Introduction 1 the Value of Equality
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Notes Introduction 1 . Amartya Sen, “Equality of What?,” in I. S. M. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 2 . Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” Ethics 98 (1987), 21–42. 3 . Cited in Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 139. 4 . Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 115ff. 5 . Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?”; Samuel Scheffler, “What Is Egalitarianism?,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2003), 5–39. 6 . Charles Beitz, “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (10) (1983); Abizedeh, “Cooperation, Pervasive Impact and Coercion: On the Scope (Not Site) of Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (4) (2007); Tan, Justice without Borders , 33. 7 . Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001). 8 . Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 265. 9 . Darryl Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 31. 10 . P. Casal, “Progressive Environmental Taxation: A Defence,” Political Studies (2012). 11 . Hillel Steiner, “Left Libertarianism and the Ownership of Natural Resources,” Public Reason 1 (1) (2009). 12 . P. Singer, One World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002), 39 . 13 . S. Caney, “Justice and the Distribution of Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Journal of Global Ethics 5 (2) (2009), 130. 1 The Value of Equality 1 . There are not, in fact, many explicit defenses of why equality matters in political philosophy that argue that it matters no matter what else does. Opponents of intrinsic egalitarianism have articulated what such a position would look like. See Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 9. 2 . Roger Crisp, “Equality, Priority and Compassion,” Ethics 13 (2003), 745–763; Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” Ethics 98 (1987), 21–42. For a 144 Notes 145 response, see Larry Temkin, “Egalitarianism Defended,” Ethics 113 (2003), 764–782. 3 . We should also note that concern for equality is not confined to issues of justice limited to the state. This issue is discussed more fully in Ch. 5, but for now we should not assume that egalitarians could not be concerned with practices that avoided stigmatizing individuals in other countries or creating conditions that undermined their self-respect. 4 . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in The Social Contract and Discourses , trans. G. D. H. Cole Cress (London: Dent, 1983). 5 . Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88 (1) (1977), 36–49. This should be contrasted with appraisal respect, which involves the positive appraisal of a person or his or her particular characteristics. 6 . Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109 (2) (1999), 288. See also Timothy Hinton, “Must Egalitarians Choose between Fairness and Respect?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (1) (2001), 72–87. 7 . Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” 305. 8 . John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 544; John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 131. 9 . “Levellers” refers to a seventeenth-century English movement whose polit- ical program included demands for equal manhood suffrage and the aboli- tion of the tithe. For a discussion, see Henry Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 111ff. 10 . Ibid. 11 . Ibid.; see also the feminist discussion in Iris Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in M. Adams (ed.), Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 35–49. 12 . Rawls, Justice as Fairness , 131. 13 . Ibid. 14 . Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 204. 15 . Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality (New York: New Press, 2005), 48. He also reports that more than fifty studies have shown a correlation between income inequality and homicide rates. 16 . Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy, “The Relationship of Income Inequality to Mortality: Does the Choice of Indicator Matter?,” Social Science and Medicine 45 (1997), 1121–1127. For general discussion of these issues, see Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality , chs. 2–4. 17 . Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality ; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Penguin Books, 2009); Sudhir Anand, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen (eds), Public Health, Ethics, and Equity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 18 . Michael Marmot, “Social Causes of Social Inequalities in Health,” in Sudhir Anand, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen (eds), Public Health, Ethics, and Equity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 19 . Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level , ch. 4. 20 . Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality , 54. See also T. Nagel, “Equality, Priority and the Levelling Down Objection,” in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (eds), The Ideal of Equality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 146 Notes A similar theme is developed by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone , which reports that US states with lower levels of inequality were less likely to be socially cohesive. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 21 . R. Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. 22 . Scanlon, “The Diversity of Objections to Inequality,” in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (eds), The Ideal of Equality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 46. 23 . Ibid., 44. 24 . Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” 21. For other discussions of suffi- ciency, see Frankfurt, “Equality and Respect,” Social Research 64 (1997), 3–15; Frankfurt, “The Moral Irrelevance of Equality,” Public Affairs Quarterly 14 (2000), 87–103; Paula Casal, “Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough,” Ethics 117 (2007), 296–326; Yitzhak Benbaji, “Sufficiency or Priority,” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3) (2006), 327–348; Brown, “Priority, Sufficiency ... or Both?,” Economics and Philosophy 21 (2) (2005), 199–220. Crisp, “Equality, Priority, and Compassion”; Roger Crisp, “Egalitarianism and Compassion,” Ethics 114 (2003), 119–126; David Wiggins, “Claims of Need,” in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1–58; David Miller, “Justice and Global Inequality,” in Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods (eds), Inequality, Globalization, and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 187–201; David Miller, “National Responsibility and International Justice,” in Deen Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 123–147; Debra Satz, “International Economic Justice,” in Hugh LaFollete (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 620–642. 25 . Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” 21; emphasis in original. 26 . Ibid., 23. 27 . Ibid., 31. Emphasis in original. 28 . Nagel, “Equality.” 29 . As Casal notes in “Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough,” it is also a challenge to desert principles that may lead to some not having enough if they do not deserve it. Nussbaum also seems to endorse a version of the sufficientarian view in her Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). She advocates a mixed sufficiency/equality view. She writes, “Some capabilities must be secured to citizens on a basis of equality, or equal dignity has not been respected. Others, however, do not seem to have this intrinsic relation- ship to dignity; with these, the capabilities approach supplies a threshold of adequacy” (295). 30 . Casal, “Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough.” 31 . For a full critical discussion of the difficulties of sufficiency views, see ibid.; Richard Arneson, “Egalitarianism and Responsibility,” Journal of Ethics 3 (1999), 225–247. See also R. E. Goodin, “Egalitarianism, Fetishistic and Otherwise,” Ethics 98 (1987); 44–49; Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit, Disadvantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32 . Casal, “Why Sufficiency Is Not Enough,” 307. 33 . Mason, “Egalitarianism and the Levelling Down Objection,” Analysis 61 (2001), 246–254. Notes 147 34 . Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” 38. 35 . Wolff and de-Shalit, Disadvantage , 92–93. 36 . Crisp, “Equality, Priority and Compassion.” 37 . See Arneson, “Egalitarianism and Responsibility”; also Richard Arneson, “Perfectionism and Politics,” Ethics 111 (2000), 37–63, at 57, for a discussion of how Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach faces related threshold prob- lems. Wolff and de-Shalit, Disadvantage , 92–93, also discuss this issue in rela- tion to the capability approach. A further objection to Frankfurt’s account is that it primarily attacks equality of money and does not account for other egalitarian metrics, such as welfare, which share many of the same concerns as Frankfurt does about fetishizing money. See Goodin, “Egalitarianism, Fetishistic and Otherwise.” 38 . As Susan Hurley notes, priority views still involve comparisons in the sense that a person’s well-being (where they are badly off) is compared to a different state of well-being (where they could be better off). So instead of being inter- personally comparative, priority views involve counterfactual