is misleading in at least two different ways. For one thing,
Sen clearly wants to allow that one's capabilities can increase
by virtue of gaining opportunities to function even though one does not
get real freedom to accept or decline the opportunities. Consider the
capability to be free of malaria, which opens many malaria-free life
options, when the capability is obtained by public health measures
beyond the power of the individual agent to control. Also, if what one
embraces is basic capability equality for all, then by implication one
is countenancing that there may be non-basic capabilities, providing
which to all is not required. But even if we amend our conception of
*capabilities* to accommodate these points, one might still deny
that every reduction or threat to an individual's (basic)
capabilities poses a social justice issue while otherwise working
within the capability framework.




One might distinguish aspects of a person's situation that are
socially caused from those that are naturally caused. This distinction
is evidently rough and needs refinement, but one has some sense of what
is intended. That I am unable to run fast or sing a tune on key may be
largely due to my genetic endowment, which in this context we may take
to be naturally rather than socially caused. In contrast, the facts
that given the talents of others and their choices to use them in
market interaction, my running ability is nonmarketable but my singing
ability enables me to have a career as a professional singer are deemed
socially caused. That I have a certain physical appearance is natural
(any of a wide variety of childrearing regimens would have produced
pretty much this same physical appearance) but that my appearance
renders me ineligible for marriage or romantic liaisons is a social
fact (social arrangements bring this about and different social
arrangements might undo it). Even if my natural physical appearance
repels any marital or romantic partners I might seek, society might
provide me charm lessons or cosmetic surgery or promulgate an
egalitarian norm that encourages the charming and the physically
attractive not to shun my company (or institute some mix of these three
strategies or some others).




However exactly the natural and social are distinguished, one might
restrict the scope of an equality ideal to the smoothing out of
socially caused inequalities. As Elizabeth Anderson remarks, "The
proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the
impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which
by definition is socially imposed" (Anderson 1999, 288). What this
restriction amounts to depends on how one distinguishes socially caused
from other inequalities. Suppose that society pursues policy A, and
that if it pursued policy B instead, a given inequality across people
would disappear. Does this fact suffice to qualify the inequality as
socially caused or not?




Critics of the capability approach home in on three of its features.




The starting point of the capability approach is that the equality
that matters morality or that we are morally required to sustain is
equality of freedom of some sort. This starting point is open to
challenge. Freedom is no doubt important as a means to many other
goods and as something everyone cares about to some considerable
extent. But why confine the concern of equality to freedom rather than
to achieved outcomes? Suppose that we could supply resources to Smith
that will expand her freedom to achieve outcomes she has good reason
to value, but we happen to know that this freedom will do nobody any
good. She will neglect it and it will be wasted. In these
circumstances, why supply the resources? If provision of freedom for
its own sake is morally of first-priority importance, then the fact
that freedom in this instance will do nobody any good would seem to be
an irrelevant consideration. If this fact seems highly pertinent to
what we should do, this indicates that freedom may not be the ultimate
value the distribution of which is the proper concern of an equality
ideal. (A version of this objection can be lodged by advocates of any
type of doctrine of equality of outcome against any type of doctrine
of equal opportunity for outcomes.)




Another feature of the capability approach as elaborated to this point
is that it does not appear to register the significance of personal
responsibility as it might appropriately qualify the formulation of an
equality ideal (Roemer 1996 and 1998). A simple example illustrates
the difficulty. Suppose society is dedicated to sustaining all of its
members equally at some level of basic capability. Society provides
resources fully adequate for sustaining an individual at this level of
basic capability, but he frivolously and negligently squanders the
resources. The resources are re-supplied, and squandered again, and
the cycle continues. At some point in the cycle, many people would
urge that the responsibility of society has been fulfilled, and that
it is the individual's responsibility to use provided resources in
reasonable ways, if his lack of adequate basic capability is to
warrant a claim to equality-restoring social intervention. The
capability approach could of course be modified to accommodate
responsibility concerns. But it will be useful to turn to
consideration of the resourcist approach, within which the aim of
integrating equality and responsibility has prompted various
proposals.


 

A third feature of the capability approach that has elicited
criticism is the idea that knowledge of human flourishing and what
facilitates it must inform the identification of an adequate equality
norm. The worry in a nutshell is that in modern societies that secure
wide freedoms, people will embrace many opposed conceptions of how to
live and of what is choiceworthy in human life. These are matters
about which we must agree to disagree. At least if an ideal of
equality is being constructed to serve in a public conception of
justice that establishes basic terms of morality for a modern
democratic society, this ideal must eschew controversial claims about
human good and human flourishing such as those in which the capability
approach must become embroiled. Martha Nussbaum explores how the
capability approach to social equality might function appropriately as
a public conception of justice (Nussbaum 2000). Charles Larmore argues
that it is wrong for government to impose a policy that could only be
justified by appeal to the claim that some controversial conception of
the good is superior to another (Larmore 1987 and 1996; for criticism
of the neutrality requirement, see Raz 1986 and Sher 1997). In
response it might be urged that a conception of human capabilities
might be controversial but true and, if known to be true,
appropriately imposed by government policy.


### 3.5 Resources




The ideal of equality of resources can be understood by recognizing
its primary enemies. These enemies comprise all manner of proposals
that suppose that in so far as we should care about equality of
condition across persons, what we should care about equalizing is some
function of the utility or welfare or well-being or good that persons
attain over the course of their lives. (There is a complication here,
because the resource-oriented approach also opposes the capability
approach, which so to speak stands midway between resources and
welfare. This raises the question whether the capability approach is
an unstable compromise (see Dworkin 2000, chapter 7). This issue
surfaces for discussion eleven paragraphs down in this section.) John
Rawls offers an especially clear statement of the animating impulse of
the equality of resources ideal. He imagines someone proposing that
the relevant measure of people's condition for a theory of justice is
their level of plan fulfillment or attained satisfaction, and responds
that his favored conception "takes a different view. For it does not
look behind the use which persons make of the rights and opportunities
available to them in order to measure, much less to maximize, the
satisfactions they achieve. Nor does it try to evaluate the relative
merits of different conceptions of the good. Instead, it is assumed
that the members of society are rational persons able to adjust their
conceptions of the good to their situation." (See Rawls 1971, section
15.) Resourcist ideals of equality of condition are non-welfarist.




Several thoughts are intertwined here. One is that equality of
condition must be developed as a component of an acceptable theory of
justice, intended to be the basic charter of a democratic society and
acceptable to all reasonable members of such a society, who are
presumed to be disposed to disagree interminably about many ultimate
issues concerning religion and the meaning and worth of human life
(Rawls 2005). We must seek reasonable terms of cooperation that people
who disagree about much can nonetheless accept. If there is anything
that people cannot reasonably be expected to agree about, it is what
constitutes human good, so introducing a controversial conception of
human good as part and parcel of the ideal of equality that is to be at
the core of the principles of justice is a bad mistake.




Another thought is that responsible individuals will consider
themselves to have a personal obligation, which cannot be shifted to
the government or any agency of society, to decide for themselves what
is worthwhile in human life and what is worth seeking and to fashion
(and refashion as changing circumstances warrant) a plan of life to
achieve worthwhile ends. So even if the true theory of human good could
be discovered, it would offend the dignity and sense of responsibility
of individual persons for some agency of society to preempt this
individual responsibility by arranging matters so that everyone
achieves human good understood a certain way to a sufficiently high
degree. Individuals should take responsibility for their ends. (See
Rawls 1971, Rakowski 1992, Dworkin 2000, and for a different view,
Fleurbaey 2008).




Another thought that motivates the family of equality-of-resources
ideals is that society's obligations by way of providing for its
members are limited. A just and egalitarian society is not plausibly
held to be obligated to do whatever turns out to be necessary to bring
it about that their members attain any given level or share of quality
of life. The reason for this is that the quality of life (the degree to
which one attains valuable agency and well-being goals) that any
individual reaches over the course of her life depends on many choices
and actions taken by that very individual, so to a considerable extent,
the quality of life one reaches must be up to oneself, not the job of
society or some agency acting on behalf of society. Along these lines,
the actual course of an individual's life and the degree of fulfillment
it reaches also depend on many chance factors for which nobody can
reasonably be held accountable. Justice is a practical ideal, not a Don
Quixote conception that aims to correct all bad luck of any sort that
befalls persons. A reasonable morality understands the social justice
obligations of society as limited, not open-ended and unbounded. So if
equality of condition is part of social justice, it too must reflect an
appropriately limited conception of social responsibility. Equality of
resources fills this bill. (See Daniels 1990 and chapters 3 and 4 of
Buchanan et al. 2000.)




The trick then is to develop an appropriate conception of resources
that can serve in an ideal of equality of condition.




Resources can be external, material goods, such as land and moveable
property. One can also extend the domain, and consider traits of
persons that are latent talents or instruments that help them to
achieve their ends as also included within the set of resources to be
equalized. Extending the domain in this way will introduce complexity
into the account, because personal talents are attached to persons and
cannot simply be transferred to others who lack talent. What one can do
is take people's variously valuable personal talents into account
in determining how material resources should be distributed so as to
achieve an overall distribution that should register as (sufficiently)
equal. If Smith lacks good legs, this personal resource deficit might
be offset by assigning Smith extra resources so he can buy a wheelchair
or other mobility device.




Notice that in elaborating equality of resources, it is assumed that
a population of individuals with given traits, generated by genetic
inheritance and early socialization, is present, and equalization is to
proceed by adjusting features of the individuals' environment or by
altering features of the individuals, say by extra education. But of
course, moral questions may also be raised about the processes by which
individuals come to be born and given early socialization so as to
endow them with certain traits. With genetic information about an
individual made available to prospective parents before the individual
is born, a decision can be made about whether to bring this child to
term. In the future, genetic enhancements may be available that can
alter the genetic makeup of individuals, and again a morality must
consider when enhancements should be supplied and by whom. Raising
these questions makes it evident that just assuming an initial
population of individuals with given traits takes for granted matters
that are very much morally up for grabs (see Buchanan et al. 2000). For
the purposes of this entry, this complication is noted only to be set
aside.




How can resources be identified and rated? We want to be able to
say, given two persons each with different amounts of resources, which
one has more resources overall. The literature to date reveals two ways
of confronting the question. One has been developed by John Rawls
(Rawls 1971), one by Ronald Dworkin (Dworkin, 2000).




Rawls suggests that the conception of resources to be deployed in a
resourcist ideal of equality is primary social goods. These are defined
as distributable goods that a rational person prefers to have more
rather than less of, whatever else she wants. (A variant conception
identifies them as goods that any rational person would want who gives
priority to her interests in (1) cooperating with others on fair terms
and (2) selecting and if need be revising a conception of the good and
a set of life aims along with pursuing the conception and the aims.) On
this approach it is not so far clear how to measure a person's holding
of social primary goods overall if there are various primary goods and
one has different amounts of the different kinds. The primary goods
approach has yet to be developed in detail. Rawls has suggested that
the scope of this problem of devising an index of primary goods is
lessened by giving some primary goods, the basic liberties, priority
over the rest. For the remainder, Rawls suggests that the relative
weight of primary goods can be set by considering what people (regarded
as free and equal citizens) need. (See Rawls 2001, section 17.)




Rawls does not propose the primary goods approach as adequate to
guide us in figuring out what egalitarianism requires by way of
compensation for those with serious personal talent deficits. His
account assumes that we are dealing with normal individuals who enjoy
good health and have the normal range of abilities. In his account, the
problem of deciding what an egalitarian approach requires by way of
helping (for example) the disabled is to be handled separately, as a
supplement to the primary goods account.




The problem of the handicapped is the tip of the iceberg according
to the capabilities approach advocate. All people vary enormously in
their personal traits, and these traits interact with their material
resources and other features of their circumstances to determine what
each one is able to do and be with a given resource share. Since we
care about what we can do and be with our resources, merely focusing
attention on the resources as the primary goods advocate does is
inherently fetishistic. The Rawlsian focuses on the distribution of
stuff, but we do not care about the distribution of stuff except
insofar as the stuff distribution affects the distribution of
capability or real freedom. This is in a nutshell the capability
approach criticism of primary goods forms of resourcism.




To some this critique of resourcism appears unstable. The capability
theorist criticizes the resourcist for tying the idea of just
distribution to the idea of fair shares of resources, but resources are
not what ultimately matter to us. But this criticism can be turned
against the capability theorist. Ultimately each of us wants to lead a
good, choiceworthy life, one that is rich in fulfillment, and not
merely to lead a life that has as its backdrop lots of options or
capabilities among which one can choose. One wants a good life, not
just good options. More options in some circumstances might predictably
lead to a worse life. With a moderate level of resources (or
capabilities) I might live well, whereas with more resources (or
capabilities) I might choose heroin or methamphetamine and live badly.
Ultimately we are concerned with welfare (living well) and only
secondarily with capabilities (abilities and opportunities to live
well). In this light, from the welfarist standpoint, the capability
approach looks fetishistic, just as from the capability standpoint, the
primary goods approach to the measure of people's condition for
purposes of deciding what constitutes an equal (or more broadly, a
fair) distribution looks to be fetishistic. (The worry that the
capabilities approach is an unstable compromise, without endorsement of
the welfarist alternative, is voiced in Dworkin 2000, chapter 7.)




The Rawlsian will reply that it is not the proper business of
government to be rating and assessing people's personal traits as
the capabilities approach and welfarist approaches require. Respect for
persons dictates that the state must respect its citizens by not
looking beyond resource shares to assess what individuals can do with
them and actually do with them (Carter 2011).




Dworkin's approach begins with the idea that the measure of a
resource that one person holds is what others would be willing to give
up to get it. From this standpoint competitive market prices are the
appropriate measure of the resources one possesses: In particular, the
division of a lot of resources among a group of people is equal when
all are given equal purchasing power for the occasion and all the
resources are sold off in an auction in which no one's bids are final
until no one wants to change her bids given the bids of the others.




This equal auction is just a first approximation to Dworkin's
proposal. Two complications need to be introduced. One is that one
ought to extend the domain of resources to include personal talents as
well as external property. A second is that equality of resources as
conceived in this construction supposes that the results of unchosen
luck, but not chosen option luck, should be equalized.




Take the second wrinkle first. If we start from an initial equality
of resources brought about by the equal auction mechanism, individuals
might then go on to use and invest and spend their resource allotments
in various ways. Assume the rules mediating their interaction are set
and morally unproblematic. Roughly speaking, we say people are free to
interact with others on any mutually agreeable terms but not to impose
the costs of their activities on others without the mediation of
voluntary consent. Starting from an initial equality of resources, any
results that issue from voluntary interactions reiterated over time do
not offend against the equality ideal. Let voluntary choice and chosen
luck prevail.




The first wrinkle is that individuals differ in their unchosen
natural talent resource allotments. These should somehow be equalized.
But how? The Dworkin proposal is that we can in thought establish an
insurance market, in which people who do not know whether they will be
born disabled (afflicted with negative talents) and do not know what
market price their positive talents will fetch, can insure themselves
in a variant of the equal purchasing power auction against the
possibility of being handicapped or having talents that fetch low
market price. In this way in thought unchosen luck is transformed into
morally inoffensive chosen luck (so far as this is thinkable).




The final Dworkin proposal then is that the thought experiment of
the equal auction modified as above is used to estimate in actual
circumstances in a rough and ready way who is worse off and who better
off than others through no choice of her own. A tax and transfer policy
is instituted then that tries to mimic the results of the imaginary
equal auction and hypothetical insurance market. To the extent that we
establish and sustain such policies--voila!--we have equality
of resources across the members of an actual society. (See Dworkin
2000).




The Dworkin proposal is noteworthy for its integration of themes of
equality and personal responsibility in a single conception. But the
moral appropriateness of linking these themes in the particular way
that he espouses is open to question.




One concern arises from the theoretical role that hypothetical
insurance markets are to play in the determination of what is to count
as equality of resources. This role assumes increasing prominence in
Dworkin's later work (Dworkin 2000, chapters 8-13; also Dworkin
20-11, Part 5, especially chapter 16). Dworkin eventually defines the
equal distribution of privately held resources as the one that would
issue from an initial auction in which all have equal bidding power to
purchase materials resources, supplemented by hypothetical insurance
markets against the possibility of suffering the bad brute luck of
handicap or low marketable talent. From then on, ordinary market
relations govern relations among individuals, and their upshot does not
impugn the equality of the initial staring point unless new forms of
brute luck intervene. For these Dworkin imagines further hypothetical
insurance markets, in which the appropriate compensation for
post-initial-auction bad brute luck is set by the average level of
insurance that people would have purchased if they knew the incidence
of the bad brute luck, its impact on people, and the available devices
for mitigating it, but not their personal chances of suffering the bad
brute luck. Given this background, just policies in actual societies
should aim to mimic the results of these hypothetical equal mechanisms.
In this exercise, we seek to undo the effect of brute luck but not
option luck, that former being luck that falls on you in ways beyond
your power to control and the latter being luck that you can avoid, and
maybe reasonably avoid, by voluntary choice.




Notice the transition from (1) the insurance decisions you actually
make to (2) the insurance decisions you would have made under imagined
equal circumstances to (3) the insurance decisions the average member
of society would have made under hypothetical equal circumstances. One
might wonder for a start why the last of these should be normative for
determining what we owe to Sally, who was raised in poverty and became
paraplegic after a ski accident. Counterfactuals about what the average
person would have done are arguably of doubtful relevance and
counterfactuals about what a particular individual would have done in
wildly different circumstances may generally lack truth value.




The distinction between brute luck and option luck does not exhaust
the possibilities. Most luck is a bit of both. Option luck varies by
degree, but it is unclear how the determination of equality of
resources should accommodate this fact. Moreover, the insurance
decisions on which Dworkin's procedures rely clearly mix together
the brute and option luck he wants to separate. In deciding on
hypothetical insurance for health care one will take account of the
likelihood that one will engage in imprudent behavior that will affect
one's health status.




Others point out that what insurance you would have purchased
against a brute luck calamity might not intuitively align with the
different notion, what compensation for suffering the calamity is
appropriate. The simplest way to see this is that for many people,
money will have more use if one is healthy and normal than if one is
plagued with physical disability, so given a hypothetical choice to
insure for handicaps, one might prefer an insurance policy that gives
one less income if one is handicapped and more income if one is not.
The insurance decision may be reasonable but the idea that on this
basis we ought to be forcibly transferring wealth away from handicapped
people and distributing the resources to the non-handicapped is
arguably not reasonable (Roemer 2002, and for more far-reaching doubts
about hypothetical insurance, Fleurbaey 2008).




Setting to the side the details of Dworkin's construction, we
can ask about the prospects of the general project he pursues. The
starting point, which some had considered prior to Dworkin's
contribution, is to consider what we should count as an equal
distribution when people have different goods and they have different
preferences over these goods. The basic idea is to treat as an equal
distribution of resources one which no one prefers to alter--no
one prefers any other person's pile of resources to her own. This
fairness test does not require interpersonal comparison of welfare,
hence has an appeal if interpersonal comparison is incoherent or
ethically problematic. No-envy is not generally satisfiable, but there
is a family of fairness norms that could be construed as egalitarian
criteria for assessing distributions and that is resourcist in the
basic sense of eschewing interpersonal welfare comparisons. Suppose we
can separate for each person her features for which she should be held
responsible and her features for which she should not be held
responsible. One fairness norm says that egalitarian transfers should
not vary depending on people's features for which they should be
held responsible. Another fairness norm says that people with the same
features for which they should be held responsible should be treated
the same. In the general case, we cannot fulfill both of these norms,
but a whole gamut of compromises between them can be identified and
have been studied (mainly by economists). The Dworkin view occupies
just one point in a large space of possibilities. As is already
evident, some of these criteria relax to some degree (or even entirely
dispense with) the Dworkin insistence on personal
responsibility--the idea that each person is responsible for her
choices in the sense that no one is obligated to make good the
shortfall in her condition if her choices turn out badly.
(Dworkin's account has an extra wrinkle here: each person is
responsible for her ambitions and what flows from them, and one's
ambitions are one's desires that one is glad to have, does not
repudiate). The vision of personal responsibility that is integral to
Dworkin's approach does not characterize the broader family of
resourcist distributive fairness doctrines that eschews interpersonal
welfare comparisons and investigates variants of the no-envy test (see
Fleurbaey 2008 for an accessible survey and somewhat skeptical
exploration, and Varian 1974 for an early contribution).




Go back to the idea that a viable account of equal distribution must
be appropriately sensitive to personal responsibility by dictating
compensation for unchosen endowments but not for ambition and choice.
The most far-reaching skepticism on this point denies that personal
responsibility can be more than instrumentally valuable, a tool for
securing other values. One might hold that in a world in which human
choices are events and all events are caused by prior events according
to physical laws, responsibility can make sense pragmatically and
instrumentally in various settings but does not really make good
normative sense under scrutiny. One might reach a similar result by
noting that even if persons are truly responsible for making some
choices rather than others, what we could reasonably be held
responsible for and what surely lies beyond our power to control run
together to produce actual results and cannot be disentangled. On this
view, if we care about equality, we should seek not
responsibility-modified equality but straight equality of condition,
using responsibility norms only as incentives and prods to bring about
equality (or a close enough approximation to it) at a higher level of
material well-being.




Another sort of skepticism challenges whether the broad project of
holding people responsible for their chosen luck but not for their
unchosen luck really makes sense, because unchosen luck of genetic
inheritance and early socialization fixes the individual's
choice-making and value-selecting abilities. What one chooses, bad or
good, may simply reflect the unchosen luck that gave one the ability to
be a good or a bad chooser. Suppose for example that Smith chooses to
experiment with cigarettes and heroin, and these gambles turn out badly
in the form of contraction of lung cancer and long-term hard drug
addiction. He is then far worse off than others, but his bad fortune
comes about through his own choice--hence is not compensable
according to Dworkinian equality of resources. But that Smith chooses
these bad gambles and Jones does not may simply reflect the unchosen
bad luck that Smith had in his genetic inheritance and early
socialization. So holding him fully responsible for the fortune he
encounters through chosen gambles may make no sense if we follow
through the underlying logic of the Dworkin proposal itself. This takes
us back to welfarist equality conceptions, which the resourcist
theorist wishes to steer away from at all cost (Roemer 1985 and
1986).


### 3.6 Welfare and Opportunity for Welfare




The ideal of equality of welfare holds that it is desirable that the
amount of human good gained by each person for herself (and by others
for her) over the course of her life should be the same. Human good,
also known as welfare or well-being or utility, is what an individual
gets insofar as her life goes well for herself (Parfit 1984, Appendix
I).). This awkward phrase is meant to distinguish one's life going well
for oneself, as one would wish one's life to go from the standpoint of
rational prudence, and its going well by way of producing good that
enters the lives of other people or animals or fulfills some impersonal
good cause. Suppose my life in its entirety consists in sticking my
finger in a dike and slowly painfully freezing to death, like the
little Dutch boy in the children's fable. So lived, this life produces
lots of good for millions of people saved from flood and drowning, but
for me it produces no good, just slow misery. The life just imagined is
a good in the sense of morally admirable life but not a life that
contains much welfare or human good for the one living it.




The background thought is then that morality is concerned with the
production and fair distribution of human good. Nothing else ultimately
matters (except animal and nonhuman person welfare, but leave these
important qualifications aside). So to the extent we believe that fair
distribution is equal distribution, that morality requires that
everyone get the same, what everyone should then have the same
*of* is human good or welfare or well-being.




To work out this conception of equality of condition would involve
determining what account of the nature of human good is most plausible.
One account is hedonism, which holds the good to be pleasure and
absence of pain. Pleasure and the absence of pain might be identified
with happiness, but there are alternative accounts of happiness. For
example, one might hold that a person is happy at a time just in case
she is satisfied with how her life is going at that time, and happy
regarding her life as a whole up to now to the degree she is satisfied
with how her life has gone as a whole up to now. If one identifies the
good with happiness according to this or another construal of what it
is to be happy, we have a non-hedonic happiness account of human good
(Sumner 1996, Haybron 2008, and Feldman 2010). Another account
identifies the good with desire satisfaction or life aim fulfillment. A
variant of this last approach holds that the relevant aims and desires
are those that would withstand ideal reflection with full information
unmarred by cognitive error (such as adding two and two and getting
five). A quite different account supposes that the good is constituted
by the items on a list of objectively valuable beings and doings. The
more the individual attains the items on the objective list over the
course of her life, the better her life goes, whatever her subjective
opinions and attitudes about such attainments might be. There are also
hybrid views, such as that the good is valuable achievement that one
enjoys, or that the good is getting what one wants for its own sake in
so far as what one wants and gets is also objectively valuable (Parfit
1984, Appendix I; Adams 1999, chapter 3). The most plausible conception
of the ideal of equality of welfare incorporates whatever is the best
theory of human good or welfare. (In this connection see Griffin 1986
and Hurka 1990.)




Any such account bumps into problems concerning personal
responsibility and the sense that the obligations of society are
limited--problems already mentioned in this discussion. A society
bent on sustaining equality of welfare would continue pouring resources
down the drain if worse off individuals insist on negligently
squandering whatever resources are expended on them in order to boost
their welfare level up to the average level. One might respond to this
responsibility challenge by stipulating that equality is only desirable
on the condition that individuals are equally responsible or deserving:
It is bad if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice
of their own. In a slogan, one might assert an ideal of equality of
opportunity for welfare. (See Cohen 1989, Arneson 1989, and for
criticism Rakowski 1992, Fleurbaey 1995, Scanlon 1997, and Wolff
1998).




Another criticism does not so much challenge the welfarist
interpretation of equality of condition but presses the issue, how much
weight any such equality of condition ideal should have in competition
with other values. Imagine for example that some people, the severely
disabled, are far worse off than others, and are through no fault or
choice of their own extremely poor transformers of resources into
welfare. A society bent on sustaining equality of welfare or equal
opportunity for welfare as a first priority would be obligated to
continue transferring resources from better off to worse off no matter
how many better off people must then suffer any amount of welfare loss
just so long as the pertinent welfare condition of a single still worse
off individual can be improved even by a tiny amount.




Another criticism challenges the welfarist conceptions of equality
of condition directly. One observes that in a diverse modern society,
individuals will reasonably disagree about what is ultimately good and
worthwhile in human life. Hence no conception of welfare is available
to serve as a consensus standard for a public morality acceptable to
all reasonable persons. In a similar spirit, one might invoke the idea
that responsible individuals cannot acquiesce in the assumption of the
responsibility on the part of the government to determine what is
worthwhile and choiceworthy for them, for this responsibility rests
squarely on each individual's shoulders and cannot legitimately be
dislodged from that perch. (See especially Dworkin, 2000, chapter 7,
also Arneson 2000.)




Notice that equality of welfare and equal opportunity for welfare do
not exhaust the welfarist egalitarian alternatives. Take the example of
a view that is oriented to equality of perfectionist achievement
(achievement of objectively valuable achievements of a kind that make
one's life go better for oneself). One might hold that what is
morally valuable and ought to be promoted is equality of achievement,
or equal opportunity for achievement, or another view along the lines
of equal achievement of one's potential or equal opportunity to
achieve one's potential. Say that each person has a native talent
for achievement. I have little native talent; you have a lot.
Egalitarianism might be construed as requiring that so far as is
possible, social arrangements be set so that each of us achieves, or
can achieve, the same percentage of his native potential over the
course of her life. Everyone's ratio of actual achievement to
native potential for achievement should be the same. So my having the
opportunity to achieve little, and my actually achieving little,
compared to you, on this conception would not necessarily offend
against the egalitarian ideal (see McMahan 1996, and for the thought
that measurement of achievements on a single scale is chimerical, Raz
1986).


### 3.7 Conclusion: A Test Case




Philosophical discussions of what should be equalized if we care
about equality of condition raise dust that has not yet settled in any
sort of consensus. All the rival views canvassed encounter
difficulties, the seriousness of which is at present hard to
discern.




It should be noted that the issue, how to measure people's condition
for purposes of a theory of equality, connects to a broader issue, how
to measure people's condition for purposes of a theory of fair
distribution. Equality is just one of the possible views that might be
taken as to what fair treatment requires. (For example, the
sufficientarian and prioritarian principles discussed in the text below
both admit of resourcist and welfarist and "capabilitist"
variants.) Any theory of distributive justice that says that sometimes
better off persons should improve the situation of worse off persons
requires an account of the basis of interpersonal comparisons that
enables us to determine who is better off and who is worse off.




Finally, the reader might wish to test the merits of rival answers
to the equality-of-what question by considering a social justice issue
different in character from the issues considered so far. Suppose a
society is divided into two or more linguistic communities, one being
by far the most populous. The language of the dominant community is the
official language of public life, and a minority linguistic group
demands redress in the name of social equality. The minority group
seeks government action to help sustain and promote the survival and
flourishing of the minority linguistic community. For another example,
suppose a modern democratic society contains more or less intact
remnants of hunter-gatherer bands who claim in the name of social
equality the right to withdraw from the larger surrounding society and
practice their traditional way of life and run their affairs
autonomously. How should a society committed to an ideal of equality of
condition handle this type of issue? (See Kymlicka 1995, Young 1990,
Anderson 1999, and Barry 2001.)


## 4. Relational Equality




The discussion so far presupposes that an egalitarian holds that in
some respect people should get the same or be accorded the same
treatment. There are other possibilities. One is the idea that in an
egalitarian society people should relate to one another as equals or
should enjoy the same fundamental status (and also perhaps the same
rank and power).




Relational equality ideals are often coupled with the ideal of equal
democratic citizenship. On this view, in an egalitarian society, all
permanent adult members of society are equal citizens, equal in
political rights and duties, including the right to an equal vote in
democratic elections that determine who shall be top public officials
and lawmakers responsible for enacting laws and public policies
enforced on all. An ideal of social equality complements political
equality norms. The idea is that citizens might be unequal in wealth,
resources, welfare, and other dimensions of their condition, yet be
equal in status in a way that enables all to relate as equals. On this
approach, an egalitarian society contrasts sharply with a society of
caste or class hierarchy, in which the public culture singles out some
as inferior and some as superior, and contrasts also with a society
with a dictatorial or authoritarian political system, accompanied by
socially required kowtowing of ordinary members of society toward
political elites.




From the standpoint of the relational equality versions of
egalitarianism, equality of condition doctrines get the moral
priorities backward. These doctrines make a fetish of what should not
matter to us, or should not matter very much. A better approach is to
look at distributive justice issues by asking what social and
distributive arrangements are needed to establish and sustain a society
of free, equal people, a society in which individuals all relate as
equals. When the question is posed in this way, relational equality
advocates sometimes claim to discern a new strong case for embracing a
sufficientarian approach to distributive justice. That some people have
more money than others is not an impediment to a society of equals, the
argument goes. But if some are so poor they are effectively excluded
from market society or pushed to its margins, they are in effect
branded as socially inferior, which offends against relational
equality. Some philosophers argue for some restriction on the size of
the gap between richest and poorest that society tolerates, again as
what is needed to sustain a society of equals. Others might see the
difference principle as required for the same purpose. Some also pleas
for institutional insulation of the political and some social spheres
so as to protect these as realms of equality from the corrosive
influence of economic inequality (Walzer 1983 and Rawls 2005, Lecture
VIII).




The ideal of a just modern society as a democratic society in which
citizens relate as equals appears in writings by Michael Walzer on
social justice (Walzer, 1983). Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler
both affirm versions of relational equality and from this standpoint
criticize the family of views that Anderson calls "luck
egalitarian," whose foremost exponents are perhaps G. A. Cohen
and Ronald Dworkin (Cohen 1989, Anderson 1999, Scheffler 2010, chapters
7 and 8, Dworkin 2000, and for responses to criticisms, Dworkin
2003 and 2010 and Arneson 2004). According to Anderson, the luck
egalitarian holds that unchosen and uncourted inequalities ought to be
eliminated and that chosen and courted inequalities should be left
standing). She criticizes these views on several grounds. One is that
the luck egalitarian wrongly takes the aim of egalitarian justice to be
achieving an equal distribution of stuff rather than egalitarian
solidarity and respect among members of society. Another is that the
policy recommendations implied by luck egalitarian principles are too
harsh in their dealings with people who fare badly but are deemed
personally responsible for their plight (see also Fleurbaey 1995). A
third is that the luck egalitarian, in order to establish that people
who are badly off are owed equalizing compensation, must involve
distributive agencies in intrusive and disrespectful inquiries that
issue in public negative assessments of people's traits as
grounding the conclusion that these unfortunate individuals are not
properly held personally responsible for their misfortune (see also
Wolff 1998). A related criticism is that luck egalitarianism adopts a
moralizing posture toward individual wayward choice that would make
sense only if free will libertarianism were correct (Scheffler
2010).




A further criticism is that the luck egalitarian supposes that if we
aim to undo unchosen luck, this aim somehow provides an underlying
justification for some form of equal distribution (Hurley 2003). It is
not clear that undoing the influence of unchosen luck has anything to
do with promoting equal distribution: consider that sometimes via
unchosen luck people end up equally well off. A better strategy is for
the luck egalitarian to start with the intuitive idea that distribution
should be equal and then allow that this presumption for equality can
be taken away when people could sustain equal distribution and instead
end up unequally well off via individual choices. Equality is deemed
morally valuable on the condition that inequality does not emerge from
choices for which people are reasonably held responsible.




Another criticism of luck egalitarianism, pressed by Scheffler and
especially Anderson, is that the doctrine engenders an inappropriate
expansion of what is deemed to be the legitimate business of the state.
Suppose we distinguish roughly between misfortune that is imposed on
people by social action and social arrangements and misfortune that
just falls on people without being imposed by anyone. The distinction
draws a line between inequality due to society and inequality due to
nature. In the words of Anderson, "the proper negative aim of
egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from
human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially
imposed" (Anderson 1999).




Relational equality ideals might be regarded either as required by
justice or as not required by justice or other morally mandatory
principles, rather as morally optional. Or a component of social
equality might count as a justice requirement while another component
is treated as a part of a broader social ideal that is desirable but
not mandatory.




The idea of relating as equals can be construed in different ways.
Samuel Scheffler suggests one specification when he writes that
"we believe that there is something valuable about human
relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least,
unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status" (Scheffler
2010, 225). The idea is that equality of rank, power, and status is
both instrumentally valuable and valuable for its own sake. He
immediately notes that such differences are ubiquitous in the social
life of modern industrial democracies, so equality so understood is
puzzling. If the ideal calls on us to tear down and completely
restructure the social life of modern industrial democracies, it looks
problematic. Why accept this demand? If one qualifies and hedges the
ideal, so it is less revisionary, then the question arises, what is the
basis for drawing these lines of qualification and hedge.




At this point the advocate of an equality of condition doctrine in
the luck egalitarian range may see an opening. The advocate may urge
that we should regard inequalities in rank, power, and status not as
desirable or undesirable in themselves but in purely instrumental
terms, as means or impediments to fundamental justice goals, the ones
identified by the best version of luck egalitarianism. For example, a
welfarist luck egalitarian will say that the inequalities in rank,
power, and status that we should accept are those that contribute
effectively to promoting good lives for people, taking account of fair
distribution of good across individual persons. The inequalities that
are impediments to promoting good lives for people, fairly distributed,
we should oppose. The luck egalitarian will add that we should
distinguish two different claims that might be asserted in holding that
Schefflerian social equality is valuable. Social inequality might be
affirmed either as morally wrong or as humanly bad, something a prudent
person would seek to avoid. The luck egalitarian critic of this
relational equality ideal is committed only to rejecting it as a
proposal for the domain of moral right. If being on the lower rungs of
a status hierarchy were per se a way in which one's life might go
badly, like failing to attain significant achievement or to have
healthy friendships, it would register in a luck egalitarian
calculation of a person's situation that determines what we
fundamentally owe one another--at least according to versions of
luck egalitarianism that affirm a welfarist measure of people's
condition.




Scheffler makes a suggestion as to how one might incorporate into
the theory of justice a norm against certain inequalities of rank,
power, and status and justify the selection of the "certain
inequalities" that are singled out in this way. One might invoke
the Rawlsian political liberalism project (Rawls, 2005). In this
project what is rock-bottom is the idea of society as a system of fair
cooperation among free and equal people. This idea is understood in
philosophically noncommittal ways so that it can plausibly command
support from all of the reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the
right and the good affirmed by members of society and also from
reasonable individuals who affirm no such comprehensive conception. The
principles of justice are the principles people committed to this idea
of social cooperation would affirm as capturing the core of their
intuitive pre-theoretical commitment. Norms of relational equality that
figure in this scheme would then qualify as principles of justice that
all citizens of modern democracies can affirm, and to which we are
already implicitly committed. To evaluate this suggestion one would
have to examine and assess the Rawlsian political liberalism
project.




An alternative construal of the relational equality ideal proposes
that people in a society relate as equals when the society's
political constitution is democratic and all members are enabled to be
fully functioning members of democratic society (Walzer 1983, Anderson
1999). All are fully functioning members of democratic society when all
are able to participate to a "good enough" extent in all of
its core institutions and practices. So understood, the relational
equality ideal becomes a version of the sufficiency doctrine (on which,
see section 6.1 of this entry).




Relational equality advocates usually advance their equality ideal
as a rival to other understandings of equality including luck
egalitarianism. But these disparate equality ideals need not be
opposed. For example, one could (1) affirm relational equality and hold
that in a just society people should relate as free and equal and also
(2) affirm luck egalitarianism and hold that people should be equal in
their condition (according to their holdings and attainments of
resources, capabilities, or welfare or according to some other measure)
except that people's being less well off than others is
acceptable if the worse off could have avoided this fate by
reasonable voluntary choice. One could uphold both ideals even if they
sometimes conflict. One could also mix and match elements of these
different equality ideals. For example, one might hold that people
should have equal status and relate as equals but add that one can
legitimately be demoted to lesser status by being responsible for
making bad choices or failing to make good choices. Along this line,
even a staunch democratic equality advocate might allow that by virtue
of committing a serious crime and being convicted of this offense one
forfeits some citizenship rights at least for a time. Egregiously bad
conduct might warrant exile. Along the same line, some benefits
disbursed by a democratic state might be made conditional on specified
forms of responsible choice. These moves would all involve qualifying
the relational equality ideal by a luck egalitarian commitment to
appropriate sensitivity to personal responsibility. On the other side,
a luck egalitarian view might allow that in certain domains entitlement
to equal treatment might be forfeitable by one's irresponsible
choice but maintain that there is a floor of democratic equality status
to which all members of society are unconditionally entitled. Taking
this stance would be to qualify commitment to luck egalitarianism by a
constraint of insistence on some democratic equality.




Luck egalitarianism could be a module or component in either a
consequentialist or non-consequentialist moral doctrine. Luck
egalitarianism might specify one goal or even the sole goal to be
promoted in the former, or might be understood as a deontically
required form of treatment in the latter. The same is true of the
relational equality ideal. That people should relate as free and equal
might be taken to be a goal to be promoted or an entitlement to be
respected.




The discussion of relational equality versus luck egalitarianism has
stressed the relational equality critique of the luck egalitarian way
of integrating personal responsibility concerns into the ideal of
equality. There are other lines of potential conflict. What these are
will turn on the particular versions of the ideals being considered.
For example, consider versions of luck egalitarianism that affirm the
idea that all should have equal opportunity for welfare as assessed
over the life course. The advocate of views in the welfarist equality
of condition family will worry that relational equality could be fully
achieved world-wide even if in each society some people lead avoidably
miserable and squalid lives and even if in some societies people on the
average are far more likely to lead avoidably miserable and squalid
lives than in other societies. In other words, the concern is that the
relational equality ideal pays no heed to the moral imperative of
bringing it about that people lead genuinely good lives, or have the
opportunity to lead genuinely good lives, while ensuring that the
opportunities for good are fairly distributed.


## 5. Equality among Whom?




Settling which aspect of people's condition (if any) should be the
same for all and fixing a measure of people's condition in this respect
still does not render an ideal of equality of condition fully
determinate. So far the question remains open, among whom should
equality of condition obtain? The same question arises if one dismisses
or downgrades the equality of condition views and takes some relational
equality ideal to capture the core morally required egalitarian
aspiration. Among whom should equality, of whatever type is deemed
morally required, obtain?




At some spots the discussion to this point has assumed an answer to
this question. The issue is posed, in what ways should the members of a
society or nation state be made equal? Framing the issue in this way
presumes that what is morally valuable is that equality prevails among
the members of each separate society. The idea then is that it is
desirable that the condition of the inhabitants of India should be
rendered more equal and that the condition of inhabitants of Germany
should be rendered more equal but that equalizing the condition of
Germans and Indians combined need not be desirable. But why not? (On
this issue, see Dworkin 2000 and Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," in Rawls
1999.)




If equality is prized as a means to other values, it may be the case
that only equality among individuals who interact in significant ways
has a tendency to promote the desired further goals. For example, if we
prize equality of possessions to foster social solidarity, it may be
that producing equality among people who live in distant parts of the
globe and hardly interact will have no tendency to promote solidarity
across the combined population. For the instrumental egalitarian, one
should seek equality among those collections of people in which
equality would produce the desired further results.




If equality is valued for its own sake, rather than as a means to
further goals, it is less clear why the domain of persons among whom
equality should obtain is limited in space or time or by political
boundaries. Why not hold that it is desirable that equality should
prevail to the degree this is feasible among all persons who shall ever
live?




This question may not be rhetorical. Many philosophers hold that
requirements of social justice including requirements of egalitarianism
are triggered by social interaction. When people interact in certain
ways, then and only then do egalitarian justice requirements apply and
become binding on them. Call egalitarian justice theories that adopt
this position "social interactionist."




Perhaps the dominant view among contemporary political theorists is
that when people set up a wide-ranging system of coercion on the scale
of a political nation, special moral requirements come into play,
including a requirement that all whose lives are ruled by this system
of coercion should be treated equally or brought to an equal condition
in some respects. (If a world government were established, the special
requirements would be global in scope.)




This idea comes in various versions. One idea is that it makes sense
to deploy the concept of justice--not just egalitarian justice,
but any justice notion--only where there is a stable scheme of
enforcement in place, or at least the potential for that, which only
the framework of a functioning state supplies (Nagel 2005; for
criticism see Cohen and Sabel 2006 and Julius 2006). The basic thought
is that justice norms cease to be binding if the individual cannot be
confident that others will comply so that the goods the scheme of
justice promises will in fact obtain. If a bus is stalled at the bottom
of a hill, and the passengers can work together to push it to the top
of the hill if all cooperate together, but pushing by less than all
produces no gain, and there is no expectation that all the rest will
cooperate, one has no clear duty to cooperate by doing one's
"fair share" of pushing. But the bus example is a special
case, which may not generalize to illuminate the run of global justice
issues. If some of us insist that the products we buy not be produced
by coerced or maltreated laborers, and the result of the insistence is
that some laborers suffer less coercion and maltreatment, whether
consumers generally follow our example may not diminish or offset the
effects of what some do. Justice might require me to join the some who
are insisting on fair play. If there is a justice duty falling on
economically advanced nations to open their doors more than they now do
to needy would-be immigrants, one country's opening its doors as
required by this duty does good for the people admitted independently
of whether or not any other advanced nations follow suit. My behaving
in a way that emits excessive greenhouse gases may result in harm in
the future to some determinate persons that is caused by me and would
not occur but for my actions, and these facts may bring into play a
duty of justice to refrain from wrongfully harming non-consenting
others.




Another view is that the state massively coerces individuals
residing within its claimed jurisdiction and does not to the same
extent massively coerce those outside its territorial borders. The
imposition of this massive coercion on individuals inside a nation is a
presumptive violation of their autonomy, which demands a strong
justification if state coercion is to be rightly deemed legitimate,
morally permissible. It is plausible to suppose the required
justification must include acknowledgement that the state must organize
society so that egalitarian principles such as the Rawlsian difference
principle are satisfied. The plausibility of this claim increases once
one notices that the state might enforce any of a wide range of
conceptions of property and criminal law and tort, and selecting one
rather than another conception to enforce will be to the advantage of
some citizens and the disadvantage of others. Hence the requirement is
triggered to the effect that the coercive scheme must be justifiable in
particular to the one who fares worst under the scheme. This in turn
points either to a strong insistence on equality or the difference
principle (Blake 2001 and Miller 1998), but the case for the insistence
is limited in scope by the jurisdiction of the coercive scheme.




A difficulty with this view is that imposition of a massively
coercive scheme either need pose no threat to individual autonomy or if
it does pose a threat, does so only in circumstances in which the
autonomy that is downgraded is worth very little. The law issues
credible coercive threats that if, for example, I were to murder
someone, I would be arrested, prosecuted, and subjected to capital
punishment or a long prison sentence. If I have no desire whatsoever to
murder anyone, the coercion sits on me light as a feather and does not
reduce my autonomy. Suppose I developed a desire to murder someone and
would act to satisfy the desire except that I am deterred by the
law's coercive threats. Now arguably the law significantly
impinges on my autonomy, but this is clearly a better state of affairs
than would result if the criminal law penalties against murder were
removed. Suppose on the other hand the law piles criminal penalties on
a type of activity that is innocent and harmless such as walking on the
beach. Here the coercion wrongfully restricts autonomy. The solution is
to repeal the law. The concern then is that either the coercion imposed
on individuals by the state is morally acceptable, in which case no
special compensation is owed to those coerced, or it is morally
unacceptable, in which case the coercion should be withdrawn. The
picture of coercion constricting the autonomy of the coerced and thus
presumptively wrong unless compensation is paid to the coerced appears
to be fading away. And if this picture is not sustainable, then it
cannot help explain why equality should be required within but not
across national borders.




This argument will not do as it stands because there might be cases
in which imposition of coercion is neither unconditionally right nor
unconditionally wrong but rather conditionally
acceptable--acceptable provided adequate compensation is paid to
those whose autonomy is burdened by the coercion. Are there such cases?
Perhaps conscription of youth for military service in a just war can be
morally permissible, but only if compensation is paid to those coerced
into this arduous and dangerous service. Coercion requires a
justification, which might include compensation to the coerced, but
need not in all cases. What is necessary is adequate moral
justification. The justification of having coercive states, and the
reason all of us ought to support them, might appeal to the need to
have stable protection of certain important rights of insiders (those
who live inside the state's borders) and outsiders as well.
Nothing so far rules out the possibility that these rights include
egalitarian rights of global scope. The sheer fact that the particular
state of the land you inhabit coerces you arguably does not establish
any sort of presumption that the state's scheme of coercion must
be specially tailored to your interests, that those coerced have
special justice claims on the particular state that coerces them.




Another possible idea in this area is that the state both massively
coerces its members but not outsiders and also claims to speak in the
name of the members who are coerced. By claiming to speak in our name,
the state involves the will of those in whose name it claims to act.
The state not only does but must claim to speak in the name of those it
coerces; rulers of a state could not avoid the moral implications that
flow from this claim by explaining that they are just authoritarian
rulers, bosses who command state power and plan to rule for their own
personal benefit. The state compels obedience to its commands and
affirms that these commands reflect the legitimate will of the
commanded subjects. The argument then is that the combination of these
conditions triggers the application of egalitarian principles of
justice and these principles apply state by state, not across all
states (Dworkin 2000 and Nagel 2005).




A concern regarding this line of thought is that whenever one acts,
what one does should be justifiable to those who are affected or might
be affected by one's choice. If what one does is justifiable, in
principle anyone who is impinged on or ignored can be provided a
justification of what is being done to them (or not being done to
them), a justification they can accept and will accept if they sort
through the relevant considerations and assess them rightly. In this
sense, whenever individuals make choices, their choices involve the
will of all those who are impinged on or might have been impinged on by
one or another choice that might have been made. And for that matter,
bystanders who could not have been affected in any way by what is done
but who are aware that some individual is choosing some act or omission
should also be able to discern a fully adequate justification for what
is done. The involvement of the will of those one's action
impinges on turns out to encompass the entire community of rational
agents, all of whom should be able to see that what one does is
rationally justified. So it is still mysterious how the involvement of
the will of those coerced by the laws and public policies of a
functioning state might be thought to trigger the application of
special egalitarian justice obligations that do not apply except among
those caught in the particular web of coercion.




Another line of thought offered to support the claim that
egalitarian justice duties apply state by state among the members of
each political community united by a state rather than among all
inhabitants of a region of the Earth or all of the Earth's
inhabitants or among all rational agents anywhere and everywhere
appeals not to state coercion but to collective goods. The suggestion
is that the members of any tolerably well-functioning political
community cooperate together through the state to provide crucial
benefits to all--basic goods of physical security, property, and
the rule of law. In the absence of these goods one would not have a
reasonable opportunity to pursue any plan of life. People's
compliance with legal rules and basic norms of cooperation supplies
these crucial goods to all, and thus obligations of reciprocity are
triggered in all recipients. At this point a luck egalitarian
consideration enters the argument. Factors beyond anyone's
individual power to control importantly affect her good fortune or bad
fortune under the existing scheme of cooperation in her political
community; hence what one owes to other fellow cooperators by way of
reciprocity takes the form of egalitarian justice requirements along
the lines of the difference principle. These egalitarian justice
requirements are owed by the members of each distinct political
community to each other and not to outsiders (Sangiovanni 2007).




This line of thought prompts several questions. If stringent
egalitarian duties to needy people arise only because the needy
participate in a scheme of cooperation with the non-needy, then
strategic action to avoid the duties seems permissible. If the rich
separate from the poor and form their own distinct political
communities, the reciprocity argument will no longer support the claim
that the rich have substantial obligations to the poor. One might
question whether genuine justice obligations are avoidable in this way
(Cohen and Sabel 2006). Another question is whether reciprocity
obligations formed by cooperative collective provision nicely divide
state by state as the argument supposes. In Southern California, the
law abidingness of neighbors in Mexico is more crucial to
people's physical security than the law abidingness of fellow
citizens in Maine or Florida. Treaties and peaceful relations among
militarily armed states, brought into being by peaceable desires of
people in all the states, are immensely important to people's
physical security in all of the potentially threatening nations. A
third question is why reciprocity obligations owed to fellow
cooperators in basic security schemes amount to more than the
requirement to contribute a fair share to the burdens of supplying the
goods. It is not immediately clear why requirements of egalitarian
redistribution arise in this way, since socially disadvantaged people
may benefit equally as much as socially advantaged folk from the goods
that such cooperation supplies.




The social interactionist arguments just canvassed purport to show
that special egalitarian justice requirements apply among members of a
nation state and require equality only among those members. The
arguments do not attempt to show that no egalitarian justice
requirements hold across national borders. These cross-border
requirements are presumably triggered by a morally mandatory
beneficence requirement that gives special priority to helping people,
the worse off they are, or by a luck egalitarian principle such as the
following: It is morally bad--unjust and unfair--if some are
worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. The
weightier the special egalitarian obligations that the social
interactionist sees holding country by country, and the less weighty
the general egalitarianism that is perceived to hold across countries,
the more the social interactionist approach will conflict with general
egalitarian equality of condition doctrines that are claimed to have
global scope.




Another version of social interactionism does not seek to show that
national borders are morally important for determining what we owe each
other by way of egalitarian justice. This approach holds that stricter
egalitarian justice duties are gradually triggered by social
interaction, and become more stringent and demanding as the density of
social interaction increases (Cohen and Sabel 2006 and Julius 2006, see
also Julius 2003). On this view, egalitarian justice duties might be
strongest among the members of a political community, strong among
people involved in dense regional trade and other forms of association,
less strong among more far-flung inhabitants of the globe whose social
interaction ties are slight.




A related social interactionist approach holds that egalitarian
justice requirements come into play among people where there is a
framework of institutions and rules or a basic social structure
regulating their interactions. Some see such a cooperative framework
existing only in each separate nation state; some see a global
cooperative framework (Beitz 1979, Pogge 1989). The background idea is
that justice becomes relevant when people are cooperating together for
mutual gain under common rules.




The question, whether the requirement of equalizing people's
condition applies within particular societies but not across societies
on a global scale, might be thought to raise a rough dilemma for the
normative attractiveness of any equality ideal. The dilemma arises in
the following train of thought. On the one hand, there is no good basis
for restricting the scope of equality. If equality matters, the group
that should be made equal is people everywhere. On the other hand, a
global equality requirement will strike many as deeply counterintuitive
because it seems to impose very demanding requirements on prosperous
individuals and nations to share their wealth with less prosperous
strangers in distant lands. The dilemma paints egalitarianism as either
(1) parochial or (2) Quixotic and utopian. To remove this impression of
dilemma, it would suffice either to defend the restriction of
egalitarian requirements to single societies or to show that the
requirements of demanding global egalitarianism are not really
counterintuitive.




Further issues may be raised about the nature of the individuals
among whom equality should obtain. One might hold that across whatever
kind of group is deemed to be the relevant domain of equality,
individuals in the domain should be made equal in condition over the
course of their lives. This view would allow that people might fare
unequally well at different stages of life so long as their lifetimes
taken as a whole are identical in faring well. Another possibility is
that the individual persons at the same stage of the life cycle should
be rendered equal in condition. On this latter view, a society in which
over time the people who are old all enjoy the same condition, and
likewise the people who are young and those who are middle-aged, could
perfectly conform to the ideal of stage-by-stage equality of condition
even if the old are (say) far better off than the middle-aged and the
middle-aged are always far better off than the young. From the
whole-lives perspective, stage-by-stage equality is unacceptable,
because some people die young, and those who die young never get to
enjoy the peak condition. One might uphold a stringent view that
requires, so far as possible, that all achieve the same lifetime level
of good and that in addition at each separate stage of life
(individuated how?) everyone achieves the same level of good. Another
possible view is that equality should be formulated so it demands that
from now, the condition of all those living should be equalized
(regardless of what condition people enjoyed in the past). (See
McKerlie 1989 and 2001 and Temkin 1993, chapter 8).




Another issue emerges if one asks: why focus on individual persons
rather than on groups? One might hold that it is not important that
individual persons have equal life prospects, but it is morally
valuable that men and women on the whole should have equal life
prospects, that heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals should have the
same life prospects, that people of different supposed races should
have the same life prospects on the whole, and so on. To fill out this
proposal one would need to develop a normative account that explains
what sorts of group classifications matter for this purpose and on what
grounds. Notice that one might be troubled, for example, if it is found
that men have better life prospects on the average than women, because
that would be an indicator that perhaps equality of opportunity and
fair equality of opportunity are not satisfied. To be moved by this
consideration is not to value equality of condition across groups per
se.




Finally, the discussion in this entry assumes that if equality is
valuable or morally required, the equality that matters is equality
among human persons. Equality across individual humans and individual
members of other animal species has not been envisaged. But why not? If
human beings are picked out as morally special, some reasonable ground
must be adduced for this selection. In view of the fact that there
might be intelligent beings who qualify as persons but are nonhuman
(angels, intelligent extraterrestrials, and so on), perhaps we should
focus on persons and consider whether equality of condition should
prevail among persons and only among persons and if so, on what basis.
Notice that the claim that human persons share a special equal status
from which less intelligent animals are excluded still allows that
these animals, though not equal in status to humans, may nonetheless be
morally considerable.


## 6. Is Equality Desirable Per Se? Alternatives to Egalitarianism




Why should it matter that people have or get the same? In previous
sections of this entry some attempt has been made to clarify some
principles that prize equality of condition of some sort. No doubt in
some circumstances movement toward equality of some sort can be
expected to increase the extent to which other values worth caring
about are achieved. The question here is whether the achievement of
equality of condition of any sort matters for its own sake,
independently of whether it hinders or promotes the attainment of other
values.




What has been called the "leveling-down objection"
suggests a reason to answer in the negative: everyone's being
equal is not valuable for its own sake. Suppose the universe contains
two persons, one of whom is far better off than the other. If we can
effect a change, perhaps by transferring resources, that will make the
worse off person better off and make the better off person worse off,
provided the change does not bring it about that the formerly better
off person is now worse off, the change will bring the people closer to
being equally well off. So equality recommends the change, at least if
other things are equal. This seems plausible. But now suppose we can
effect a change that will make the better off person worse off without
making anyone else better off, and without making it the case that the
formerly better off person is now worse off. Perhaps the better off
person has a nice house, and we can burn down the house costlessly,
making him worse off, but without improving the condition of anyone
else. This is leveling down. If equality is non-instrumentally
valuable, then the situation that obtains after leveling down must be
in at least one respect better than the preceding situation: the new
situation is more equal. The objection simply is that it is
counterintuitive to claim that in any respect increasing equality by
making someone worse off and no one else better off is improving the
situation. Leveling down is pointless or worse.




As stated, the leveling down objection invites the reply by the
egalitarian that the situation after leveling down is indeed in one
respect better than the situation previously obtaining: after all, we
now have greater equality or a closer approximation to a condition of
equality. We may have a standoff of conflicting moral intuitions. Those
who doubt that equality is non-instrumentally valuable offer this
diagnosis. When we envisage a more equal world, we tend to think of
changes that make some people better off--those who before got the
short end of the stick now are made better off so that equality across
persons is approached. We also tend to envisage situations in which
those who are worse off than others are badly off in non-comparative
terms. In this way we tend to run together (1) people being more equal
and (2) the worse off (who are likely badly off) becoming better off.
By a halo effect, the goodness of 2 appears to shine on 1. Once we see
clearly that having equality and making gains toward equality need have
nothing to do with 2, we see that we had all along we had been
misjudging the value of 1, and so our considered judgment should be
that it is not the case that equality of any sort is non-instrumentally
valuable (Parfit 1991, Temkin 1993, and Holtug 2010, chapter 7).




In considering this question, one should beware of conflating
equality per se with distinct and independent values that in some
circumstances will closely shadow it. The values that might be
confounded with equality include sufficiency, priority, and desert.


### 6.1 Sufficiency




Suppose one compares the grim conditions of life endured by the
poorest inhabitants of the earth with the garishly opulent conditions
of life enjoyed by the wealthiest people. A natural reaction is that it
is morally outrageous that such inequalities in life prospects exist.
As George Orwell once wrote, "a fat man eating quails while children
are begging for bread is a disgusting sight" (Orwell 1938, 115).
But one may wonder if what is troubling about the example is the gap
between rich and poor or rather the deplorable condition of the poor,
which might continue unabated even if the gap itself were eliminated.
To put the issue another way, if it is the inequality per se that is
bad, then the gap between poor and rich would seem to be no worse than
a same-sized gap between the life prospects of the rich and super-rich.
Talk here of a "same-sized gap" presupposes that we have an
agreed standard for measuring the sizes of gaps. The claim then would
be that according to any plausible such standard, the gap between
someone who is very badly off and someone who is much better off will
be far more morally significant and bad than an identical gap between
someone who is extremely well off in non-comparative terms and someone
who is much better off than that. If the latter inequality strikes one
as morally inconsequential, the question arises whether inequality is
in and of itself really objectionable. Perhaps the problem is not that
the poor have less than the rich, but rather that the poor do not have
enough--a sufficient level of resources to provide a good life or
a reasonable prospect of a good life. The suggestion then is that
sufficiency not equality is what per se matters. How one's condition
compares to the situation of other people is not important in itself.
What is morally important is that people have enough to bring them over
the threshold of decent life prospects. (For this line of thought, see
Frankfurt 1987 and 2000, Nussbaum 1990 and 2000, Miller 1995, Wiggins
1991, Anderson 2000, and for an earlier statement of the sufficiency
ideal, Walzer 1983).




The doctrine of sufficiency holds that it is morally valuable that
as many as possible of all who shall ever live should enjoy conditions
of life that place them above the threshold that marks the minimum
required for a decent (good enough) quality of life. Sufficiency can
rationalize egalitarian transfers of resources from better off to worse
off persons when such transfers would increase the total number of
people who ever achieve sufficiency.




A potential problem for the sufficiency doctrine is that it may not
be possible non-arbitrarily to specify a line of sufficiency such that
moving a person just across that line has great moral significance. If
the sufficiency doctrine were asserted either as a complete theory of
justice or as a principle that trumps all competitors, it would
definitely be problematic. Suppose a large number of people are
unavoidably below sufficiency, leading hellish lives, and that transfer
of resources could vastly improve their lives while leaving them below
the sufficient level. Instead we could use these same resources to
boost a single person who is now just barely under sufficiency to just
barely over it. Sufficiency as a trumping doctrine says that we ought
to do what will increase the total number of persons who ever achieve
sufficiency no matter what the cost to other moral values. This
instruction is worse than dubious. A similar difficulty emerges when
one imagines cases in which many people are unavoidably over the
sufficiency level, but with a resource infusion their lives will be
vastly improved, and in which the same resources could instead be used
to prevent a single person now just above sufficiency from falling a
hair beneath this line. If we try to mitigate the first concern by
lowering the sufficiency threshold, this exacerbates the second
concern.




The doctrine just criticized is not the only one that falls under
the general heading of sufficientarian views. Roger Crisp (2003)
suggests that justice requires giving priority to making people better
off, and greater priority to helping a person, the worse off in
non-comparative terms she is--up to the point at which the person
attains a good enough quality of life. Roughly speaking, the idea would
be priority for the worse off, up to sufficiency, and straight
utilitarian maximization of aggregate well-being above that line. This
is a doctrine of priority (see next section) qualified by a sufficiency
line. The question arises, how non-arbitrarily to draw the line. The
sufficiency skeptic might hold that the underlying moral reality is
that a person's well-being, in all its dimensions, varies by
degree, as does any overall index of well-being, and there is no
"good enough" line that has the significance the Crisp-type
sufficientarian must give to it. A further question is how much
priority to give to helping people below the threshold when that
competes with helping people above the threshold. If one says no
trade-offs are allowed, that a jot of gain for a below-threshold person
outweighs any amount of good that can be gained for any number of
above-threshold individuals, many will object that this is an extreme
and wildly implausible view. But this may be one of those cases in
which one person's *reductio* is another's Q.E.D.
(If the sufficiency line is truly arbitrary, then giving any weight to
it at all in determining what should be done will be excessive.)




Other formulations of views that emphasize the moral importance of
the sufficiency line are possible. One says that one should bring it
about that, as far as is possible, over the history of the universe,
the total sum of the gaps between the level of lifetime well-being each
person achieves and the sufficiency level, for all persons whose
lifetime well-being is below sufficiency, is as small as possible. This
implausibly recommends preventing any future persons from being born
and having any life at all, if unavoidably some will fall below
sufficiency. We might try the idea that we should seek to make the
aggregate sum of the gaps just described per person as small as
possible for the entire history of the world. If the sufficiency line
is deemed to be above the line of a life worth living, then if
unavoidably at some point in the future people can only have lives
worth living not good enough lives, the minimization of gaps-per-person
again yields a recommendation to bring it about that no future persons
live, even though they would have lives worth living. Or consider an
Adam and Eve scenario--Adam and Eve lead nice lives above the
sufficiency line, but begetting any children and bringing it about that
any further persons exist would be wrong to do, according to the view
under consideration, if it is the case that bringing about the
existence of future persons will unavoidably make things worse from the
standpoint of minimizing total gaps-per-person.




Notice that we might deny that the sufficiency view is a rival to
egalitarianism. One might instead hold that sufficiency is a version of
egalitarianism. Sufficiency holds that all persons equally have a claim
to live a sufficiently good life, and that people's condition is
relevantly and importantly equal when all equally live at or above the
level of sufficiency. I assume there need be no more than verbal
disagreement between one who asserts and one who denies that the
sufficiency advocate values a type of equality. (This purely verbal
disagreement can arise whenever someone asserts that the doctrine that
all should equally have *X* or receive *X* treatment is an egalitarian and
someone else denies that this *X* theory is genuinely egalitarian.)


### 6.2 Priority




There is another route to the conclusion that equality per se is not
morally valuable. Consider again the scenario in which the poorest
inhabitants of the earth face grim and miserable conditions of
existence and the richest enjoy an enormously better quality of life.
The sufficientarian's diagnosis of this situation is that what is bad
about this scenario is not the inequality, the gap between rich and
poor, but the fact that the poor do not have enough. An alternative
diagnosis can most easily be explained by supposing that we have a
cardinal interpersonal measure of welfare or well-being. An
individual's level of well-being registers how well her life is going
as it would be assessed from the standpoint of rational prudence. An
individual's level of well-being is the level of benefits or advantages
for herself that her life contains. From this perspective, when one
speaks of "better off" and "worse off" persons, one is speaking of
persons whose lifetime level of well-being is high or low.




With this bit of background in place, the idea that transfers of
resources from better off to worse off persons are sometimes morally
desirable can be understood without supposing either that equality of
any sort is per se desirable or that there is some level of well-being
that marks the good enough level and that has a special status as
specified by the sufficiency doctrine. Suppose that for any person, the
lower her lifetime well-being score--the amount of well-being she
gains or is now expected to gain over the course of her life--the
more morally valuable it would be to secure an incremental gain of
well-being for her (or to avoid a small loss). This is the root idea of
prioritarianism.




The prioritarian idea is to be sharply distinguished from the idea
that across some range, resources secured for a person have declining
marginal utility. To illustrate, suppose one person is leading a
hellish existence and another is leading a life of sheer bliss. We
might think that a single unit of some generally useful resource such
as water is likely to do more good, result in a greater aggregate of
well-being among all persons, if the unit is provided to the person
suffering in hell rather than the person enjoying heavenly bliss. This
may be so. The straight utilitarian of well-being will then favor
provision of the unit of water to the inhabitant of hell. Now suppose
instead that a unit of some resource would provide exactly the same
increase in well-being if it is provided either to the person leading
the hellish or the person leading the blissful life. (Perhaps the
person already in bliss is a very efficient transformer of resources
into personal well-being.) The prioritarian gives priority to getting
benefits to those whose well-being level is low, so will favor helping
the miserable rather than the lucky person even if the well-being
aggregate is thereby reduced a bit, compared to what it would have been
if the resource had been channeled to the blissful person.




Prioritarianism holds that the moral value of achieving a benefit
for an individual (or avoiding a loss) is greater, the greater the size
of the benefit as measured by a well-being scale, and greater, the
lower the person's level of well-being over the course of her life
apart from receipt of this benefit. Well-being weighted by priority as
just specified is sometimes called "weighted well-being." To this
account of value the prioritarian adds the position that one ought to
act, and institutions should be arranged, so as to maximize moral value
as defined. (See chapter 2 of Scheffler 1982, Weirich 1983, Parfit
1997).




Prioritarianism is not vulnerable to the leveling down objection, so
if one finds that objection decisive against any position that takes
equality of any sort to be non-instrumentally valuable, priority looks
to be an ethically attractive alternative. Political conservatives
sometimes conjecture that the rancorous emotion of envy fuels the
impulse to egalitarian movements. With respect to a possible good and
your having it or my having it or both of us or neither of us having
it, if I am an envious person, I prefer my having it rather than your
having it and also prefer neither of us having it to your having it.
The prioritarian judgments as to what ought to be done do not reflect
the preferences of the envious. (Clarification: Envy as just described
corresponds to the ordinary common-sense notion of envy as a vice,
which should be sharply distinguished from the bland preference
constitutive of the No-envy fairness criterion. These are different
ideas.)




Another attractive feature of prioritarianism is that it promises to
combine in a single determinate principle the values of well-being
maximization and priority for the badly off. So elaborated, the
priority doctrine would contain a solution to the problem of
integrating the values of efficiency and equality broadly understood.
But this advantage is just notional pending a determination of how to
weight the competing values of well-being gains and priority in a
single principle. As stated, the priority doctrine does not specify a
determinate principle but a family of principles. At one extreme,
hardly any weight is given to priority as it competes with maximizing
well-being, and the prioritarian doctrine is then barely
distinguishable from straight act utilitarianism with utility
identified with well-being. At the other extreme, hardly any weight is
given to maximizing well-being as it competes with priority, and the
prioritarian doctrine is then barely distinguishable from the maximin
principle with well-being as the maximand. (Maximin holds that one
should choose that policy, among the alternatives, that brings about
the best position for the worst off individual affected by the policy
choice.)




The priority doctrine has been explicated as a version of welfarism.
One can see that the prioritarian idea itself is separable from any
commitment to welfarism. In general terms, the prioritarian holds that
the moral value of gaining a benefit for a person is greater, the lower
the benefit level of the person prior to receipt of the increment, and
greater, the greater the size of the benefit. So stated, the doctrine
admits of various interpretations that put different constructions on
the idea of "greater benefit." For example, if benefit is identified
with the Rawlsian idea of a primary social good, and one takes
prioritarianism beyond its limit to maximin, one then has the Rawlsian
conception, that justice in most general terms is bringing about the
best possible outcome for the very worst off. (See Rawls 1971, chapter
2, and for a defense of maximin, J. Cohen 1989.)




As characterized here, priority says one ought always to choose the
act that maximizes the moral value that is brought about, with moral
value being larger, the larger the benefit one brings about for a
person, and larger, the worse off the person would be absent this
benefit over the course of her life. A challenge to priority, raising a
doubt against the thought that morality should dispense with any
relational equality concern, points out that priority says that if
one's acts can affect only oneself, one morally must do the act
that maximizes one's lifetime benefit level. Here priority and
prudence coincide in their dictates as to what one should do. But
suppose the acts one can choose are risky, they might produce better or
worse outcomes. A natural extension of priority says that when
one's choices are risky and affect others, one should be risk
averse, the degree of risk aversion that is called for depending on how
much weight should be assigned to getting benefits to a person, the
worse off the person is. So far, so good. But priority applies to the
choice of a single person whose acts affect only himself: Consider
Robinson Crusoe alone on an island. He can choose to swim, which would
be fun but carries some risk of being eaten by a shark and dying
immediately, or instead climb coconut trees on the beach, less fun but
carrying no risk of harm as grave as a shark attack. Rational prudence,
we think, does not dictate that Crusoe be conservative in his choices
by giving extra weight to the outcome in which he suffers low lifetime
well-being. Prudence permits Crusoe to be risk-loving, risk-averse, or
risk-neutral is deciding among options such as swim with the sharks or
climb on the safe beach. But the natural extension of priority makes it
a strict moral requirement that he be risk-averse, giving extra weight
(above and beyond what his own preferences dictate) to avoiding the
outcome in which death right away induces low lifetime well-being. That
seems odd. We might respond by saying that egalitarian values only come
into play in dictating what we ought to do when our acts affect other
people, and thus affect how badly off or well off people are relative
to each other. When choices affect only the self, following ordinary
prudence is fine. That response abandons extended priority and
challenges the idea that priority captures our moral convictions
regarding why there is extra moral reason to help those who are worse
off than others (see Otsuka and Voorhoeve 2009).




The prioritarian can choose among several ways to stave off the
Otsuka and Voorhoeve challenge. The most sensible response may be
simply to bite the bullet and, in effect, acknowledge that Crusoe has
special reason to avoid the sharks. This does not mean that taking
risks that would bring it about that one's absolute well-being
level is low is never or seldom rational. Dangerous sports, after all,
can provide sublime experience. In fact, accepting a slight risk of a
fatal car crash by driving across town to get better quality bread,
when one's available choices affect only oneself, may be
perfectly rational. But priority tells us to put a thumb on the scale
so as to favor avoiding very bad life outcomes. It is difficult to
assess the acceptability of this implication of the doctrine pending
some specification of the priority weights as they bear on decision
making.


### 6.3 Desert




Egalitarian transfers will in some circumstances be recommended by
yet another principle that cares nothing for equality per se (Kagan
1999 and 2012). This is the principle of desert: *It is desirable
that each person should gain good fortune corresponding to her virtue
(deservingness)*. As construed here, the desert principle
presupposes that individuals' virtue is cardinally interpersonally
measureable. A number can then be assigned to each person indicating
that person's level of virtue; persons assigned higher numbers have
greater virtue. Suppose that for each number there is a specific amount
of good fortune or well-being that an individual with that number
indicating her amount of virtue deserves to have. This is the level of
good fortune that corresponds to one's virtue. This level is higher for
the more virtuous, lower for the less virtuous. (One might allow that
very non-virtuous persons deserve some level of bad fortune or negative
well-being.)




Suppose one adds to the desert principle the further norm that when
a person has less than she deserves, it is morally more valuable to
gain an increment of good fortune for that person, the greater the gap
between what she has and what she deserves. Call the further norm the
greater gap principle. Just as the prioritarian regards it as morally
more valuable (a matter of greater moral urgency) to gain a benefit for
a person, the worse off in absolute terms she would otherwise be, the
greater-gap desertitarian as just characterized holds that it is
morally more valuable (a matter of greater moral urgency) to gain a
benefit for a person, the greater the shortfall (if any) between the
benefit level she has and the benefit level she deserves. Accepting the
desert principle and the greater gap principle, one will then sometimes
favor egalitarian transfers purely from considerations of desert.




Just as someone might fail to notice that in some situations both
priority and equality will both recommend equalizing transfers, and so
wrongly think that she favors the transfer in these situations because
she values equality per se, someone might fail to notice that in some
situations desert and equality will both recommend equalizing
transfers, and so wrongly think that she favors the transfer in these
situations because she values equality per se. The situation is
clarified when one considers examples in which priority and equality
disagree about what ought to be done, and examples in which desert and
equality disagree about what ought to be done. Shelly Kagan presses the
proposal that when we consider a wide range of views and examples, we
should conclude that bringing it about that people should get good
fortune corresponding to their virtue rightly commands our allegiance
and bringing it about that people get the same or have the same does
not rightly command our allegiance.




Kagan poses many examples and tests our responses to them (Kagan
1999 and 2012). An important range of examples involves situations in
which a person is badly off, but has more than he deserves, and another
person is well off, but has less than he deserves. Kagan suggests that
for each person at a given level of deservingness, there is some
absolute level of benefit or well-being that is exactly what the person
deserves. From the standpoint of desert, getting this amount is ideal,
better than getting either more or less. Kagan calls this level of
benefit for a person with a specified deservingness score that
person's *peak*. Now consider a saint who is very well
off, but is way below her peak, and consider a sinner who is very badly
off, but still is far beyond her peak. The sinner enjoys more good
fortune than she deserves, the saint less. Now we face a choice: we can
help either the sinner or the saint but not both. An advocate of
equality says, help the badly off person, the sinner. An advocate of
priority will say the same. Kagan suggests to the contrary that we
should regard it as morally the better course of action to aid the
saint, who has less than she deserves, rather than to help the sinner,
who already has more than she deserves. Kagan suggests that rewarding
desert trumps any moral imperative to equalize (or
"prioritize"). Kagan adds a further suggestion: that
getting what one deserves matters more, the more deserving one is. The
sinner's getting less than she deserves is less of a big deal,
morally speaking, than the saint's getting less than she
deserves.




In reply: the advocate of equality (or priority) might stiff-arm the
idea that people should get what they deserve. Maybe in a diverse
modern society any standard of virtue will be contestable, and so not a
good building block for constructing fundamental moral principles.
Maybe we are all determined by prior conditions and causes to behave
just as we do, and this fact properly understood should lead us to hold
either that the idea of being deserving lacks clear sense or that
everyone's deservingness score is the same. On either view,
rewarding the deserving is not a moral imperative. At most doing this
will be a means to other goals, not desirable for its own sake.




Even if we cannot endorse the flat denial that rewarding the
deserving has any moral value, we might give this norm decisively
subordinate status. One suggestion along this line denies the idea that
there are "peaks"--a level of benefit for each person
such that his becoming better off is bad from the standpoint of desert.
Instead we might say that desert only establishes a comparative ranking
among individuals. Being deserving or undeserving enhances or dampens
the moral reason to bring it about that one gains further benefits or
avoids further losses, but never to the point that gaining further
benefits or avoiding further losses has negative value. So to speak,
being more or less deserving puts one toward the front or rear of the
line of people eligible for benefits, but does not ever make one
morally ineligible for a better life. Along the same line, one might
allow that desert reasons compete with equality or priority reasons,
but give decisively less weight to desert reasons.


### 6.4 Other Views




Just about any moral principles might require moves toward equality
of some sort across persons in some actual, likely, or conceivable
circumstances. Utilitarianism says that one ought always to do whatever
would maximize aggregate welfare. In some circumstances doing that
would require working especially hard to boost the welfare of the
disadvantaged, and so to bring about a state of affairs that is closer
to equality of welfare than would otherwise have come about. Sometimes
in order to maximize aggregate welfare one would need to transfer
income or wealth from rich to poor, and thus bring about a closer
approximation to the state of affairs in which all persons have the
same income or wealth or both. A Lockean natural rights view holds that
one is always bound by a strict moral duty to respect everyone's
natural rights, come what may. It might be that in some circumstances
doing what brings about greater equality of some sort across persons
would be a good means to bringing it about that one respects the
natural rights of other people that morality says one ought to respect.
In other situations increasing equality might be a byproduct of the
course of action that one is morally obliged to take, according to
Lockean morality, in order to respect people's natural
rights.




It should be clear that even if some contingent connections of these
sorts hold between promoting equality and acting in conformity with
some quite different moral view whose best articulation contains no
essential reference to equality promotion, the quite different moral
view is not thereby revealed to be egalitarian. At the outset of this
survey broad and narrow egalitarianism were distinguished. The former
says equality is at least instrumentally valuable and should be
promoted; the latter says equality is non-instrumentally valuable and
should on that ground be promoted. To show that some moral doctrine
supports broad egalitarianism one would need to show not just that the
view might conceivably, given some logically possible circumstances,
support the claim that equality of some sort should be promoted, but
rather that given the world as it is and is likely to be, the doctrine
in question is often or usually or always aligned with broad
egalitarianism.




Sufficiency, priority, and desert are rivals of narrow
egalitarianism. Advocates of each of these views have argued that the
rival often supports equalization, and so one might mistakenly support
equalization on the ground that equality of some sort is
non-instrumentally valuable. But once one examines a broader sample of
examples, and reviews situations in which the rival and narrow
egalitarianism yield opposed recommendations as to what should be done,
one should conclude that the rival, and not any version of narrow
egalitarianism, should be affirmed as non-instrumentally valuable and
incorporated into the set of fundamental moral principles. Or so the
advocates of the rivals will say.




To defend the position that equality is per se morally desirable one
would need carefully to investigate the scenarios in which egalitarian
transfers are attractive and the variety of principles that would
support egalitarian transfers in those scenarios. If the norm of
equality does not match our considered judgments after wide reflection,
we should be content to be instrumental egalitarians if we are
determined to be egalitarians at all.



**7. Egalitarian Standards for Institutions and Individual
Conduct**




Egalitarian principles might apply only to individual conduct, only
to institutions, to both, or neither. The same principles might apply
to individual conduct and institutions, or it could be that different
principles apply in each domain.




One reason for supposing that more demanding egalitarian principles
apply to the enactment of laws and public policies and to the conduct
of states than to individual conduct is that the reasons to insist that
the state choose its actions according to impartial standards, treating
all citizens impartially, are stronger than the reasons to insist that
individuals in private life should choose actions according to
impartial standards, treating all fellow citizens who might be affected
by one's choices impartially. In private life, an individual is
permitted to favor herself over others. An individual is also permitted
to favor her own friends and family members over other people in many
contexts (not when she is an employer selecting who among those who
have applied for a job should be selected for employment, nor is she
permitted to offer goods and services for sale to some while refusing
to sell these same commodities to others). Individuals are thought to have wide discretion
to pursue their own projects in their own way. In contrast, the state
is widely supposed to be entitled to favor the interests of its
citizens living with its jurisdiction over the interests of noncitizens
living outside its jurisdiction, but is required to be strictly
impartial in treating citizens. In the words of Ronald Dworkin, the
state is obliged to treat all citizens with equal concern and
respect.




The considerations advanced in the previous paragraph could be given
a stronger or a weaker interpretation. On the stronger reading, the
principles that determine morally acceptable state actions have no
implications for what individuals should do in private life. The
principles for state action might in principle be entirely separate and
distinct from the principles that determine morally acceptable
individual conduct. On the weaker reading, the principles that regulate
state action might have implications for what individuals should do in
their private as well as public roles and might partially determine the
standards regulating individual conduct. Nonetheless individuals
generally should have greater permission to deviate from strict
impartiality in deciding how to act when their actions could help
others than states should have.




Even those sympathetic to the position just outlined are likely to
acknowledge the position must be qualified and hedged in some ways.
Consider racial discrimination. Suppose we hold that the state should
not engage in discriminatory conduct on the basis of racial
classifications even to advance morally worthy goals--imagine that
in some circumstances guiding police behavior by racial profiling would
be a cost-effective measure to reduce crime. The reasons we hold it is
wrong for the state to engage in racial discrimination would appear to
carry over to private discriminatory behavior by citizens. It would be
wrongful racial discrimination to choose my friends according to their
race or skin color. Private action by individuals that expresses hatred
of people on grounds of their race or skin color is wrong for pretty
much the same reasons that it would be wrong for a state to pass and
enforce laws and public policies that express hatred of people on
grounds of their race or skin color.




To illustrate some of the complexities of determining how
egalitarian principles regulating state action and egalitarian
principles regulating individual conduct might be related, consider
John Rawls's view that the primary subject of justice is the
basic structure of society--core institutions including the state,
private ownership and the market economy, and the family as they
interact and affect people's fundamental life prospects. Rawls
devises a special argument designed to generate principles for the
regulation of the basic structure of society that we, contemplating
this argument, should accept as principles that determine what must be
true if the basic structure is to qualify as just. The special argument
device, which Rawls calls the "original position," is also
deployed to select principles of individual conduct associated with the
principles of justice, but these principles merely state that
individuals should support just institutions. When the basic structure
of society is just, individuals should support it and conform to its
norms and rules, and if the basic structure is not just individuals
should cooperate with others to bring about a just basic structure so
long as they can do so at moderate cost and risk to themselves (Rawls
1999, chapters 2 and 3).




For purposes of examining the relationship between requirements on
individuals and requirements on institutions in a theory of justice, I
shall simplify Rawls's theory and suppose it simply mandates that
the basic structure institutions should be arranged so that the primary
social good holdings of the worst off sector of society are maximized.
(As is well known, Rawls's theory also includes a principle of
equal liberty that mandates that a fully adequate scheme of civil and
political liberties be secured for all and a principle of fair equality
of opportunity that requires that inequalities in primary social good
holdings be attached to positions and offices open to all in such a way
that those with equal ambition and equal native talent have equal
chances of being competitively successful. These principles take
lexical priority over the difference principle [Rawls 1999, chapters
2-4]).




There is undoubtedly a certain appeal to the strategy of holding the
legal, coercive structure of legal rules to be the entity that delivers
distributive justice according to the difference principle. The laws
including laws regulating contract, property, torts, and family are set
so that, as compared to any alternative set of rules that might be
chosen, they work to maximize the long-run primary social good holdings
of the people who have least of these. In private life, and carrying out
private decisions within the institutions regulated by the coercive
rules, the individual citizen has complete liberty to act according to
her own values and preferences so long as she obeys the legal rules
that apply to her. The strategy reflects a balance of liberty and
equality (Nagel 1991).




The adoption of the strategy also reflects the view that the
coercively imposed basic structure of society including its political
constitution must be acceptable to all reasonable persons in a diverse
society in which reasonable people disagree widely in their
comprehensive conceptions of the right and the good. Since any attempt
to impose egalitarian norms on individual economic choices would be
unavoidably controversial and socially divisive, the just society
eschews the attempt, on principle (Scheffler 2010, chapter 5).




In several of his writings G. A. Cohen has mounted an attack on the
Rawlsian position that the basic structure is the primary subject of
justice and that beyond supporting just institutions individuals are
not morally required to pursue justice goals including the difference
principle in their choices of how to live (Cohen 2000 and 2008, see
also Murphy 1998). In a nutshell, Cohen objects that in a society in which
people and institutions are just according to Rawls's standards,
the people endorse the difference principle: they believe institutions
should be set to make the condition of the worst off in primary goods
holdings as good as it can be made. However, their own actions,
individually and in the ensemble, will have an impact on the condition
of the least advantaged members of society. Hence their acceptance of
the difference principle ought to have implications for the conduct of
their lives. Grant that each person is free to live as she chooses, to
some extent, without being required in every action to do her utmost to
bring about the fullest realization of social justice in the universe.
Each person has a legitimate personal prerogative to do actions that
produce less than the best outcome within certain moral limits
(Scheffler 1982). But the prerogative gives out, and where it does, if
one is committed to the difference principle, one will make decisions
concerning work and career that will aim to improve the condition of
the worst off. Suppose one holds instead that justice requires an equal
distribution of benefits and burdens among the members of society,
except when inequality arises in a way for which the person who ends up
with less should properly be held responsible (Cohen 2008). Then also,
one will, to some considerable extent, shape one's economic
behavior with this egalitarian aim in view, if one is seriously
committed to the idea that justice demands equality.




If justice is a fair distribution of benefits and burdens across
people, and if one's economic behavior affects the degree to
which justice obtains, then if one is committed to justice, one must,
to some degree, guide one's behavior by that commitment. So Cohen
urges. He complains that Rawls countenances a split in the thinking and
action of the just individual in an imagined fully just society that
does not make sense. The Rawlsian just individual supports the
difference principle as the regulative standard for institutions, for
the basic structure of society, but does not regulate his own life
choices in daily economic affairs and career choices by the difference
principle. Cohen objects that this split personality cannot be an
ideally just person, contrary to what Rawls claims (Rawls 1999).
According to Cohen a fully just society regulated by egalitarian
principles would include an egalitarian ethos that instructs
individuals that each should do her bit towards sustaining equality by
her everyday choices. Individuals internalize the egalitarian ethos and
are guided by it in their economic choices, and hence will not be
disposed to bargain hard for extra pay and benefits in exchange for
making efficient contributions to the economy. They will rather be
disposed to cooperate with others efficiently in their economic
interactions without requiring the spur of economic incentives. In this
way a thoroughly just Rawlsian society populated by just individuals
achieves more egalitarian outcomes while maximizing the benefits that
go to the worst off than a Rawlsian society regulated in the split
personality fashion. (Cohen also challenges Rawls's argument for
the difference principle. Cohen claims that Rawls starts with a
consideration favoring equality that illicitly gets dropped as his
discussion proceeds. Cohen then holds that Rawls, and we, should
believe that justice requires equality, even if pragmatic nonjustice
grounds favor the difference principle, which does not incorporate the
idea that equality is non-instrumentally morally valuable. (See Cohen
2008, chapter 4). But in the argument being considered here, Cohen
accepts the difference principle *arguendo*, and argues that Rawls does
not fully acknowledge the implications of his own commitment to
it.)




A Rawlsian rejoinder to Cohen might point out that the principles of
justice including the difference principle are principles for the
regulation of the basic structure of society. Accepting the difference
principle as a standard for institutional arrangements is not
tantamount to accepting the difference principle as a guide to
one's personal life. Cohen insists this position is unstable.
Rawls holds that the basic structure of society is the primary subject
of justice because its effects on people's fundamental life
prospects are so deep and widespread. But voluntary choices of
individuals within institutions such as the economy and the family also
massively shape people's fundamental life prospects. According to
Cohen, the rationale for taking the basic structure to be the primary
subject of justice is also a rationale for taking people's
choices within the basic structure to be incorporated in the primary
subject of justice. Perhaps the principles of justice in their
application to individuals take a somewhat different form than they do
in their application to institutions. Recall here Cohen's
acceptance of the idea that each individual has a Scheffler prerogative
to pursue her own projects and aims, to some extent, and not always to
be acting with a view to promoting justice. But Cohen's bottom
line is that if justice requires the promotion of a moral goal,
acceptance of that moral goal as a requirement of justice by the
individual must commit her to acting in her own life with a view to
promoting that goal.




Several issues arise in considering Cohen versus Rawls. According to
Rawls, a just society is a fair scheme of cooperation among persons
regarded as free and equal. Each is free in having the ability and the
right to develop and pursue a conception of the good and also the
ability and the disposition to cooperate with others on fair terms. In
any modern, diverse society that refrains from clearly unacceptable
restriction of freedom, individuals will develop allegiance to
different and opposed conceptions of the right and the good, and a
conception of justice that can elicit everyone's reasonable
acceptance must be acceptable to the different reasonable ethical views
that individuals espouse. The moral equality of persons generates this
unanimity requirement. To satisfy this requirement, a justice doctrine
must be built up from ideas deeply embedded in the culture of modern
democracies. To enable satisfaction of this requirement, reasonable
citizens do not press as justice norms controversial, sectarian
doctrines that some cannot reasonably accept. When we act together as
citizens through the state, we act on the basis of shared reasons, a
common ideal of justice. But each of us has different ultimate ethical
allegiances, and no single idea of what demands morality places on us
to promote justice in our private conduct will make sense to all of us.
Moreover, it would be a form of tyranny to require that we generally
act only on the shared reasons of justice throughout our lives rather
than on the aims and ambitions that are uniquely our own. In a just
society, individuals in their daily lives will decide from their own
individual ethical perspectives what goals to pursue, including justice
goals, within constraints set by the rights of others. There is no
social consensus on this issue, so no particular view of the demands of
justice promotion in ordinary life will be part of a conception of
justice that all can accept (see generally Rawls 2005).




The defender of the Cohen side of this debate will insist that
reasonable people can make mistakes, so the fact, if it is a fact, that
any particular view of the positive duties to promote justice and
equality in daily life that we should accept will fail to gain
unanimous support does not necessarily impugn the particular view. Some
such view may be correct though controversial. Also, the egalitarian
ethos with its demands on individual daily conduct is not supposed to
be legally enforceable, rather it is supposed to be a social norm
backed by informal sanctions and rational persuasion. Still, justice
demands an egalitarian ethos, and individual conduct in conformity with
it. So the defender of the Cohen position will hold. This is a tricky
issue. It may be difficult to determine to what extent Cohenites and
Rawlsians are in substantial disagreement, as opposed to arguing past
each other. It may be still more difficult to determine which side (if
either one) is right on the points that substantially divide them.




Stepping back from the Cohen versus Rawls polemic (on which, see
Williams 1998, Pogge 2000, Scheffler 2006, and Shiffrin 2010), we
should note that any theory of egalitarian justice must indicate how
its requirements for institutions and practices mesh with its views
concerning what justice requires of individuals. For example, any
ordinary person seeking to fashion a fulfilling life for himself will
form friendships and close family ties and other associations that will
command his loyalty. Being a good friend, one will be partial to
one's friend over others in some contexts; being a good family
member, one will be partial to one's family members over others;
being a good citizen, one will (perhaps, this case is more
controversial) have a special loyalty to one's compatriots. These
special-tie commitments appear to be unavoidably in tension with any
commitment to any impartial justice norms (Scheffler 2003). Suppose we
accept the idea that the person committed to egalitarianism will not
seek to expunge all personal commitments from her life but will seek to
accommodate impartial ethical and partial concerns in some way that does
justice to both. What way is that? Presumably the answer will vary
across the different types of personal commitments that might lead one
to do what cuts against justice requirements. Relations to colleagues,
family members, friends, lovers, parents, children, ethnic and social
group comrades, and so on will pose different sorts of problems that
will require different sorts of accommodations and adjustments. A
complete egalitarian theory includes principles that would properly
guide these accommodations and adjustments. (For an attempt to work out
these issues for one domain, that of parents and children, from a
perspective sympathetic to Cohen's line, see Brighouse and Swift
2009).


## 8. Equal Fundamental Human Worth




Egalitarian justice doctrines rest on the fundamental premise that
all persons have the same fundamental worth and dignity, which commands
respect. An aristocratic doctrine that held that all lords are
inherently superior to commoners and hence ought to have greater rights
and privileges would reject the basic equal human worth premise.
However, acceptance of this fundamental or background egalitarian
premise need not per se commit one to any very substantive egalitarian
ethic. Accepting basic equal human worth, one might cheerfully maintain
that the correct ethic is egoism, that each person ought to strive to
bring about her own advantage as best she can. Or one might hold that
there is no moral requirement that the inhabitants of a political
community should share equally in political power or political rights,
and no moral requirement that people who happen to become better off
should help the worse off.




The gap between equal fundamental human worth and a substantive
egalitarian ethic is exposed in *Utilitarianism*, chapter 5,
when Mill avers that utilitarianism incorporates the fundamental
principle of equality, that in the determination of what to do, each
person's interests should count exactly the same as any other
person's exactly similar interest. On this basis he denies that
utilitarianism, the doctrine that one ought always to do whatever
maximizes aggregate utility, comes into conflict with the
recommendations for conduct of a justice norm of equality (Mill 1979).
The utilitarian rule "everyone to count for one, nobody for more
than one" is already a substantive egalitarian norm, which goes
beyond the bare assertion of equal basic human worth. However, there
are egalitarian doctrines that insist on equal treatment of persons in
some more robust sense, which neither equal basic moral worth nor
utilitarian equal counting necessarily delivers. Some egalitarians
might hold that equal free speech rights or democratic rights for all
should be upheld even if denial of free speech or voting rights in
particular circumstances would lead to the greatest total of utility or
happiness. Some egalitarians might hold that it would be morally better
to bring about a situation in which there is somewhat less aggregate
utility (human good) dispersed equally among all people than an
alternative situation in which the utility total is larger but its
distribution is extremely unequal across persons.




The assertion that all persons have equal basic moral worth is not
transparently clear. What is being asserted? I will try to elucidate
the idea by giving two examples of its application. A Lockean theory
holds that all persons equally have certain natural moral rights. Just
being a person confers on one the same package of rights that every
other person possesses. One can perhaps forfeit some of these rights by
bad conduct, but initially the protections the rights afford are the
same for all. If possession of rational agency capacity confers moral
worth, and having this moral worth makes you a possessor of natural
rights, equal worth gives everyone equal natural rights. For another
example, a utilitarian might also hold that being a person makes the
fulfillment of your interests and the achievement of your good just as
valuable as the fulfillment and achievement of any other person's
identical welfare gains. Your good weighs the same as anyone
else's on the scale that determines what outcomes would be best
and so what ought to be done (and a boost to any person's welfare
morally counts for more than an identical boost in welfare that instead
might be brought about for any lesser, nonperson sentient creature).
What equal basic worth of persons implies regarding how persons should
be treated varies from moral theory to moral theory and depends on the
structure and content of the particular theory.




The assertion that all persons have equal basic moral worth and
dignity calls out for justification or at least elucidation. What is it
about persons that renders them all morally equal in some fundamental
sense? One proposal is that a being becomes morally considerable by
gaining some capacity for rational agency, for thinking through what
ought to be done and setting one's will to do it, and that if one
attains rational agency capacity at a certain threshold level, one
becomes a full person, and further increases in rational agency above
that threshold line that some might attain would not affect one's
fundamental status of being a person with the same worth and dignity
possessed by all other persons (Nozick 1974, chapter 3).




This proposal has the attractive feature that it treats evenhandedly
members of the human species and members of any other species of being
there might be anywhere in the universe. If any beings possess rational
agency capacity at a threshold level, they are persons and have the
moral worth and dignity that attaches to persons. The proposal also
provides an attractive approach to the issue of what rights and duties
humans and other animals have with respect to each other. The proposal
suggests that the more it is the case that an individual being attains
some degree of rational agency capacity, below the threshold of full
personhood, the more morally considerable that being is.




Though attractive, the proposal faces difficulties that have not so
far been solved. One initial difficulty is to specify and justify the
threshold that marks the personhood boundary. There are evidently
different components of rational agency capacity, such as the ability
to perceive features of one's environment, the ability to
recognize and assess reasons for choice, the ability to deliberate and
choose, the ability to form intentions and carry through what one has
decided, and so on. To speak of rational agency capacity as one
capacity presupposes some way of adding together an individual's
component ability levels into one overall capacity. Then there is a
line drawing problem: What justifies identifying the level of capacity
that marks one as a person here rather than there? A perhaps more
troublesome difficulty is that it is not at all obvious why the fact
that people differ in their attainment of rational agency capacity
above the threshold of personhood does not bring about difference in
their fundamental moral status. Why doesn't the fact that you
possess more of the very capacities for reasoning, insight, choice, and
effective volition that qualified us as persons than I do render it the
case that you are morally more considerable than I, have a higher
fundamental moral worth? (see Carter 2011 and Waldron 2003). There is
the further question how to determine what degree of moral worth or
moral considerability attaches to beings who possess some rational
agency capacities below the threshold level, or who possess capacities
of some other sort such as bare sentience that should be regarded as
moral considerability qualifications. And finally, Peter Vallentyne
poses yet another worry (Vallentyne 2007). Suppose that we take
rational agency capacity to be the basis of personhood. What then do we
say about newborn human infants or normal young human children, who
surely lack rational agency capacity at any plausible threshold level.
If we say, the newborn human is a potential person, hence entitled to
rights close to those of persons, the problem arises that in the
future, when we have better genetic therapies available, and by
applying expensive genetic treatment to a normal mouse, could endow it
with rational agency capacity, the normal mouse looks likely to qualify
as a potential person if the newborn or young human does.