My friend and colleague-of-sorts (at USD’s Institute for Law and Philosophy) Richard Arneson has revised the entry on “Egalitarianism” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I think many readers of BHL will find the essay to be of great interest. Arneson is a sharp philosopher, and while he’s no libertarian by a long shot, he the knows the arguments of his intellectual opponents well, and always treats them in a fair and intellectually serious way.

The scope of Arneson’s essay is surprisingly expansive. “Egalitarianism,” as Arneson sees it, doesn’t simply refer to the doctrine that everyone should be exactly the same in all respects, or even in income and wealth. That latter view, in fact, gets relatively short treatment in the essay, probably an accurate reflection of the relatively few number of philosophers who adhere to it (Arneson actually doesn’t cite any). No, for Arneson,

the label “egalitarian” does not necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people’s condition be made the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as equally morally considerable.

So, in this sense, a defender of the traditional view of hereditary monarchy would not count as an egalitarian. But a libertarian very well might. (There’s even a section on Lockean Rights!)

The essay draws a broad distinction between two ways in which egalitarianism might be conceived: equality of opportunity and equality of condition. To many, the former might sound fairly innocent. But Arneson is quick to note that its full realization can be extremely demanding, especially when we understand it in the robust form of John Rawls’ “Fair” Equality of Opportunity (FEO):

Consider that parents naturally want to help their children develop the talents needed for competitive success. Some parents control a lot of resources useful for this purpose; some parents have few such resources. The ordinary interaction of parents with their children is then an obstacle to the achievement of fair equality of opportunity. If society were fully to achieve FEO, then either parental freedom to help their children in ways that give them a competitive edge would have to be curtailed or such help would have to be exactly offset by compensating infusion of social resources toward the education and socialization of children whose parents are less effective.

Equality of condition, on the other hand, can be developed in three main ways – equality of capabilities, of resources, or of welfare – and the essay does a nice job of laying out the difficulties and of setting out the various tensions in each (see especially here on the seeming instability of the capabilities approach as an intermediary between equality of welfare and equality of resources approaches).

Arneson’s own position, for which he is justly famous, is a kind of hybrid position between equality of opportunity and equality of condition, known as equality of opportunity for welfare. One of the most distinctive features of this view is its attempt to supplement traditional egalitarian concerns with an attempt to take seriously the moral implications of personal choice and responsibility. So, it holds, equality requires that some individuals’ lives not go better or worse than others merely as a result of brute luck. But if some do better or worse than others because of the wise or foolish choices they have made, there is no injustice in this.

Because it takes seriously one of their most important moral commitments, Arneson’s view should be of special interest to those who hold libertarian or conservative values. Another family of views that might be of special interest to this group is that committed to the ideal of “Relational Equality.” As Arneson describes it, the animating idea of these views is “that in an egalitarian society people should relate to one another as equals or should enjoy the same fundamental status.” But just because people should have equal status does not mean that they should have equal stuff, or even equal opportunity for stuff (or welfare).

From the standpoint of the relational equality versions of egalitarianism, equality of condition doctrines get the moral priorities backward. These doctrines make a fetish of what should not matter to us, or should not matter very much. A better approach is to look at distributive justice issues by asking what social and distributive arrangements are needed to establish and sustain a society of free, equal people, a society in which individuals all relate as equals. When the question is posed in this way, relational equality advocates sometimes claim to discern a new strong case for embracing a sufficientarian approach to distributive justice. That some people have more money than others is not an impediment to a society of equals, the argument goes. But if some are so poor they are effectively excluded from market society or pushed to its margins, they are in effect branded as socially inferior, which offends against relational equality.

The most well-known defense of relational equality is set forth by Elizabeth Anderson, in her excellent paper, “What Is the Point of Equality?“. In the paper, she juxtaposes the relational approach to equality with the luck-egalitarian approach of Arneson and others. And one of her most potent (and libertarian-friendly) critiques of that view is that, in Arneson’s words, it  “engenders an inappropriate expansion of what is deemed to be the legitimate business of the state.” Or, in Anderson’s own words, “the proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed” (emphasis added).

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in the essay, such as its discussion of the question of equality’s scope. If we ought to care about equality, among which group of persons ought we seek to establish it? Members of our community? Our state? All persons currently living? All persons who are living or ever will live (or have lived)? The discussion here, like many of the discussions in the essay, gets technical quick. But the debate is of more than merely theoretical interest. Suppose, for instance, that a policy of open borders on the part of the United States would increase inequality at the local level, but decrease it at the global level. Whether egalitarians should support or oppose the policy, in these circumstances, would depend at least in part on where they came down on the question of equality’s scope.

Also worthy of note is the extensive discussion of alternatives to egalitarianism. Some people who are broadly sympathetic to egalitarian ideals are nevertheless motivated to reject the idea that equality is desirable per se by considerations like the “leveling-down objection.” We could make a society more equal by simply destroying some of the wealth or welfare or the well-off, so that their resultant wealth or welfare would be closer to the same level as that as the worse-off. But, many think, there is no respect in which society would be morally better off as a result. Equality, then, must not be intrinsically desirable. Or so the argument goes.

That doesn’t mean that policies that push in the direction of greater equality are not worth pursuing. Suppose we agree, with George Orwell, that “a fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight.” What disgusts us might not be the mere fact that there is a large gap between the wealth, or welfare, of the fat man and the child. What disgusts us might not be the fact that the child has less than the fat man, but that the child does not have enough – enough to live a decent life. This is the idea that motivates the Sufficiency view, most closely associated with Harry Frankfurt. Similar, though somewhat distinct, considerations motivate the Priority view associated with Derek Parfit. Arneson does a fine job setting out the attractions and limitations of both of these views, as well as several others.

You’ll learn a lot from the essay, so I highly recommend reading the whole thing. And follow Richard’s work! Readers of this blog might be especially interested in his recent takes on Gaus and Tomasi.