Lecture 4 Flashcards
Why equality
- Is equality even a value?
- Obviously people are naturally unequal: people are bigger, smaller, faster, etc.
- And they are logically unequal: in math, if two things are equal, they are identical. But humans are not.
- In political philosophy, equality is not a fact but a value. So, why do we value equality?
- Because, ceteris paribus, its better that people be considered equal. Now we have a problem: we believe in equality in principle, but we need to do some work to understand why and in what
circumstances and to what extent.
Equality of what?
Is it that we think we should have…
- Equality of resources – things at our disposal, like money.
- Equality of opportunity – ability to take positions in society.
- Equality of outcomes – success in having achieved those resources and positions.
- Equality of wellbeing – general contentedness with one’s lot.
Or is it not about equality at all?
- Or is it not about equality at all. Do we believe…
- We should have enough to live on - sufficiency.
- That people in great need are taken care of first - priority.
Dworkin
- Dworkin suggests a difference between welfare and resources.
- Welfare-Egalitarians care about outcomes (that everyone is happy)
- Resource-Egalitarians care about opportunity (that everyone starts in the same place)
QUOTE IN SLIDES.
Dworkin argues against welfare, because:
- How do you define or measure welfare?
- And there are problems: for example, what to do about expensive tastes?
- Welfare eliminates individual responsibility – you have to find your own way to be happy; you can’t expect the government
to do this for you.
Dworkin’s point is not the welfare
- Dworkin’s point is not the welfare – utility – is not important. What you need is a balance of utility and
equality: - “A just society will make some compromise between efficiency and distribution. It will sometimes tolerate less than perfect
equality in order to improve average utility” (1981a: 235).
Dworkin’s thought experiment
- He begins by stipulating that a functioning market economy is the friend, not enemy, of equality.
- But how do you establish the value of goods?
- And how do you account for the distribution of tastes?
- Thought experiment: Immigrants land on a desert island. How do you start a society?
- Use the market! Establish an auction to determine the value of goods …
- … And the “envy test” to correct for errors of judgment:
The envy test
“Equality of resources supposes that the resources devoted to each person’s life should be equal. That goal needs a metric.
The auction proposes what the envy test in fact assumes, that the true measure of the social resources devoted to the life of
one person is fixed by asking how important, in fact, that resource is for others. It insists that the cost, measured in that
way, figure in each person’s sense of what is rightly his and in each person’s judgment of what life he should lead” (289).
Hypothetical insurance
“[To supplement the auction the immigrants] now establish a hypothetical insurance market which they effectuate through
compulsory insurance at a fixed premium for everyone based on speculations about what the average immigrant would
have purchased by way of insurance had the antecedent risk of various handicaps been equal” (301).
Dworkin and Rawls
On its face, this system sounds like Rawls’ system (specifically via the insurance scheme).
- But it improves it in certain ways:
- It starts with a baseline of equality, but allows for differences in ambition.
- In other words: it is ambition-sensitive, but endowment insensitive.
- It seems like a “starting gate” theory – but it isn’t: QUOTE IN SLIDES.
How do we create Dworkin’s system?
So how do we do create such a system?
- By distinguishing between different kinds of luck:
- “Option luck is a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out – whether someone gains or loses through
accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined. Brute luck is a matter of how risks fall
out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles” (Dworkin 2000: 73).
Dworkin’s achievement
- Adapts the Rawlsian thesis to allow for differences of ambition …
- … And controls for the kind of luck that is oblique to concerns of justice.
- This positions is hereafter called “luck-egalitarianism”.
Issues with Dworkin’s position
Inter-Generational Giving: do we get to pass gifts down to our kids?
- Radical Mind Changes: what if we change our conception of the good? Does this legitimate a “fresh stock of resources”?
- Profligacy: What if one wastes everything to a point where they are below subsistence?
- Politics: How do we control for political power? Is a theory of economic equality without political equality coherent?
Egalitarian plateau
- Nearly all political philosophers agree with the principle of equality to some degree – what Kymlicka calls the
‘egalitarian plateau’: - All individuals (within a political community) should be treated as equals – i.e. with concern and respect.
- Equality as citizens: (right to vote, right to run for office, etc).
- Equality before the law: (There is only one law for black/white, men/women, etc).
- But are these so straightforward?
- Equality as citizens: But do we really think that the rich have the same voice as the poor?
- Equality before the law. But does this formal fact of law signify equal treatment by the law?
- These latter points returns us to the question of whether we care about ‘formal freedom’ or ‘effective freedom’.
Spotlight recognition
So everyone values treating all people with “equal concern and respect”, but fall short of advocating equality.
What do we make of this?
* One answer is to shift our focus towards social relations – i.e. recognition – rather than redistribution (Axel
Honneth and Nancy Fraser). They suggest:
- The problem is not equality as such, but rather the kind of thing that inequality brings – namely hierarchical relationships
between peoples.
- Recognition encompasses both the “recognition of rights” and “cultural appreciation,” as well as the claims of “love” (3).
* Unequal social relations leads to numerous harms:
- marginalization
- exploitation
- domination
* This does not distill to redistributive claims: for example, LGBT communities may want to be treated as equals,
but do not necessarily have redistributive demands.
- But this may also feedback into redistribution: these themselves may correlate with inequalities of goods.
