Unequally egalitarian? Defending the credentials of social egalitarianism

Abstract

In his new book, Luck Egalitarianism, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen responds to challenges raised by social egalitarians against luck egalitarianism. Social egalitarianism is the view according to which a just society is one where people relate to each other as equals, while the basic premise of luck egalitarianism is that it is unfair if people are worse-off than others through no fault or choice of their own. Lippert-Rasmussen argues that the most important objections to luck egalitarianism made by social egalitarians can either be largely accommodated by luck egalitarians or lack the argumentative force that its proponents believe them to have. While Lippert-Rasmussen does offer a version of luck egalitarianism that seems to avoid some of the main lines of criticism, he mischaracterizes parts of both the form and the content of the disagreement, and thus ultimately misses the mark. In this paper, we provide a substantive, a methodological and a political defense of social egalitarianism by elaborating on this mischaracterization. More work must be done, we argue, if social egalitarianism is to be dismissed and its concerns genuinely incorporated in the luck egalitarian framework. Until this is done, the supposed theoretical superiority of luck egalitarianism remains contested.

Keywords:

• Social egalitarianism
• luck egalitarianism
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
• responsibility
• diagnostic precision

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tim Meijers, Tom Parr, Beth Kahn, Debra Satz, Lasse Nielsen, Clare Burgum, Christian Schemmel, and audiences at the AWW 2015, LSE, the Social Justice Seminar Series, Durham, and the participants of the Postdoctoral workshop of the Centre for Ethics in Society at Stanford. Furthermore, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for very thorough and helpful written feedback.

Notes

1. The past three decades has seen the development of a number of social egalitarian arguments. See for instance: Anderson (1999, 2010b), O’Neill (2008), Scheffler (2003), Schemmel (2011), and Wolff (1998, 2015). See also, Fourie, Schuppert, and Wallimann-Helmer (2015). In this paper, we use ‘social egalitarianism’ – relational egalitarianism and democratic egalitarianism are also used (Lippert-Rasmussen uses ‘social-relations egalitarianism’).

2. For more on what McKerlie’s unequal city example and issues of age group justice tell us about our egalitarian commitments, see Bidadanure (2016).

3. See also, O’Neill (2008), who argues that a conception of equality should be based on a prior account of what is bad about inequalities.

4. It might be worth noticing that some social egalitarians would seemingly approve of the externalizing strategy (e.g. Miller, 1976). The main targets of Lippert-Rasmussen’s critique, however, would not.

5. Note that this disagreement is different from the terminological one which Lippert-Rasmussen discusses and dismisses in chapter 8.

6. For another attempt of this kind, see Gheaus (2018). See also Cordelli (2015) for a related discussion about the distribution of relational goods.

7. See Young (1990), chap. 1, for another critical discussion of this internalizing tendency.

8. See also, Fourie (2012) for a related distinction between the intrinsic and instrumental harms of social inequalities. See also Miller (1998), 24.

9. See also, Slavny and Parr (2015) for an argument to this effect on the topic of discrimination.

10. See also Anderson (2010b)’s ‘third disagreement with luck egalitarianism’ for a similar idea that justice is a virtue, rather than a state of affairs.

11. See, for example, Anderson (2010a), Wolff and De-Shalit (2007), and Wolff (2015).

12. For a related worry, see also Smiley’s (1992) excellent work on the inadequacy of equating individual responsibility with blameworthiness separately from the social structures and norms within which this blaming occurs.

13. See Anderson (2015), 26, Wolff (2015), 11.

14. Note that this is not a problem with the value of responsibility per se but, rather, with a focus that lends itself easily to responsibility-assessment or holding people responsible (see, for example, McTernan, 2016 for a responsibility-sensitive account which is not subject to this critique).

15. See also Kymlicka (2002), 93–96.