Lecture 4: equality Flashcards
(13 cards)
Spotlight: Dworkin
resource and welfare egalitarians
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)
Dworkin argues against welfare, because:
-How do you define or measure welfare? (difficult to make a system that measures happiness)
Dworkin’s point is not the welfare – utility – is not important. What you need is a balance of utility and equality
option luck
Outcomes resulting from deliberate choices and calculated risks (e.g., gambling or career decisions).
Dworkin believes inequalities from option luck are justified as they stem from personal responsibility.
Brute Luck
Inequalities caused by factors beyond an individual’s control (e.g., genetic inheritance, accidents, or social background).
Dworkin argues that these inequalities should be corrected by redistributing resources to ensure fairness.
Dworkin’s Desert Island Thought Experiment
Establishing Value: Use a market auction to assign value to goods.
Correcting Inequality: Apply the envy test — distribution is fair if no one envies another’s resources.
Key Principle: If envy occurs, re-auction to ensure fairness and equal value of resources.
with a hypothetical insurance
Dworkin’s Equality of Resources
Ambition-sensitive: Inequality is justified if it results from individual choices and efforts.
Endowment-insensitive: Inequality is not justified if it stems from natural advantages or disadvantages (e.g., wealth, talent).
Improves Rawls by balancing equality with personal ambition. and critiques Nozick (by the endowment critique)
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 (sensitive to these kind of lucks)”
There are numerous issues Dworkins position raises:
-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 cohere
Egalitarian Plateau (Kymlicka)
The egalitarian plateau is the consensus among political philosophers that all individuals should be treated as equals within a political community.
It includes:
Equality as citizens: Everyone has the same rights to vote and run for office.
Equality before the law: Everyone is treated equally by the law (regardless of race, gender, etc.).
However, the application of these concepts is debated in practice, as factors like wealth and social power can influence the effectiveness of equality.
Recognition over Redistribution (Honneth & Fraser)
Instead of focusing solely on equality and redistribution, recognition should be prioritized.
Recognition involves acknowledging rights, cultural appreciation, and love.
The issue with inequality is not just unequal distribution but the hierarchical relationships it creates (e.g., viewing women as less than men).
Unequal social relations lead to marginalization, exploitation, and domination, not just from class, but from other hierarchies (e.g., gender, race, sexuality).
Some groups (e.g., LGBT) may seek equal treatment rather than redistribution, but lack of recognition still leads to wider inequalities.
Recognition and Inequality (Feminism & Social Relations)
Gender Equality: Beyond equal pay, it involves ending oppressive relationships (e.g., patriarchy) and redefining societal views on gender roles.
Self-Respect: A person’s self-respect is influenced by their social standing and recognition from others. It’s about more than basic needs—participating in society and being regarded as equal matters.
Community: Inequality may lead to economic growth but can create a divided society, lacking solidarity and shared well-being. Solidarity is essential for human flourishing.
positional goods
Definition: Goods where one person’s gain means another’s loss, often because they confer relational superiority.
Example: University education—limited spaces mean some will miss out, and its value comes from its scarcity and social status.
Key Point: People value positional goods not based on their absolute level, but on how much they have relative to others.
Utilitarianism & Equality
What it looks like: Utilitarianism seems egalitarian because it aims to maximize well-being for everyone.
What it actually is: It’s aggregative, meaning it focuses on maximizing total utility rather than ensuring an equal distribution of it.
Key Point: In utilitarianism, the distribution of resources or utility is incidental, with the goal being only to maximize the total amount, not to ensure equality.
Priority & Sufficiency
What it looks like: Prioritarianism seems egalitarian but isn’t.
Key Idea: The belief in equality often stems from the feeling that some people need things more than others, and satisfying these needs is more valuable.
Diminishing Principles: This principle holds that the greater the need, the greater the value in addressing it, making it a focus on need rather than equality itself.
-In short: the underlying principle is not equality, it is “prioritizing”. Rawls is considered to be prioritarian
Thus: Sufficiency – the point here is not equality, but simply the desire that everyone has enough.-But where do you define the threshold of sufficiency
