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Inheritance, Gifts, and Dick Arneson For Duke conference 12001 “It has become a commonplace to say we’re living in a second Gilded Age,” writes , attributing the shift in common opinion to the recent work of the Thomas Piketty. More strikingly, according to Krugman, this recent scholarship suggests that we are “on a path back to ‘patrimonial ,’ in which the commanding heights of the are controlled not by talented individuals but by dynasties.”1 In the light of such worries, we might wonder about how inheritance and large gifts to individuals would be assessed in the lens of egalitarian political philosophies. This essay explores a part of this large topic. I look at the of along with Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity, luck egalitarian doctrines, and the burgeoning relational tradition. In the course of this survey, I tack back and forth between considering what the doctrine under review implies with respect to inheritance and gift-giving and considering whether the doctrine under review is sufficiently plausible so that we should care about its implications for this topic or any other. 1. Limits on Individual gains from gift and bequest. A permissive state policy on gifts and inheritance would allow that anyone who legitimately possesses property is free to pass along any portion of it to anyone she chooses, provided the would-be recipient accepts the bequest, and provided the intent of the giver is not to induce the recipient to violate a genuine duty, as occurs in bribery. An even more permissive policy would treat property received by such gifts as exempt from any accessions and exempt from taxation as income when it is received. A still more permissive policy subsidizes gifts and bequests by offering special tax advantages to givers. J. S. Mill proposes a more restrictive policy toward inheritance of wealth. The proposal is that a legal maximum limit be placed on the amount of wealth any individual may acquire by gift or bequest. This limit “should be fixed sufficiently high to afford the means of comfortable independence.”2 Two considerations mainly seem to be prompting Mill’s proposal. One is that it is undesirable that any individual start adult life with large wealth or the assurance of large wealth in the future (on the death of those from whom one expects an inheritance). Mill seems to think that such an absolute guarantee of large wealth reduces initiative and effort directed toward wealth creation (and other socially valuable goals) on the part of the beneficiary. A second consideration that if a person is rationally prudent, she first uses her resource to satisfy highest-priority needs, then successively lower-priority needs, so that limiting the maximum amount one can gain from gifts and bequests enables more resources to flow via this channel to satisfaction of people’s highest-priority needs. Mill tends to focus this concern on the slight utility or even disutility of very great wealth, which he regards as tempting one to spend enormous sums on low quality pleasures, silly trinkets, and status symbols.3 Mill also envisages the result that “Wealth which could no longer be employed in over-enriching a few, would either be devoted to objects of public usefulness, or if bestowed on individuals, would be distributed on a large number.” So “there would be a great multiplication of persons in easy circumstances.” This result would be superior to confiscation of estates and provision of a basic wealth endowment to every adult person, Mill must be supposing, because those making bequests, having the to choose whom to benefit, would on the whole and on the average channel the money to individuals who could use it more effectively for themselves and others than could the average member of . Mill is also evidently supposing that allowing the wealthy to give their money at will to philanthropic causes will have better results than governmental taking of the wealth and using it for public purposes. Perhaps being free to channel one’s wealth in this way will operate as an incentive to work to amass wealth, and perhaps the decentralized philanthropic choices of individual wealthy persons will in the aggregate be more beneficial than centralized choice by state officials. Mill is guessing—it can

1 . Paul Krugman, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014. 2 . J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book II, chapter II, section 4. 3 . See the quality of pleasure discussion in Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2. 2 hardly be more than guesswork on his part—that “utility in the largest sense”4 would be maximized by spreading wealth ownership without spreading it equally. In Principles of Political Economy Mill does not actually specify a standard for determining how high or low the limit on acquisition of wealth by gift or inheritance should be; I am filling in this blank by supposing his standard would be utilitarianism. He is clearly committed to what we today call welfarism: the consequences of actions and policies that determine whether they are right or wrong are consequences for individual well-being. But he does not consider the range of possible welfarist principles, some of which would register as morally valuable the fair distribution of well-being as well as the increase of its aggregate total. Mill never seriously entertains egalitarian welfarist alternatives to utilitarianism, nor does he wonder whether society perhaps should be maximizing some function of opportunities for individuals rather than welfare outcomes. This essay considers three versions of contemporary liberal egalitarianism. What (I submit) emerges as plausible and worth further consideration are views closer to Mill’s than to contemporary egalitarianisms. At any rate, the contrasts are interesting.

2. Fair equality of opportunity (FEO). ’s famous theory of social famously includes a stringent equal opportunity doctrine: Inequalities in people’s holdings of social primary goods must be attached to positions and offices that are open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, which require that all those with the same native talent and the same ambition have the same prospects of competitive success.5 To see what this comes to, and why it might be found appealing, think about access to bank loans that might be used to finance starting a business, and access to specially desirable in the bureaucratic hierarchies of and private firms. In a regime of open to talents (where anyone can apply for such loans and jobs and applications are judged on their merits and selection is by merit as revealed by applications), some individuals may have nil opportunity to become qualified. Perhaps one must be appropriately educated and socialized to become properly qualified, and is provided at great expense by rich people to their children, but not by poor people to their children, and of the right sort is provided by concerned and competent parents/guardians, but not all children are lucky enough to have concerned and competent parents/guardians. In a regime in which the FEO is fulfilled, being born and raised on the wrong side of the tracks, in disadvantageous circumstances, makes no difference at all to one’s prospects of competitive success. The child of an unskilled worker, equally natively talented and equally ambitious as the child of the CEO or successful banker, has equally good prospects of competitive success as the children of well-off parents. FEO states an ideal of a society that is classless in this sense. Now suppose the institutions of society otherwise conform to FEO, except that some individuals are much better off than others because they are the recipients of gifts and bequests showered on them by wealthy members of society. These windfall gains falling on some people are patently not attached to positions and offices open to all, selection to which is made in conformity with formal equality of opportunity, much less stricter FEO requirements. Nobody has the opportunity to apply for the position of child with wealthy parents, who pass on some or all of their wealth to their children by intra vivos gifts and inheritance. Receiving an inheritance might have the effect of giving the recipient advantages in further competitions for positions and roles that provide primary social goods to their occupants. Even if no such effects take place, receiving an inheritance might directly bring it about that the recipient has more primary social goods than others have. Moreover, the assured prospect that one will inherit wealth may provide advantages to one long before inheritance is actually received. The assurance relieves anxiety about one’s future prospects and makes it reasonable to invest more than one otherwise would in higher education and to engage in entrepreneurial risk taking with potential large payoff. Having wealthy parents who will give one gifts of money in response to downward shocks in one’s income prospects also serves as insurance.

4 . Mill, On , chap. 1. 5 . John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 2, section 14. 3

Inheriting wealth from one’s parents or being the recipient of substantial gifts of money from them may enable one to spend extra money on one’s children in ways that substantially boost their competitive prospects. Again, the expectation of an inheritance to come may do the same. Parents knowing that they will eventually receive a considerable sum from their parents, may thereby find it feasible to lavish funds on the education and upbringing of their children, sending them to private school, enrolling them in social clubs frequented by rich notables, and so on, thus boosting their children’s competitive prospects. Also, grandparents may make gifts and bequests to grandchildren. Inheritance and gifts on their face violate FEO, unless the ensemble of bequests and gifts happens to fall on recipients in such a way that taken together these transactions do not result in unequal initial holdings of primary social goods. Actually this conclusion would be too swift. There are other possibilities to consider. One is that society permits individuals to lavish gifts and bequests on chosen recipients in any way they see fit, without restriction, but in order to ensure that FEO is fulfilled, society (the government acting as agent of society) engages in robust offsetting programs, counterbalancing such FEO-threatening shifts. An arms race may ensue, with parents desirous of giving their children a leg up taking new steps to outspend whatever public authorities are spending to develop the talents of the poor and disadvantaged, these initiatives being matched by matching public programs. The tendency of the rich to give help to their children that threatens nonfulfillment of FEO is continuously offset by Head Start programs to the max. Though conceivable, I take it this is a far-fetched scenario, and also an undesirable one, since resources expended by private individuals and government are being wastefully employed, taken as a whole, from everyone’s point of view. Another possibility that needs examination is that the basic that take strict priority over the other elements in Rawls’s nested principles of justice include a basic liberty to mate with any willing person and raise a family as one chooses. If the basic liberty principle takes priority over FEO, then if they conflict, FEO gives way to the conflicting basic liberty. So if family liberty conflicts with FEO, family liberty trumps. This seems to be a possible and even likely occurrence: almost all parents are disposed to expend considerable resources to help their children get a good start in life. As Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift point out, just acting to establish and sustain a good relationship with one’s child, say by reading stories to her and playing with her, may help her develop in ways that give her a competitive edge over other children equally natively endowed and ambitious.6 Of course, parents may also pay for special private schooling and tutoring and do other things that are intended to give their children competitive advantages over others. Nor must this motive be malign. It is a dog eat dog world, and failing to help prepare one’s children for social and economic may leave them floundering victims. However, if one gives strict lexical priority to the fulfillment of FEO over the pursuit of measures to increase the general prosperity of society and the flourishing of its members, then however one decides what the basic liberty of parents to raise their children as they see fit implies for the permissibility of doing things to assist one’s children that threaten fulfillment of FEO, one should accept that justice as understood by Rawls and his followers will require us to engage in HEAD Start type counterbalancing policies to the point that FEO is fulfilled. To balk at this proposal is to reject the Rawlsian idea that just as the basic liberties principle takes strict priority over other principles of justice, FEO takes strict priority over every other justice principle as well as other social values a society might pursue. I balk myself; others may disagree. In passing we note that if the activities of some adults including gift-giving activities take the form of giving some children especially strong ambition to achieve places in society and to occupy social roles that give them extra-large shares of wealth and income and other primary-good resources, and enhanced ambition leads these children to have better competitive prospects than others, that route to superior position does not violate FEO. Recall, the FEO idea of equal opportunity is that those with the same ambition and same native talents should have the same prospects of competitive success. This feature of FEO is not an accidental loophole made possible by careless formulation; it is there by design. Rawls himself calls attention to it. However, we should see here a large problem that needs further work. We do not hold children responsible for their preferences and aims; a major part of a good

6 . Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, “Legitimate Parental Partiality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (2009); also Brighouse and Swift, Family Values. 4 education is to instill reasonable preferences and aims in children. An effect of a disadvantaged childhood is often that one’s ambitions are weak, vague, and poorly formed. Hence any reasonable equal opportunity doctrine (that goes beyond careers open to talents) has to include the idea that in a society that achieves equal opportunity individuals have all had a fair education and socialization that gives each of them a reasonable opportunity to form worthwhile aims that will help them lead lives that will be productive of good for self and others. This aspect of equal opportunity is not fulfilled in a society in which rich people form ambitious ambitions and poor people form unambitious, easily satisfied ambitions. There is one further qualification of the opposition between FEO and the effects of inheritance and gifts.7 In the small print of A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduces priority rules that allow deviations from equality that are to the advantage of the worst off. Restrictions of equal basic liberties are acceptable if they are necessary to preserve the system of equal basic liberties in the long run, and unequal restrictions are acceptable if they increase the basic liberties of the worse off (compared to what they would be if we insisted on equal basic liberty for all). Regarding the second-priority equal opportunity principle, the priority rule says that “an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with the lesser opportunity.”8 As stated, this is vague. I suppose that if there are conflicts of interest among the disadvantaged, Rawls’s underlying commitment is to maximin and therefore to favoring arrangements in which the worst off are as well off as possible. So as a first pass, a justifiable deviation from FEO must be to the maximal advantage of the worst off in terms of the opportunities this principle regulates. (A second pass would take us to leximin.) Roughly speaking, Rawls’s priority rule qualification of FEO, applied to inheritance and gifts, allows that freedom to bequeath wealth and confer significant gifts as one chooses is compatible with even if it violates fair equality of opportunity, provided that this is part of a system of institutional arrangements that makes the and entrepreneurial opportunities available to those who are least advantaged by this measure as advantageous as possible. If we must allow the rich to pass on wealth to their children or others, in order to sustain continued economic prosperity that brings about more opportunities for unskilled and low-ability persons, so be it. So says Rawls. So far this discussion just engages the stale popcorn of Rawls textual exegesis. However, Rawls in making these qualifications was feeling a normative pressure that should be pressuring us as well, and pushing us beyond Rawls’s official position. Rawls in effect acknowledges that there is no moral reason to insist on equality when insistence on inequality is not to the advantage of the worse off, and especially the worst off. But if we believe that equality is important, and is valuable in itself, then we should be willing to accept some losses in terms of other values to achieve some gains of equality. Rawls denies we should accept any loss, however small, falling on the worst off, in order to achieve greater fulfillment of an equality principle.9 This amounts to scratching equality from the set of fundamental moral principles. In Rawls’s ultimate view, equality is a means to bettering the condition of the worst off. But if equality is valuable in that way alone, it is not valuable in itself. G. A. Cohen has accused Rawls of perpetrating a bait-and-switch here.10 He starts out by affirming equality of condition as a moral imperative and ends up adopting a position in which doing as well as one can for the worst off entirely eclipses and replaces equality as a moral imperative. But there

7 . The text needs a further qualification. Rawls holds that among the basic liberties are political liberties whose “fair value” must be sustained. This says roughly that all those with the same ambition to be politically influential and the same political talent should have the same prospects of being politically influential. This is, as Rawls observes, a version of fair equality of opportunity applied to political influence. Conceivably the fair value of political liberty idea could require compressing inequality of wealth, if there proved to be no feasible ways to insulate from its influence. If being wealthy gives one opportunity for greater political influence than others have, the fair value of political liberty conflicts with toleration of inequality of wealth. 8 . Rawls, Political , 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), Lecture VIII, section 7. 9 . A complication is that Rawls’s final formulations retain lexical priority relations between types of goods. Basic liberties are not to be traded off against other lesser-priority primary social goods, and the opportunities for desirable positions and roles regulated by FEO are not to be traded off against other benefits. This complication does not affect the point made in the text, that equality is displaced by maximin. 10 . G. A. Cohen, Defending Justice and Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 315-323. 5 might be insight here. Following the lead of Harry Frankfurt, writing specifically about equality of income and wealth as a moral ideal, Rawls might protest that how one person’s condition compares to that of another does not in itself morally matter, so a fortiori whether one person’s condition is the same as that of another does not in itself matter. Frankfurt surmises that what is troubling about the condition of those in poverty is that they lack enough for a good life, not that they have less than others.11 A prioritarian would offer a different diagnosis. What gives us reason to seek more equal distributions in many circumstances is that a shift toward equality would improve the position of those who are worse off. In some cases, greater equality can be achieved without improving the condition of the worse off, instead simply by making the better off people worse off. If we balk at seeing any moral value in this latter shift, we are registering a conviction that everyone’s having the same is not in itself desirable, and that our egalitarian judgment is that it is morally more valuable to secure a benefit for a person who is worse off rather than an identical benefit for someone who is already better off. The worse off one is in well-being, on an absolute not comparative scale, the morally more valuable it is to bring about for one a small gain in well-being (or prevent a small well-being loss). Suddenly several disagreements, or choice points for the construction of a plausible egalitarian social justice doctrine, have emerged. Our starting point was dissatisfaction with Mill’s equanimity, in proposing a restriction of the maximal wealth that anyone should be allowed to acquire by inheritance or gifts over the course of her life, in the face of its glaring inegalitarian implications. A world with Mill’s proposed inheritance reform in effect, so that the wealthy elderly are free to bequeath their wealth as they like, under the constraint that no recipient should end up excessively wealthy, permits there to be in each generation a large rump of individuals, perhaps a large majority of the population, each of whom starts adult life facing a competitive with zero bank account wealth.12 We might view this regime as unfair to the worse off. One possibility is to regulate inheritance and gift by a Rawlsian equal opportunity doctrine, according to which a necessary condition of inequalities in resource holdings being acceptable is that they must attach to positions and offices, in the open competition for which all those with equal ambition and equal native talent potential will have identical prospects of success. (The further necessary condition for acceptable inequalities in this scheme is the difference principle, which says inequalities must work to the maximal long-run benefit of the worst off social group.) Rawlsian FEO at first glance seems to regulate gifts and inheritance by prohibiting them given that they seem inevitably to preclude achievement of FEO. But pressure of argument pushes us to regard Rawlsian FEO as a means to more fundamental goals, not morally required for its own sake. In the Rawlsian framework, this would be naturally an imperative of maximin—we ought to make arrangements that maximize the primary good resource holdings of those who are least advantaged in this respect. But we might be left wondering whether we should be aiming at fair outcomes rather than fair opportunities, and at some measure of resource holdings rather than individual well-being. This train of thought takes us to what have been called “luck egalitarian” positions.

3. . Luck egalitarianism is a broad family of views of . Roughly, the idea is that it is morally bad—unjust and unfair—if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. There are two ideas here—call them egalitarianism and luckism. The egalitarian claim is that there

11 . Harry Frankfurt, “Economic Equality as a Moral ideal,” Ethics; also Frankfurt, On Inequality (Princeton: Princeton Univrsity Press, 2015). 12 . A similar problematic equanimity is revealed when Mill speculated about the probable desirable futurity of the working class. He speculated that in the future the more able and reliable workers would gradually decline to work for a capitalist boss and instead join in worker . Eventually the sector of the economy might be expected to attract all superior workers leaving only inferior workers laboring for capitalist firms, or possibly the entire disappearance of the latter. But if working for a boss is so bad, why contemplate with equanimity a future in which the least able workers suffer that fate, and must work for less productive enterprises that more able workers shun? I suppose this is just to say Mill is a utilitarian, not any sort of egalitarian. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, chapter VII. 6 is a strong moral presumption in favor of everyone being equally well off. Different versions of the claim give different construals of the standard for assessing people’s condition as better or worse. The luckism claim says that the moral presumption in favor of equality only holds on the condition (or to the degree that) individuals have exercised their agency in appropriate, responsible ways. Example: Suppose two young individuals are in an extreme predicament, threatened by a mining accident. Absent help, they will die young and end up living miserably short lives. Rescue resources are scarce. The luckism idea is that if one individual was reckless or malicious with respect to taking care to avoid triggering an accident, and the other took due care to avoid behavior that would risk a serious accident, the individual who behaved irresponsibly is less eligible for aid. Put another way, the irresponsible individual stands behind the other in the moral queue for assistance, and if there are limited resources, and not all can be saved, there is stronger moral reason to aid the individual who is badly off through no fault or choice of her own. The generic formulation of luck egalitarianism says it is bad if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. There are two different ideas here, fault or choice, and two different branches of the luck egalitarian doctrine. Fault says that behaving in ways that are negatively deserving reduce the badness of one’s being worse off than others. Choice says that becoming worse off than others in situations in which one could have avoided getting the short end of the stick by taking some reasonable course of action available to one lessens the badness of being worse off than others. Luck egalitarianism might take more or less ambitious forms. Least ambitious: luck egalitarianism is one social justice principle among many others. To see what justice requires, we have to identify all the principles, and assign them relative weights, so we know what relative importance the luck egalitarian considerations have when they conflict with other principles. More ambitious: luck egalitarianism is the whole story of distributive justice, but social justice has further domains, besides distributive justice. Most ambitious: Luck egalitarianism is the full and complete account of social justice. Its requirements determine what just social policy should be and what individuals morally owe one another, in any way that is appropriately enforceable. Here we look at a less ambitious (but perhaps still excessively ambitious) version of the doctrine. Consider naïve luck egalitarianism, which says that there should be material equality among persons unless those who get the short end of the stick are appropriately deemed responsible for their unequal plight by virtue of their voluntary choices that led to it. Daniel Halliday suggests that inheritance and gifts form the “Achilles heel” of naïve luck egalitarianism. He worries that “naïve luck egalitarianism seems to require the total abolition of inherited wealth, except for the far-fetched scenario where society can be arranged so that everyone inherits equally, or that differential receipts of inheritance fit into some arrangement where nobody’s brute luck is overall better or worse than anyone else’s.” So construed, naïve luck egalitarianism “is incompatible with even a very minimalist sort of liberalism which seeks to grant limited freedom of bequest.”13 One obvious response is to scrap naïve luck egalitarianism in favor of a more sophisticated doctrine that takes avoidance of brute luck inequality to be one principle among several others in a distributive justice ideal. No principle rules the roost; what is just all things considered depends on the proper weighting of the principles to resolve cases where they conflict. A simple sophisticated view would hold that justice demands both maximizing material opportunities for people and equalizing them in the brute luck manner, and we need to decide what weight to give to each of these principles when equalizing conflicts with maximizing. But first it should be noted that naïve luck egalitarianism does not flatly oppose inheritance. To see this, consider gifts. Anne Alstott gives the example of an individual who befriends an artistically inclined person, develops a friendship based on a shared interest in art, eventually receives gifts or an inheritance (maybe including valuable art works) from the friend.14 This outcome is not a brute luck occurrence. The individual has made choices reflecting her ambitions and tastes, which others could have made, but did not, because their tastes and ambitions were different. At least, within the circle of people

13 . Daniel Halliday, Inheritance: Justice and the Right to Bequeath, unpublished manuscript. 14 Anne Alstott, “Equal Opportunity and Inheritance Taxation” Harvard Law Review ; Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, The Stakeholder Society. 7 who are acquainted with this artistically inclined person (or some other one), and might have formed a relationship but did not, the outcome is option luck but not brute luck. We might suppose many ordinary cases of inheritance have something of this character. As a young relative, one might cater to one’s elders, or not, and inherit something from them, or not. Here is a simple rule for inheritance and gifts compatible with luck egalitarianism. Sort people into the average wealth level of the people in their social networks. Tax the inheritances and gifts received by people in wealthier social networks, the tax increasing with the average wealth of the network. Use the proceeds to provide a substitute inheritance for those in social networks with below- average wealth, this grant varying in amount with the degree of poverty of the network. Set the tax levels and grant levels so as, so far as possible, to equalize people’s expected brute luck inheritance. For reasons already stated, a luck egalitarian should not be striving to equalize actual inheritance outcomes. Of course this simple rule is crude. For one thing, it makes the strong assumption that each person in a social network with a given average wealth level has the same chance of gaining a bequest or inheritance from someone in the network if one strives to bring about this outcome. It also makes the strong assumption that if one’s social network has the same average wealth as another person’s, the likely gain one would get from an inheritance if someone in the network made one a bequest, conditional on the efforts one makes to secure such a bequest, would be the same. The proposal also ignores the glaring fact that inheritance interacts with many other factors to affect people’s overall brute luck expectations. Consider the proposal as a toy stand-in for a more adequate set of rules regulating inheritance, such that inheritance under that set of rules will be permissible to some extent without offending against naïve luck egalitarianism. Another possible response to the claim that the luck egalitarian position on inheritance (and gifts) is in conflict with minimal liberalism (and therefore presumably unacceptable) is to challenge the credentials of minimal liberalism so understood. A liberal society protects individual freedom, but not all are equally important. There is the freedom to speak as one chooses to willing listeners on public affairs no matter how one’s speech may offend or corrupt some people, and there is the freedom to drive a car as one likes on crowded roadways no matter how much risk of harm one’s driving imposes on others. Only the former freedom merits strong protection. Liberalism is compatible with extensive restriction of liberty when the restrictions are demanded by other values central to liberalism and the restrictions do not trench on core freedoms that enable people to live according to life plans they reflectively endorse with a fair chance of success in their pursuit of these life plans. If we believe that justice requires ensuring that all have roughly equal starts in life, equal prospects at the starting gate, as one begins adult life, then we may find restrictions on inheritance and gifts necessary to that end to be acceptable all things considered. People are free to do what they choose with their property, except engage in gift-giving that is inconsistent with maintenance of an equal opportunity regime over time. We might also hold abolition of inheritance and significant gift-giving is compatible with the operation of an efficient capitalism that fosters prosperity. Hal Varian recommends “a scheme where the ownership of factors of production was indeed private, but this ownership was nontransferable except through the market and reverted to the state upon death to be distributed equally to new generations. This ‘people’s capitalism’ still has the . . .desirable characteristics of encouraging efficiency and innovation, without any notion of permanent, inheritable property.”15 The brief discussion of whether naïve luck egalitarianism might be compatible with inheritance and bequest should insinuate doubt as to whether this is anyway a plausible interpretation of the doctrine. For starters, the idea that inequalities arising from gifts and inheritance are less objectionable if the recipients have made choices that others could have made that would have brought them similar benefits conjures up a Charles Dickens nightmare image of a world in which everyone is busy kowtowing to those who might bestow some wealth on them and scheming to hinder the similar kowtowing efforts of others. We should have no sympathy for the claim that getting the above-average share of an inequality by vicious scheming should not raise objections on egalitarian grounds, whereas getting this

15 . Hal Varian, “Distributive Justice, Welfare Economics, and the Theory of Fairness,”, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1975), 223-0247. 8 special advantage by sheer brute luck should raise egalitarian objections. The distinction between chosen and unchosen inequalities is too anodyne to support sensible judgments. Choices proceed from motives and desires that range from good to bad to ugly.16 We might then shift from a choice to a desert conception of the luckism component in luck egalitarianism.17 On this view, deserved inequalities are not morally objectionable, or at least less morally objectionable than otherwise comparable undeserved inequalities. Social justice prefers the world in which saints fare better than scoundrels to a world in which the scoundrels fare better than the saints, even if total well-being aggregated across people is somewhat greater in the scenario in which inequality benefits the scoundrels. Already in this discussion I have raised the possibility that equality of any sort might be just one desideratum among several to be integrated in a social justice conception. There is also the issue, if equality of some sort matters in such a way that it merits being included as an essential component in fundamental social justice principles, what sort of equality plausibly matters? One might object: why does justice require distributive equality? Why must everyone have the same? Why does it matter morally how well you are faring compared to how others are faring? The objection bites especially hard if the claim is that distributive equality rules the roost. For then we must insist on equality come what may. Equality might share the roost. A simple plural doctrine says we care about people enjoying better lives as well as about people enjoying equally good lives. We want to increase prosperity, which may conflict with sharing it equally. For example, better that Smith have enormous bliss and wealth, and live far better than others, rather then an alternative situation in which the position of other persons is unchanged and Smith’s position is far worse, no better than anyone else’s. Another doctrine in the near vicinity is that equality, everyone’s having the same, is not in itself desirable at all. But obtaining a benefit for a person (avoiding a loss) matters more, the worse off over the course of her life the person would be, absent that benefit.18 A social justice doctrine that requires balancing maximizing good and equalizing it, or that requires maximizing a function of good that assigns more weight to getting a gain for a person, the worse off overall she would otherwise be, will evaluate inheritance and gifts according to their consequences. What policy on inheritance and gifts would over the long run bring about better lives for people, with good fairly distributed across people? Pretty clearly the question will arise, into what package of practices and policies will the candidate policy on inheritance be set? Are we asking, what is the best feasible set of reforms to our current status quo could we bring about now? The question needs much sharpening. If curtailment of inheritance unavoidably dampens wealth production to some extent, what can be said in the abstract is that any social justice doctrine that gives greater moral weight to gains achieved for the worse off will favor tighter inheritance restriction (if coupled with spread-the-wealth policies) than straight utilitarian maximization.19 In these formulations I have slipped into assuming that justice requires fair outcomes rather than fair opportunities, is formulated from an ex post father than ex ante perspective. I have also written as though Mill is broadly right and the moral concern with resource distribution is entirely subordinate to a

16 . According to choice, if people starting from initial equal opportunity enter into high-stakes gambling from which some emerge rich, some very poor, this inequality does not offend against the luck egalitarian norm. But consider: “I think I would be better for men not to gamble. It is a besotting kind of taste, likely to turn into a disease. And besides, there is something revolting to me in raking a heap of money together, and internally chuckling over it, when others are feeling the loss of it. I should even call it base, if I were more than an exceptional lapse. Thee are enough inevitable turns of fortune which force us to see that our gain is another’s loss:--that is one of the ugly aspects of life. One should like to reduce it as much as one could, not get amusement out of exaggerating it.” This speech is put in the mouth of the title character in the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (originally published 1876). 17 . Nir Eyal, “Egalitarian Justice and Innocent Choice,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2007), 1-18. 18 . See Derek Parfit, “Equality or Priority?”, The Lindley Lecture, Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas. 19 . One might think this claim holds only if one assumes a short time horizon. In the long run, one might suppose, will do more to improve the situation of the worse off than policies that spread the wealth if the spreading dampens economic growth. But one might think that in the long run necessary resources are finite and economic growth must cease. 9 more ultimate concern for the well-being (good quality lives) of individual persons, which greater resources might or might not facilitate. But these are still clearly open questions. Rather than pursue further the question, what justice doctrine in the vicinity of luck egalitarianism has the most claim on our allegiance, and provides the normative standard for assessing inheritance and gift practices, I turn now to a quite different egalitarian justice ideal, which perhaps has quite different implications for assessment of inheritance and gifts.

4. Relational equality. A straightforward suggestion about appropriate state policy toward inheritance and gifts is that we should value a society in which people relate as equals, and a society in which wealth transfers are a significant factor in determining how wealthy people become and how large is the gap between the wealthy and the poor will be one in which people do not relate as equals. The problem is not that some have more and some have less, or that some lead lives that are much higher in well-being than the lives of others, but that society fails to sustain a democratic egalitarianism in relations among people. Thomas Nagel states, “Like racial and sexual domination, hereditary class stratification is likely to generate mentalities of felt superiority and inferiority that are harmful in themselves.”20 “Hereditary class domination” calls to mind , in which inherited privileges and obligations largely determine one’s place in society. Nagel actually has in mind a society that is stratified by wealth, and in which an individual’s place in the hierarchy of wealth in the society she inhabits is to a significant degree set by the wealth of her parents (and that of her parents’ parents, and so on). This could occur directly via transfers of wealth, or through genetic inheritance, or through parental influence, as when wealthy parents help their children gain elite education, or train them in other ways to develop traits conducive to wealth acquisition, or provide give them access to social networks that are an asset for wealth acquisition. Nagel’s comment raises such issues as whether differential wealth does tend to foster the invidious mind- set he mentions (always, or in particular circumstances?) and if so, whether wealth that passes through several generations is especially likely to foster bad status distinctions. Some hold that the syndrome that generates crucial evils is not simply unequal wealth or unequal wealth that is stable across generations but specifically economic segregation, understood as occurring to the extent that “society’s richer and poorer members lead lives that are cut off from each other in certain important respects.” The pathology here is that “like other forms of segregation, such as racial segregation,” economic segregation “undermines relations of equal status between different social groups.”21 The suggestion seems to be that if rich kids and poor kids went to the same schools, played together on the same sports teams, and had sets of friends diverse in their parental wealth, equal status would not be threatened, or would be less threatened. The threat is to equal status, an idea that stands in need of clarifying characterization. On this view, inheritance raises problems of social justice only if it causes economic segregation. Surveying all of this, we might deny that there is a single ideal in view.22 We should identify the ideal of relational equality as a hodge-podge of undeniable truisms, some good values that don’t have anything much to do with equality in any sense, speculations that some things some philosophers like are contingently linked to other things these philosophers like, and a false claim that equalities of power, rank, and status are inherently good things. The undeniable truisms. The most important of these is the important but vague idea that that each person just by being a person shares a fundamental equal moral status. This status dictates that

20 Thomas Nagel, “Liberal and Hereditary Inequality,” Tax Law Review (2009). 21 . Daniel Halliday, Inheritance manuscript. Chapter 1. 22 In a way it may seem unfair to criticize relational egalitarianism as wooly, vague, and unclear. This doctrine is said by its advocates to be in a preliminary of articulation. It is a work in progress. We have the idea of a society in which people relate as equals, and are in process of working out what this thought, interpreted sympathetically, comes to. Dismissive criticism is premature. One might then take my criticisms to be nondismissive, rather a challenge to advocates of relational egalitarianism to do more to clarify their ideal so that we can see whether or not some version of it should command our allegiance.

10 good or bad falling on any person counts exactly the same as a relevantly similar good or bad falling on any other person in the determination of what ought to be done and what policies ought to be implemented. This status dictates that any person’s fundamental moral are just as stringent and have exactly the same weight as any other person’s similar rights in the determination of what ought to be done and what policies implemented. This is an important and controversial truth, pregnant with implications. But it does not say anything to the effect that we should all share a democratic ethos or ensure that no one has more social power than anyone else. Nor does it imply anything about the equal worth of different people’s ways of life and conceptions of the good, or about the equal worth of different people’s abilities and achievements. You can firmly accept fundamental human equality and yet believe, and perhaps believe correctly, that you are a better athlete than I am, your taste in clothes and books and movies is better, the work you do to make a living is more interesting and worthwhile, the culture of your community is superior to mine, you are more intelligent and discerning and have better moral perception and refinement, you are less crude and boorish than I am, your child can find a marital mate far superior to my daughter or son, you are more virtuous and moreover have greater native capacity for virtue than I do, and so on. Agreement on fundamental human equality does not in itself support a democratic equality ethos. The relational egalitarian will protest that relating as equals does not involve equally esteeming everyone. Nor does it involve striving for that. Relating as equals involves relating on a footing of equal respect. But what is equal respect? A simple answer is that to respect people equally is to regard them, and to be disposed to treat them, as sharing a fundamental equal human dignity possessed by each and every person. But this is a thin as well as vague idea. Roughly speaking, treating people as equals on this conception is treating them as they ought to be treated, according to correct moral principles. I have stipulated that the idea has a bit more content: fundamental equality of persons means that each person’s comparable good, and the comparable fulfillment of each person’s rights, counts the same in determining what ought to be done. But this leaves it wide open what the good is, what basic rights people have, and what moral principles should be adopted. These ideas could well be given a luck egalitarian interpretation, for example, but relational egalitarianism was billed as a substantive rival of luck egalitarianism, the two doctrines of equality being opposed and competing for our allegiance. Some good values unrelated to equality. Summarizing this new tradition of thought about the ideal of equality, Daniel Halliday offers this characterization: “On the negative side, equality requires the elimination of oppressive social hierarchies. On the positive side, such hierarchies need to be replaced by institutions and attitudes that improve (in relevant ways) the quality of interpersonal relationships between citizens.”23 Look at the proposed positive aim. It is a nice thought that we should strive in sensible ways to improve the quality of interpersonal relationships between citizens, but it is not clear this admirable aim has any tie to equality. Civility and politeness among citizens in their personal dealings would be nice. But a frankly aristocratic or communist-party elitist conception of desirable social order could affirm this value. Whether or not your status in society is high or low, your dealings with others should be constrained by politeness and civility. Perhaps it would improve the quality of interpersonal relationships between citizens if all could be trained to be more alert to sexual messages in their communications with others, so that those who are mutually sexually attracted find it easier to engage in mutually consensual and beneficial sexual encounters and people are dissuaded from pressing for romantic contact with those who do not reciprocate their feelings of attraction. But these ideas, whether attractive or not, do not to my mind promise to illuminate the idea of relating as equals. Speculations. Here is Samuel Scheffler characterizing what is attractive about the ideal of a society of equals: “ A society of equals supports the mutual respect and the self-respect of its members, encourages freedom of interpersonal exchange, and places no special obstacles in the way of self-understanding or truthful understanding among people. It also makes it possible for people to develop a sense of solidarity and of participation in a shared fate without relying on unsustainable myths or forms of false consciousness. For all of these reasons, an egalitarian society helps to promote the flourishing if its

23 Halliday. 11 citizens. Nor is the value of living in such a society purely instrumental. On the contrary, to live in society as an equal among equals is a good thing in its own right.”24 One might quibble with this list of desirables. Self-respect in the Rawlsian sense—the confident belief one’s plan of life is worthwhile and that one is competent to pursue it—can impede the successful accomplishment of a worthwhile plan of life. This is so either when one’s current life plan is not aimed at anything worthwhile or one is not in fact competent to achieve one’s otherwise sensible goals. In these situations sharp blows to my self-respect can be a tonic that improves my life prospects. Perhaps Scheffler has some other idea of self-respect in mind. Also, encouraging freedom of interpersonal exchange can be good or bad for cooperative relations depending on the context. Sometimes privacy and discreet avoidance of divisive issues can be for the best.25 This can be true of relations between friends and close family members as well in relations involving bosses and subordinates. Sometimes an egalitarian democratic ethos in society encourages a populist anti-intellectualism and an unwillingness to defer to people who simply know better than others what policies to follow for our mutual benefit. But the more important point surely is that if we are trying to discover rock-bottom fundamental moral principles, and debating whether some version of luck egalitarianism or relational egalitarianism merits inclusion in this set of fundamental principles, speculating about how some putative values might be instrumentally linked, positively or negatively, to other values is just a distraction. If Scheffler’s speculations happen to be empirically correct, then welfarist luck egalitarianism and welfarist prioritarianism will at least to some considerable degree recommend relational equality as instrumentally valuable for promoting human flourishing. For what it is worth, my personal hunch is that some of Scheffler’s speculations and others we might identify will prove sufficiently empirically well founded so that luck egalitarians and prioritarians should end up embracing the ideal of relational equality for roughly the same reason they should end up embracing good nutrition. Both promote flourishing. The qualifier “to a considerable extent” is needed because we will want to know not just whether achievement of relational equality in society maximizes aggregate human well-being but also whether relational equality achievement tends to distribute well-being in ways that accord with the distributive principles we should at the fundamental level accept. A welfarist luck egalitarian or prioritarian will favor policies that produce less well-being that is better distributed up to a point (the point determined by the proper tradeoff between maximizing welfare and distributing it fairly across persons). To decide whether luck egalitarianism or relational egalitarianism merits a place in the set of fundamental moral principles we should accept, we need to focus on cases where following one or the other would not yield morally better instrumental benefits all things considered. Suppose the instrumental benefits associated with some candidate version of luck egalitarianism or relational egalitarianism were not forthcoming. Would we still value the candidate form of equality for its own sake, and if so, to what degree? Most important, the Scheffler characterization of relational egalitarianism quoted above is not forthcoming on the question, what is it to relate to others as equals or to live in a society of equals among equals? Until we have an idea what these phrases are supposed to mean, we cannot start considering whether it is plausible to regard relating as equals to be intrinsically not extrinsically valuable, and valuable for its own sake not just as a means to other ends. The false claim that inequality in power (along with inequalities in rank and status) is bad in itself. In the essay from which the long Scheffler quotation reproduced six paragraphs back was drawn, Scheffler suggests that equality strikes us as valuable “because we believe that there is something valuable about human relationships that are, in certain respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status.” So is relational equality relating to people on a footing of equality in rank, power, and status? If so, what do we make of the fact that inequalities in rank, power, and status are endemic on modern society? Scheffler makes the further suggestion that some inequalities must be compatible with egalitarian relationships and some inequalities though incompatible with such relationships must be acceptable all things considered in light of the benefits they produce.

24 Samuel Scheffler, “Choice, Circumstances, and the Value of Equality,” reprinted in Scheffler, Equality and Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 25 . See Thomas Nagel, “Concealment and Exposure,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1997??. 12

This all sounds sensible, but one can see a standoff emerging. The luck egalitarian or prioritarian will say that inequalities in rank, power, and status are in themselves neutral and good or bad depending on whether they facilitate or hinder the fulfillment of other values that do matter in themselves. The relational egalitarian will say that inequalities (or some subset of them) in rank, power, and status are bad in themselves, but may be acceptable all things considered, given their beneficial consequences. Assessing these rival views will be a delicate enterprise. One might try out the idea that if for example, extra power, rank, or status is conferred on some to facilitate the achievement of some important goal, the offense against relating as equals occurs at the point at which the position generates surplus power, rank, or status that is not relevant to the social function this hierarchy serves. But the question arises again, is this surplus power, rank, or status, a help or hindrance, all things considered, to the achievement of moral values we should care about? For what it is worth, I doubt that unequal power, for example, is in itself bad for people or morally bad. Being born into a family or clan, I may find myself, to a degree, in a a stable inferior power position, vis-à-vis my grandmother. She could harm me, and I would be unable to reciprocate the harm. Looked at a certain way, the situation is that I am at her mercy. The same situation, more negatively described, is that she dominates me. But she is an nice person; the power inequality between us facilitates all involved doing what is morally right and living good quality lives. Moreover, if choosing for oneself is an aspect of living well, then my grandmother’s dominating hierarchical position facilitates that for those in the ambit of her power. I find nothing regrettable or in itself bad in this social hierarchy as described. In actual circumstances, we are more familiar with situations in which unequal social power tends to make things go badly for those with lesser power. This is a reason for valuing relational equality of some sort, in any circumstances, as instrumentally valuable. We do not view inequality of power between children and parents as in itself bad. Children need guidance, and the successful guidance of children by loving adult guardians is a great component of well- being for the guiders and beneficial to the guided. As children mature and no longer need guidance, this inequality of power loses its rationale. The simplest view of the situation is that when inequality of power is instrumentally beneficial it is desirable and when this inequality is instrumentally bad it is undesirable; in itself it is neutral. In a later essay Scheffler makes another interesting suggestion. This is that whether we are relating as equals depends not directly on our overt behavior but on the attitudes and spirit that animate our interaction. We can look to egalitarian personal relationships to gain understanding of these attitudes. In particular, people relating as equals respect each other as competent and responsible partners in the relationship and are committed to each member having equal authority over the future course and content of the relationship. People relating as equals in personal relationships also are committed to what Scheffler calls a “deliberative constraint,” which he characterizes as follows: “In a relationship that is conducted on a footing of equality, each person accepts that the other person’s equally important interests—understood broadly to include the person’s needs, values, and preferences—should play an equally significant role in influencing decisions made within the context of the relationship. Moreover, each person has a normally effective disposition to treat the other’s interests accordingly.”26 Scheffler asserts that at the society-wide level, relating as equals to fellow members of society consists in each respecting the others as equal participants and also being committed to the deliberative constraint. A first obvious point to note about this proposal is that it is really quite different from conceiving of a society of equals as one in which inequalities of power, rank, and status (of certain sorts) are absent. In a personal relationship, the participants could be all committed to following the deliberative constraint even thought they have unequal power, rank, and status, and find these inequalities unobjectionable. Same goes at the level of an entire society. All members of society might be strongly committed to the deliberative constraint without being committed at all to avoiding inequalities in power, rank, and status as bad in themselves. Members of a communist party elite, or members of a democratic intelligentsia

26 Scheffler, “The Practice of Equality,” in Carina Fourie, Fabian Schuppert, and Iwo Walliman-Helmer, : On What It Means to Be Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21-44. 13 with special prerogatives, along with all other members of society might be committed to the deliberative constraint. A second obvious point is that Scheffler has brought the ideal of a society of equals back to something close to concern for distributive equality. A prioritarian welfarist will at least view everyone’s commitment to the deliberative constraint as highly useful to sustaining prioritarian welfarism (provided that the scope of her proritarian concern extends just to the members of the society she inhabits). Regarding everyone’s comparable interests as counting the same in determinations of what public policy should be (allowing that the interest of a badly off person in an extra unit of well-being has greater weight than an identical interest of an already well off person) facilitates establishing and implementing public policies that do just that. Or if oddly that proves not to be true, why make a fetish of attitudes if their cultivation does not actually advance the goals we ought to care about? A third obvious point is that if you scratch the surface, the debate between relational egalitarians and luck egalitarians (and their fellow travelers) reveals itself as a debate about the relative moral importance of global justice concerns. This claim might seem mistaken. What the content or substance of egalitarian concern should be is one question, and what should be the scope of egalitarian concern is is another and a quite different question. Any view about content or substance can be coupled with any view about morally required scope. So it might seem. But appearances here are deceptive. If our egalitarian concern should be a concern to relate to others as equals, egalitarian concern is naturally limited in scope. Its home ground is the sphere of personal, face-to-face relationships, as exemplified in the ideal that friendship and should be on a footing of equality. A social equality ideal can be formulated for members of a community, local or national, who sustain significant social relations among each other. But extended to a global scale, the notion of relational equality lacks purchase. I lack significant relations to people in Burundi or Outer Mongolia, so the question of how I might relate to these people as equals does not arise. If the distribution of resources or welfare across people is not the fundamental justice issue, and especially if it is not in itself significant at all, then egalitarianism naturally and plausibly has local scope: Where significant social relationships are, there and only there does the moral imperative of relating as equals apply. In contrast, distributive egalitarian doctrines such as luck egalitarianism or prioritarianism have unrestricted scope unless the theorist can concoct some special rationale for scope restriction. If it is bad, unjust and unfair, that some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own, then it is bad if especially badly off people in the poorest regions of Earth are worse off than especially well off people in the richest regions. If a well-being gain of a given size has greater moral value, the worse off in lifetime well-being the individual who gets this gain would otherwise be, then if this gain accrues to a Syrian who is heading toward lifetime well-being lower than anyone living in Europe or North America, her getting the gain has greater moral value than would its getting by anyone living in Europe or North America, including an individual who happens to be one’s fellow countryman or a friend or a member of one’s extended family. The local scope of relational egalitarianism is clear in Elizabeth Anderson’s formulation in an essay that has canonical status. She favors what she calls “democratic equality.” On the negative side, democratic equality calls for undoing . On the positive side, “egalitarians seek a social order in which persons stand in relations of equality. They seek to live together in a democratic community, as opposed to a hierarchical one. Democracy is here understood as collective self-determination by means of open discussion among equals, in accordance with rules acceptable to all. To stand as an equal in discussion before others means that one is entitled to participate, that others recognize an obligation to listen respectfully and respond to one’s arguments, that no one need bow and scrape before others or represent themselves as inferior to others as a condition of having their claim heard.”27 Notice that there could be a world consisting entirely of democratic communities so understood, even though some such communities have extremely poor access to resources and their members live grueling, harsh, even squalid lives, lives you would not wish upon your worst enemy, whereas other democratic communities are rich in resources and their members lead great lives, lives you would wish for your own children. The democratic equality standard applied across all these democratic communities

27 . Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics (1999). 14 does not register any problem. Suppose that if people’s lives are sufficiently hellish, they cannot meaningfully participate as equals in democratic conversations. If so, the democratic equality ideal will require that things are arranged so people escape hellish lives. But if we are all badly off together, we can be pretty badly off while still fully able to relate to each other as equals in a democratic society satisfying Anderson’s egalitarian ideal. Now suppose it turned out that certain sorts of social hierarchy in wealthy and powerful countries facilitate policies that improve the conditions of the globally impoverished. Perhaps a society of equals whose members are prosperous will incline toward populist economic policies and policies that aggressively push their national interest in world affairs, both tendencies leading to significantly worse lives for the globally disadvantaged. In these circumstances distributive egalitarianism will without regret or hesitation favor social hierarchies if they really do deliver better results according to global egalitarian distributive justice. To my mind this is the nub of the disagreement between distributive egalitarians and relational egalitarians.

5. Inheritance and relational equality. The relational egalitarian position suggests a distinctive approach to inheritance and gifts. The mere fact that in a society some people have more than others or that some are leading happier lives, or more generally lives higher in well-being, than others, does not in itself render it the case that the society fails to be a society in which people relate as equals. Nor does mere distributive inequality, or inequality of distributive opportunity, imply relational inequality or relational inequality of opportunity. If the kind of equality that is morally valuable and that we should care about is relational not distributive equality, that makes a difference to the assessment of inheritance and gifts. Inheritance and gifts are presumptively morally okay when they merely affect the distribution of people’s prospects of well-being, leading lives better or worse in prudential terms. Inheritance and gifts are morally bad when they undermine or destroy or preclude achieving and sustaining relational equality. It is worthwhile to seek to determine the implications of the democratic equality ideal of relating as equals for issues concerning appropriate social policies toward inheritance and bequest. In the previous section I raised skeptical questions about the relational equality ideal, but I do not claim that these questions must have skeptical answers. The relational equality ideal is sufficiently plausible that it is of interest what implications acceptance of the ideal would have for various public policy issues including inheritance and gifts. Towards the end of this section I reiterate the skeptical questions. Recall Thomas Nagel’s comment already cited. He states, “Like racial caste and sexual domination, hereditary class stratification is likely to generate mentalities of felt superiority and inferiority that are harmful in themselves.” This observation occurs in a comment on proposals about taxing inheritance and bequests. He is here voicing the suspicion that an important problem arising from inheritance is the contribution it makes to the division of society into different wealth levels that persist through several generations. This is bad from the relational egalitarianism perspective. We should want to avoid stable caste hierarchy. The enemy is old wealth. Why suppose that persistent stable stratification by wealth is a special problem from the standpoint of social justice values? Imagine that in each successive generation, the gap between the very rich and the very poor is immense, but the wealth of your parents does not affect the probability that you will end up in the top wealth stratum or the poorest or somewhere in between. Suppose the competitive market operates as a casino and by luck people at an early age win big or lose massively.28 The attitudes of felt superiority and inferiority according to wealth status, contempt for those in lower strata, and solidarity across wealth strata, are the same in the casino society and in another society in which the wealth of your parents reliably predicts what wealth stratum you will occupy. So there is an hereditary

28 . In passing, notice that wealth acquisition in the casino society as described might be largely a matter of brute luck (unavoidable by any reasonable choice those who lose might have made) rather than option luck (mediated by choice). Suppose there are no alternatives one has, that would avoid others making casino choices that would leave one far worse off than others. To avoid being left in the dust, one has no choice but to participate in the casino-type market activities. If so, the casino society fails to satisfy luck egalitarianism, choice version. The casino society might also operate in ways that make it the case that it fails to satisfy luck egalitarianism, fault or deservingness version. 15 class stratification only in the latter society, but if the social attitude concomitants are the same, we might wonder why, from a relational egalitarian perspective, we should find the hereditary class stratification more objectionable than the otherwise similar casino society. Maybe the concern is entirely contingent. Nagel and others who are like-minded are guessing that these attitudes of felt superiority and inferiority, contempt for those less wealthy, and lack of solidarity across wealth strata are likely to be much greater in like our own than in the imagined casino society. This might be so, but this is an empirical question to be investigated, and even if true to a degree, might not be true to a large degree. The twistiness of the human mind should not be underestimated, and people may be quite capable of coming to believe that the outcome of some random chance event that happens to be favorable to them indicates their inherent superiority, shows they are truly deserving. We could also imagine societies that are strongly stratified by wealth, with a huge gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, and little , but in which mechanisms of persistent stable stratification vary.29 One such society might be a perfect in which the able, competent, and ambitious amass great wealth from scratch in each generation and in each generation the winners in competition for positions that confer wealth satisfy Rawlsian FEO. (Of course this society as described would not satisfy Rawls’s difference principle, so its pattern of rewards would be unjust according to Rawls despite satisfaction of the FEO component of his second principle of justice.) Here the mechanism of transmission would be some combination of genetic inheritance and parental stimulation of their children’s ambition. Again, we might have guesses as to whether this type of stratified class society would be worse in the features that are bad from a relational egalitarian perspective than an alternative type of society we might imagine in which direct transmission of wealth from parents to offspring looms much larger as a cause of hereditary class stratification. In the imagined FEO-compliant society wealth transmission to individuals, and a fortiori inheritance and gifts, play no role in establishing and sustaining social hierarchy. If the bads that Scheffler and other relational egalitarians associate with societies in which people do not relate as equals would be equally present in some societies in which inheritance and gifts play no role in sustaining social hierarchy, inheritance and gifts are reduced to one possible mechanism that can bring about these evils. We should note that a society that satisfies FEO could be a version of the casino society. Those with the same native talent and the same ambition have the same prospects of competitive success, but anyone’s chances of competitive success are much more strongly influenced by sheer luck (catching a wave, being in the right place at the right time) than by being more qualified than others by detectable criteria. In another possible society with hereditary class stratification by wealth, the chief mechanism sustaining this type of society might be the skin color or supposed race or or some similar basis for distinguishing “us” versus “them” shared by parents and offspring. In another society as we might imagine it, the wealth of the very rich overwhelmingly is gained by inheritance or gifts from their close relatives. In a simple sense, wealth possession in such a society tends to be unearned rather than earned. We might call this a Piketty society. 30 One gains wealth by gift and inheritance and retains and augments it by passive, coupon-clipping investment. Again, we might speculate as to whether the bad features that relational egalitarians revile and associate with social hierarchy are more likely to appear in social hierarchical societies stratified by direct wealth transmission rather than in some other way. If a society in which people fail to relate to each other as equals is deemed bad for instrumental reasons, by virtue of the bad effects and likely concomitants of absence of social equality, then relational egalitarians and distributive egalitarians might have no quarrel in principle, though they might have subtle disagreements about how much moral weight attaches to various social bads. The nub of disagreement concerns claims that distributive concerns do not morally matter in themselves and claims that relational equality concerns in themselves do morally matter in themselves. See the previous section of this essay for further comment.

29 . Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The Inheritance of Inequality,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2002). 30 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 16

Looking at the social phenomena surrounding practices of inheritance and gifts just revives these ground-level disagreements and does not settle them. At least, I do not see that regarding the conflict between distributive egalitarians and relational egalitarians through the lens of inheritance and gifts should reduce anyone’s confidence that distributive concerns do matter. Suppose it turned out in some surprising way that inheritance and gifts do not contribute significantly to the concomitant concerns contingently linked to existence of social hierarchy but simply have bad distributive impacts. A society in which there are large differences of wealth across people due to inheritances and gifts is one in which aggregate human well-being is sharply reduced and distributed more unfairly than it would be under alternative regimes in which inheritance and gifts are curtailed or eliminated. People on the whole lead less valuable and worthwhile lives, and the distribution of good quality life across persons is by any sensible distributive fairness standard, horribly unfair. Just suppose. My assessment of that imaginary social world is that in it inheritance and wealth should be sharply curtailed or eliminated. Distributive concerns matter, contrary to relational equality doctrine.31 In contrast, if you imagine an alternative world in which inheritance and gifts contribute to the establishment and maintenance of pure social hierarchy—social hierarchy unmarred by any of the further bads claimed to be associated with it, and giving rise to nothing bad that would register in some welfarist distributive assessment, I submit that we should to view this social hierarchy with equanimity. People do not relate as equals—so what? Shifting gears, I want simply to raise a question as to whether we should expect social hierarchy consisting in stratification by wealth to give rise to similar levels of evil further effects that we have seen with other forms of caste hierarchy such as feudal hierarchy and racial hierarchies. Suppose we could achieve a society that was social democratic in terms of the quality of life achieved for people at the various wealth levels. That is to say, the society has wealth inequality, perhaps wealth inequality persisting across generations, but the inequalities are functional in terms of bringing it about that the society continually satisfies fair distribution principles. But being in one or other wealth stratum tends to give rise to feelings of social superiority and inferiority. Would we expect this tendency to be rampant, and to the extent it exists, disturbing? Consider current practices of airline companies toward their customers. Customers are in effect stratified into several visible distinct groups by wealth—ultra-first class, first class, business class, economy-plus class, economy class, and so on.32 Here we have social hierarchy, raw and salient, experienced by all who travel by air. I have doubts as to whether this sort of hierarchical arrangement is wounding to the dignity, self-respect, and so on of those at the bottom layers of the hierarchy. The fact that money is the dividing force (rather than, for example, race or religion) puts a democratic halo on the arrangements. If I am sitting in a cramped economy class seat, I am aware I could be in ultra-first class, if I were willing to pay more for the privilege. Even if I lack the funds that would make paying more to be even possible for me, I know that I might have had greater funds, and then could buy the privileges. 33 Even knowing or suspecting that the customers in the higher-privilege groups are looking down on me and regarding me as a peasant or hobo type of person need not be disquieting. Who cares? This sense of superiority might be as trivial as soccer fans believing their sport is the best and that they are inherently

31 . Why not hold that both distributive concerns and relational equality matter? One might consistently embrace both. I think my hypothetical examples throw cold water on the claim that social equality is in itself morally or in another way valuable in itself, but there may be rock-bottom conflict of intuitions here. 32 . I’m not here supposing the society in which the air lines operate is just according to social democratic standards. The reference here is to practices in current society, warts and all. I’m simply trying to imagine a possible case, unlike our current societies, in which people do not relate as equals, and are sensitive in their dealings with one another to rank and status, but in which not relating as equals would not seem morally objectionable or anyway not seriously morally objectionable. In such a society the social hierarchies the relational egalitarian identifies as oppressive might—so I claim—be nonoppressive. 33 . Of course, if I am born a peasant rather than a lord, or am born dark-skinned in a society that prizes light skin, I could also imagine myself gaining the desired traits—waking up from sleep to find myself in the manor house occupying the lord’s bed, and light-skinned. I am not making a conceptual claim, nor a claim about what is logically or metaphysically possible. My claim is about our psychological reactions. Even if I am penniless, I can readily picture myself rolling in cash. If beauty is, as they say, only skin deep, lacing cash is not even skin deep. 17 superior to fans of lesser sports such as rugby or American style football. This does occur, but who cares?34 My guess is that if this sort of status inequality is not a big deal in our current unjust societies, it likely would not be a big deal if it persisted in societies that were just in terms of fair distribution. To reiterate, this bit of armchair is nothing more than a guess. I am simply raising an empirical question. A further question is whether persistent wealth stratification stretching across several generations promotes social segregation of the classes. Suppose it does. Is this bad in itself, or likely to generate bads? If people in each separate wealth stratum come increasingly to lead lives that are isolated from people in other strata, one might speculate that social segregation might lower people’s allegiance to solidarity norms across these groups. But segregation also insulates those who have less from being forced to experience lesser opportunity and status in face to face interaction. To resort again to a personal example simply to illustrate the point, I live in a wealthy community. If my rich fellow community neighbors interacted with me regularly, I might feel different and somehow of lesser worth, might feel bad. But they don’t interact with me much, in fact they seem to take pains to avoid interacting with people like me, so this problem does not arise. There are many deep and profound injustices in our social world. It is hard to see these failures of people to relate as equals of the sort just described as injustices at all. This is not here a claim that relational equality does not matter but a question as to how much this particular sort matters and whether failures of relational equality due to wealth inequality are likely to give rise to further contingent evils.

6. Equal opportunity for relating as equals. We might wonder whether what is morally important, from the relational equality standpoint, is whether people relate as equals, or whether they have a fair opportunity to live in a society in which all relate as equals. Michael Otsuka once suggested that we might take pains to make people’s membership in any particular society far more voluntary than it is at present. He imagines a world in which very different types of social relations are sustained in separate societies, each of which occupies a small island in a large archipelago. We might imagine some societies sustaining ideal relations between people as assessed from the democratic equality relational egalitarian standpoint. On some islands relations are hierarchical, even feudal in character. Some are highly wealth-stratified, and in these societies rich and poor do not relate as equals, and even subgroups of rich and poor fail to sustain egalitarian social relations among themselves. But on becoming an adult, social arrangements give everyone an equal opportunity to join any of the many types of society. The various types of society, nonhierarchical and hierarchical, sustain themselves over time via voluntary membership, as just described, let us imagine. We might wonder whether this imaginary world in which there is equal opportunity for all to relate as equals (or not, as they choose) should be deemed to satisfy the relational equality ideal.

34 . In this connection we might observe that being thick-skinned in certain ways is an important virtue for a member of a modern society. Living in a diverse democratic society in which people live very different sorts of lives and have wildly different tastes and values, I should not be overly sensitive to what might be slights or signs that those I am dealing with think little of me. I should not easily take offense. (This is not to deny that a disposition to respond with resentment to genuine serious affronts to one’s dignity is also a democratic virtue.)