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Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods and Capabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2016

G. A. Cohen
G. A. Cohen*
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
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Summary

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called Equality of What? Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realised in a given society. In this study I comment on answers to Sen’s question in recent philosophical literature. I describe and criticize what a number of authors (and notably Rawls and Sen) of egalitarian persuasion have said about the dimension(s) or respect(s) in which people should be made more equal, when the price in other values of moving towards greater equality is not intolerable.

Résumé

Résumé

Amartya Sen, à l’occasion de sa Tanner Lecture” de 1979, intitulée “Equality of What?”, s’est interrogé sur la mesure que les égalitariens devraient utiliser afin d’établir jusqu’à quel point leur idéal a été réalisé dans une société donnée. Dans cette étude, nous réagissons aux réponses que la littérature philosophique récente a données à cette question de Sen. Nous décrivons et critiquons ce qu’un certain nombre d’auteurs (parmi lesquels Rawls et Sen) du courant égalitarien ont affirmé sur l’étendue à accorder au principe d’égalité entre individus lorsque le prix ou la valeur du mouvement vers une plus grande égalité n’est pas insupportable.

Keywords

024025024025
Type
Research Article
Information
Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 3-4: A Special Issue in Honor of Professor A. Sen : Alternatives to Welfarism , 1990 , pp. 357 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 1990 

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Footnotes

*

For their excellent criticism of a previous draft of the material in this article, I thank Richard Arneson, John Baker, Gerald Barnes, Will Kymlicka, David Lloyd-Thomas, John McMurtry, Thomas Scanlon, Amartya Sen and Philippe Van Parijs.

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