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Why We Should be Negative about Positive Egalitarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2019
Abstract
The article assesses recent attempts to deflect two persistent objections to Positive Egalitarianism (PE), the view that equality adds to the goodness of a state of affairs. The first says that PE entails bringing into existence individuals who are equal to each other in leading horrible lives, such that they are worth not living. I assess three strategies for deflecting this objection: offering a restricted version of PE; biting the bullet; and pressing a levelling out counter-objection. The second objection points out that for any world A containing many individuals all leading very satisfying lives, and in perfect equality, PE prefers a much larger, perfectly equal population Z with much lower (yet positive) well-being. I review two main strategies for avoiding this Repellent Conclusion: a Capped Model and making egalitarianism sensitive to welfare levels. Both solutions, I show, are worse than the problems they are meant to solve.
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References
1 Temkin, Larry S., Inequality (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. Persson, Ingmar has defended this view under the title of ‘anti-inegalitarianism’. See his ‘Equality, Priority, and Person-Affecting Value’, Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 4 (2001), pp. 23–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another endorsement is found in Segall, Shlomi, Why Inequality Matters (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 73–8Google Scholar.
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41 Julia Mosquera is the first to my knowledge to discuss this asymmetry between eliminating inequalities and creating individuals who are equal. See Mosquera, ‘Disability, Equality, and Future Generations’, pp. 187–8.
42 I am grateful to Gustaf Arrhenius, Gideon Elford, Iwao Hirose, Ofer Malcai, Nathan Milikovsky, Julia Mosquera, Tom Sinclair, Patrick Tomlin, Zofia Stemplowska, and two anonymous referees for Utilitas for valuable written feedback on earlier versions.