Telic: inequality is bad in itself – The Principle of Equality: “It is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others”
Does this apply to between us and aliens? Or between us and Inca peasants?
Deontic: agents are required to bring about equality because of some other duties, e.g. of fairness or justice. So we ought to treat people equally because fairness demands it.
Deontic is about rightness v wrongness; i.e. claims about what agents ought to do. But telic is about axiology – theory of value – and what is good v bad as a state of affairs.
LDO as usually stated doesn’t bite for deontic egalitarianism because nobody is doing anything – but you could come up with an action-centred version that does bite, and the theory would handle it the same as telic view.
One extra resource deontic view has for LDO: restrict the content of the duty so that it never recommends LD in the first place (e.g., make the duty “act fairly”, or “redistribute” rather than “promote equality”)
Reasons to dislike the deontic view – it seems to be too narrow; says there’s nothing morally amiss with unavoidable inequality
E.g. Divided World: one half of humanity is at 100 and the other at 200, and neither knows the other exists. Then nobody is doing anything wrong here. But it seems worse than everyone at 145!
Similarly with natural disasters, etc. Deontic view isn’t really able to point to anything bad about these. E.g. Gust of Wind: we plan to allocate some resources equally, then a gust of wind makes it unequal. Is there no reason to redistribute?
Rawls: if a situation is unalterable, the question of justice doesn’t arise
Pluralist vs monist egalitarians – whether they admit other intrinsic goods, e.g. The Principle of Utility: “it is in itself better if people are better off”
Pluralism more plausible, surely not only equality matters: e.g. Heaven vs Hell. (And also not very plausible it has lexical importance over welfare)
Also strong vs moderate pluralist egalitarians. Suppose you have y weakly Pareto dominated by x, but y is more equal. How do they compare?
Strong pluralist egalitarian: sometimes y is all-things-considered better than x, even though better for nobody.
Moderate pluralists say that y is always, on balance, worse than x.
Levelling Down Objection to telic egalitarianism
Idea: if you’re a telic egalitarian, any reduction in inequality must be, in a respect, good. But what if you reduce inequality by simply making everybody worse off.
This hits even moderate pluralists, because they do put intrinsic weight on equality.
But the all-things-considered LDO only hurts monist egalitarians, and hardly anybody would have that view anyway.
Attempt to get around it: Mason (2001) – conditional egalitarianism.
Instrumental vs non-instrumental value is different from intrinsic vs extrinsic value.
E.g. the pen used by Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation has non-instrumental value but based on extrinsic properties, i.e. context
I find this somewhat dubious. Like, seems like the pen is valued for the experiences it induces. And the reply that “well, if you learned it was a perfect replica then the value would disappear” seems to miss the point: it indeed no longer generates the experiences in you. (Why that is, is an interesting psychological question, but it seems clear that the value was coming from that)
Equality’s value could depend on extrinsic properties, e.g. at least some people benefitting from it. Hence conditional.
But this makes the relation ‘better with respect to equality’ intransitive. [Holtug 2007]. This seems like a big thing to give up – betterness no longer really action-guiding because you’d get cycles.
Biting the bullet: Temkin (2000) – reject The Slogan: One situation cannot be worse than another in any respect if there is no one for whom it is worse – i.e. person-affecting principle.
Egalitarians who want to maintain that equality has value will need to endorse strong impersonal goodness (that there are valuable states-of-affairs whose value doesn’t reduce to good-for-someone).
But this seems OK anyway! Temkin makes two arguments: (a) non-identity problem, and (b) desert suggests that states of affairs really can be impersonally better vs worse
With desert: idea is that things are better when people get what they deserve. So why couldn’t a levelled-down state of affairs in a respect make things better?
Note that telic egalitarians aren’t necessarily worried about all inequality – it only makes a state of affairs worse if it is undeserved or unchosen. In those cases, happy to bite bullet.
But see Hayden comment on my essay: “I think person-affecting views are a red herring with this question. It’s not obvious that caring about people requires a person-affecting account of the good (an a monistic one at that, rather than a pluralistic one).”
Giving Up Levelling Down (Campbell Brown): claim that when considered analysed reductively, prioritarians also need to say that LD is “in a respect” better.
Brown’s analysis: “X is better than Y in respect of r” is just the claim that if you hold fixed all other relevant respects so that X and Y differ only in r, X would be better than Y all things considered.
Suppose the LDO is moving from A=(10,2) to B=(1,1).
Now, according to an egalitarian the relevant aspects are equality and total welfare. Construct A*=(10,2) and B*=(6,6) where all that differs is equality; most would agree B* is better than A*. So B is better than A in respect of equality.
For a Prioritarian, they must also judge B* better than A*, though! So they similarly must explain why B is better than A in a respect.
Another way to put it: you can represent Prioritarianism’s social welfare function as W = n * B*(1-IN), where B is average welfare and IN an inequality measure. But then Prioritarians must say that inequality is a respect of disvalue, so LD is better in that respect.
Weber (2019) replies that this is conflating algebraic decompositions with what a moral theory actually values. Average height, or % of population that likes scrambled eggs, might be higher in the levelled-down state, but that doesn’t matter for Prioritarianism either!
This is just rejecting Brown’s reductive analysis. Not every quantity that covaries with the ordering in a separable way constitutes a genuine respect of value.
(Of course, inequality is in a bit of a different boat to scrambled eggs, because the former really does have a mechanical link to the social preference ordering.)
Prioritarianism (or The Priority View): Benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are.
It’s not simply the view that there’s lower-hanging fruit to help the worse off. Much stronger: it matters more morally. Or from Otsuka and Voorhoeve: each person’s wellbeing has positive diminishing marginal moral value
Contrast with egalitarian view, where helping the worse-off isn’t directly good, but instead instrumental towards promoting equality. Focus is on relative wellbeing – you care about worse-off only because there’s someone better-off. But prioritarians care about absolute wellbeing.
“what is bad is not that these people are worse off than others. It is rather that they are worse off than they might have been” (Parfit 2000)
There are two parts to Prioritarian axiology: (a) diminishing marginal value of wellbeing, and (b) Separability – moral value of an increase in one person’s welfare doesn’t depend on how anyone else is doing
Typically, you’d say that states-of-affairs are better if they have higher total priority-weighted wellbeing.
One argument for Separability: “Egyptology”. Without separability, then it might be that how x morally compares to y depends on wellbeing of temporally distant unaffected individuals, e.g. those in Ancient Egypt. But that’s very counterintuitive. (originally presented about average utilitarianism and whether or not to have children, depending on QoL in Egypt)
The standard view is telic, weighted, maximising Prioritarianism. But you could have a deontic version, lexical views, non-consequentialist versions.
Escapes standard LDO, because you don’t make the worst-off any better off (and others are harmed), so certainly priority-weighted wellbeing goes down.
Ingmar Persson claims that it is vulnerable to LDO, because after levelling down, the average moral weight of marginal welfare gains is higher. And this is a respect in which Prioritarianism claims levelling down is better.
What?? I think this is confused in two ways. (i) the LDO isn’t usually trying to argue that the theory does have a respect in which levelling down is better – the point is that it seems committed to levelling down being in-a-respect better, even though it’s intuitively implausible that there are indeed any such respects. (ii) why is the average moral weight of marginal welfare gains something of interest, beyond a mathematical quantity? Why is increasing this valuable? This makes no sense at all, and I don’t see why a Prioritarian would believe it.
Yeah, Weber (2014) makes this point.
Priority monster objection (Pummer) – instead of giving a very large benefit to a badly off person Beth, there could be an extraordinarily badly off person Zelda to whom it’s better to give a very small benefit.
Follows from a spectrum argument. For sufficiently small e, seems like on Prioritarian view it’s better to give B-e to badly-off Beth than B to well-off Andrea.
Overall I think it’s fine to bite the bullet here. Else, give up transitivity, or reject one of the premises:
Maybe nobody could be as badly-off as Zelda. (seems false, they could be. And Pummer points out you can extend a somewhat-bad life over time for sufficiently long to make it worse)
Maybe on the left tail of welfare, the moral value of an additional unit of wellbeing stops increasing as welfare gets even lower. Amongst people who are sufficiently badly off, improvements to their wellbeing matters equally. Seems implausible to me.
Failure to account for shift between interpersonal and intrapersonal decision-making (Otsuka and Voorhoeve)
Setup: equiprobable chance of developing either slight impairment or very severe impairment. Need to administer either medicine A (slight → full health) or B (very severe → severe). Empirically, people are indifferent between them receiving A and B, i.e. EU gain is equal.
Note: Mogensen lecture 5 has a cleaner setup for this – current welfare is at 100. You can guarantee that, or let her have 50:50 chance of gaining vs losing 20 units. In group case, can intervene to guarantee both stay at 100, else 50:50 chance of Harry gaining 20 units vs Sally losing 20 units. Seems like there’s a stronger reason to intervene in group case, but Priorit views them as identical.
Single patient case. Claim: intuitively a morally-motivated stranger ought to be indifferent between administering A and B, since the patient is herself. But Prioritarianism says B has higher expected moral value, because of priority weight of EU gain at very severe > priority at slight impairment.
But Prioritarian can object pretty reasonably to this: morality isn’t simply prudential interests; the whole point of Prioritarianism is that moral value isn’t simply welfare, and that there are diminishing moral returns! Just because the patient is indifferent between A and B doesn’t mean they’re equally morally good. (You’d get a bit more bite if you changed the probabilities so agent prefers A to B yet Prioritarian administers B. Still, not that bad imo.)
[Another position Prioritarian could take: it’s OK to be indifferent, even at the cost of failing to maximise priority-weighted EU, because we have proper regard for autonomy of the patient & her preferences. But O&V rebut this – just suppose the stranger owns the treatments and the patient is a young child without rationality]
Group case: half the people will get slight impairment, half get very severe (and you know who). Claim: intuitively you ought to administer B here, and we can justify this by separateness of persons. No need for Prioritarianism – and indeed it misses out on the fact that there should be a shift in decision between single patient vs group.
But from Separability, because the moral value of improving someone’s wellbeing depends only on their absolute level (not on other people), we must take the same decision in single vs group.
But separateness of persons means that it’s not justified to benefit the slightly impaired people by imposing costs on the severely impaired ones – it’s trading off between different people.
[hmm, surely even if you buy separateness of persons you must admit that sometimes you can impose costs on X for benefits to Y. maybe the idea is that this counts against that action though, and Prioritarianism doesn’t allow that]
Possible resolution: ex ante Prioritarianism. You apply Prioritarian weighting to individuals’ expected utility, rather than to the utility that they end up with.
This will always line up with the agent’s preferences in single patient case (so indifference). And in group case, it’s all deterministic anyway so we get the same result as before, that is, B.
But (somewhat complicated) objection involving group case with risk and inversely correlated outcomes: each person has 50:50 risk, and exactly half the group will get each condition. Ex ante the view is indifferent between A & B. But seems like we should just give everybody B – then, we will have indeed provided treatment to those who had the strongest claim on it ex post, that is, whoever ends up with very severe impairment.
Maybe: BB’s presentation of Huemer’s argument against Prioritarianism and egalitarianism
Sufficientarianism
Sufficientarianism
Frankfurt (1987): “If everyone had enough it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others”. He thinks we should distribute resources to maximise incidence of sufficiency.
Two claims (Shields 2020):
(a) Positive Claim: it’s of intrinsic moral importance for people to have enough
(b) Negative Claim: apart from the above, it doesn’t intrinsically matter how resources are distributed.
Or: once someone’s at sufficiency, there aren’t any non-instrumental reasons to benefit them. Alternatively (weaker): the reasons shift.
Objection: suppose you can make one badly-off person even worse-off, to tip another person over the sufficiency boundary. Suggests we should do that, but this seems wrong.
Of course, you can use a weaker view like Shields to get the result that the reasons don’t go to zero. But then this isn’t a very distinctive theory, just a version of Prioritarianism with a particular functional form for the weighting function.
Also, maybe you object to e.g. gender pay gap among well-off movie stars. (Though this could be to do with discrimination, not the fact of inequality.)