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Equal Opportunity or Equal Social Outcome?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Marc Fleurbaey
Affiliation:
Thema–Université de Cergy-Pontoise

Extract

John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how this selection ought to be carried out.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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