Equality or Priority, Derek Parfit
What is it about equality that makes it good? Is it intrinsically good or does it just lead to better outcomes?
The pure egalitarian (or telic egalitarian) views ex post equality as intrinsically good. Someone's starting position matters when determining distribution and the TE would be indifferent between equality brought about by raising the standards of the lowest or lowering the standards of the highest. Their primary concern is people being equally well off.
"The Principle of Equality: It is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others."(p84)
"The Principle of Utility: It is in itself better if people are better off."(p84)
Most people are pluralist egalitarians but their inability to demonstrate when one principle should take priority over another indicates that they are intuitionists.
Contrasts the instrumental with the intrinsic value of equality. He criticises Nagel 2 'intrinsic' arguments as being instrumental:
- the individual argument that inequality is bad because it causes envy, unhappiness etc
- the communitarian argument that equality is a condition of the right kinds of relations in society.
Deontic egalitarianism is a position of comparative justice - inequality depends on whether people are treated differently from others without some morally relevant difference.
Alternatively, the justice could be non-comparative - only concerned with an individual and what they deserve (COUNTER-ARG: the only think one deserves is equal treatment for equal action and in this sense justice is comparative)
"Only comparative justice makes equality our aim" (p85)
Makes a distinction that justice can be purely procedural - it only demands that we act in a certain way; or it might be substantive - concerned with the outcome. Or equality could be required to avoid some procedural fault such as favouritism: equality is thus the default position. (p85)
Are we objecting to the state of affairs or merely the way it was produced? (p86)
Parfit misinterprets Rawles as a telic egalitarian (p91). The injustice of a caste system is not the result of who one's parents are (windfall luck) but that a social system makes this criteria important. We can't change our birth but we can change its importance as a deciding factor of life.
Rawles' conception of luck:
- windfall luck: inequality entirely due to the state of nature
- productive luck: equal skill and effort leads to different outcomes
- genetic luck: differences due to peoples nature
There is an important difference between inequalities that are not justified and inequalities that are unjustified. Only the latter requires redress. (p93)
@article{parfit1997equity, author = {Parfit, Derek}, title = {Equality and Priority}, journal = {Ratio}, volume = {10}, number = {3}, publisher = {Blackwell Publishers Ltd}, issn = {1467-9329}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9329.00041}, doi = {10.1111/1467-9329.00041}, pages = {202--221}, year = {1997}, }