Equality and priority | Rohan's Rambles

‘Equality matters.’ ‘We should give priority to the worse off.’ ‘We should be compassionate.’ Compare and contrast these views. (2000 Q11)

Key distinction: something mattering terminally vs instrumentally.
State each of the views
- “Equality matters”: telic egalitarian view, where there’s some impersonal goodness ascribed to more equal states of affairs.
  - Different degrees to which equality is balanced with other goods. For example:
    - Monist egalitarian
    - Strong pluralist egalitarian (sometimes y, weakly Pareto dominated by x, can be better all-things-considered by virtue of being more equal)
    - Moderate pluralist egalitarian (on balance, y is never all-things-considered better)
- “Priority to the worst off”: welfare has diminishing marginal moral value (Parfit)
  - There’s the instrumental view, where diminishing marginal returns means that we should allocate more to poor people, but that’s less interesting
- “Compassionate”: from Martha Nussbaum (Upheavals of Thought, 2001) has three judgements (i) seriousness of suffering, (ii) non-desert, (iii) similar possibilities [i.e. there but for the grace of God go I]
  - This is a view not about what is impersonally good, but rather how we ought to orient ourselves to moral situations. It’s a virtue-based account.
  - Someone might feel compassion but act in ways that do not lead to the best outcomes on an axiological view – e.g. we are biased, scope-insensitive, etc.
  - Link to Sufficientarianism (Frankfurt)
One difference: how they treat Levelling Down objection
- Present the classic LDO: either have A at 12 and B at 4, or A and B both at 4.
- Brown: Giving Up Levelling Down – argument that both egalitarian and Prioritarian have to accept that LD is in-a-respect better
  - Rebuttal from Weber (endorsed) that this is algebraic decomposition, not what a Prioritarian really values
Another difference: separability in Prioritarianism vs relational nature of egalitarianism
- Egyptology objection to egalitarianism; likewise would discovery of aliens be bad news?
- Divided World objection to deontic egalitarianism
Conclusion: one could feasibly hold all three views, but there are conflicts between which you hold terminally. Most plausible is that we should give priority to the worst off.

‘Just as resources have diminishing marginal utility, so utility has diminishing marginal moral importance.’ (DEREK PARFIT) Does it? (2019 Q12)

Yes, Prioritarianism seems correct. It can accommodate the intuition that equality matters in a respect, but without implausible implications about how to rank outcomes.
Many people have the intuition that equality matters – for example, that it is better to have a more equal distribution of welfare than an unequal one, ceteris paribus.
- At a first pass, we could explain this with reference to egalitarianism.
- Telic or deontic, mention the views.
- [Larry Temkin: all about
- But these have substantial problems
  - Against deontic: Gust of Wind.
  - Against telic: Egyptology / Distant Happy Aliens.
Intuitively, it seems like separability holds: the relative welfare doesn’t matter, but each individual’s position absolutely does.
- So this is what Prioritarianism captures.
Someone might object that this is the right idea, but actually among the very wealthy differences don’t matter.
- Frankfurt, Sufficientarianism. “If everyone had enough, then the distribution of resources would not matter”
- Note that this is not just a form of Prioritarianism!
  - Depending on how you cash it out, if we want to maximise the incidence of sufficiency, then you could make someone badly-off even worse-off to push one person above the threshold. [are there versions of sufficiency to escape this?]
  - Otherwise, if you think that it matters throughout the lower tail, and then doesn’t matter at upper end, then you do simply have Prioritarianism where marginal utility hits zero at some point.
  - But, suppose everyone was above the threshold. Then surely, if you could push a button that would make everybody even better-off, you would have reason to!
A reason why we might doubt this: separability implies that we don’t have separateness of persons.
- Otuska & Voorhoeve. Shift in moral importance from intra- to inter-personal setting.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

Engage with the first premiss. Do resources really have diminishing marginal utility?
- Frankfurt denies it does; he says it can be lumpy, with thresholds, and non-concave.
- (Hmm, but this seems silly as an empirical claim. Surely on average across the population money is DMU. Anyway, it doesn’t matter too much for ethics, though it does give one empirical reason for equality being morally better.)
Remember the Priority Monster objection! And the spectrum counterargument.

Do egalitarians have any compelling answer to the Levelling Down Objection? (2022 Q14)

The egalitarians have a strong reply to the Levelling Down Objection (LDO) in the form of a tu quoque argument: alternative views (including, in particular, Prioritarianism) which account for our intuitions about the value of equality also face the LDO.
The LDO goes along the following lines:
- Egalitarians claim that there is some intrinsic value to equality (we’ll precisify this shortly).
- Compare two worlds:
  - (a) Jack at 12, Jill at 6
  - (b) Jack at 6, Jill at 6.
- World (b) has nobody better off, and someone strictly worse off. This is “levelling down”.
- But egalitarians are committed to saying that world (b) is in a respect better than world (a), since it is more equal. This seems counterintuitive.
Before analysing further, let’s distinguish between different types of egalitarianism.
- Deontic view: actions are (pro tanto) wrong when they increase inequality, and right when they decrease it.
- Telic view: equality is itself good / inequality is itself bad.
- The deontic view is not subject to LDO as stated above, though reformulations can affect it. The view is unattractive for other reasons and it has similar defences to the telic view, so we’ll set it aside in what follows.
  - Deontic view doesn’t rank states of affairs, just actions. [Although, you could reframe our choice between two worlds as a choice between two actions?]
  - Deontic view seems to deliver the wrong verdicts, e.g. in Gust of Wind (Parfit).
The first response an egalitarian might reach for is to say something like: “well, clearly world (a) is better than world (b); I’m not saying that only equality matters!”. But this can’t free them from the view that (b) is in a respect better.
- Put more precisely, even if one is a moderate pluralist egalitarian – i.e. one who holds that allocation X is always worse than allocation Y if weakly Pareto-dominated, regardless of whether X is more equal – you still think that in respect of equality allocation X is better.
A better reply turns to Campbell Brown’s reductive analysis of the better-in-respect-of-w relation.
- This is a counterfactual analysis: holding all relevant features apart from w constant, then compare betterness all-things-considered.
- So the relevant comparison for whether (a) is better than (b) in respect of equality is where you let, for example, total welfare be the same.
  - And then (9, 9) does look better than (12, 6).
  - Moreover, alternative views would have to say the same!
  - Define Prioritarianism: view that welfare has diminishing moral value. And so they’d agree.

After Claude comments

Remember two other answers:
- Conditional egalitarianism: equality’s non-instrumental value is conditional on at least someone benefitting.
- Larry Temkin and rejecting “The Slogan”: One situation cannot be worse than another in any respect if there is no one for whom it is worse
Sharpen the thesis a bit, so it’s more like willing to bite the bullet and highlights that once you distinguish between all-things-considered and in-a-respect betterness, the LDO seems quite mild anyway.
- Also, properly show that the deontic view is victim in similar ways to telic view, but also has similar defences available.
  - Deontic egalitarians could also adjust the duty, so that LDO doesn’t even bite in-a-respect – e.g. make it so that agents ought to promote fairness, or promote equality provided they don’t destroy value, etc.

Is equality’s value best explained by appeal to fairness? (2023 Q14)

There are different senses in which equality might be valuable:
- It’s intrinsically valuable
- It’s valuable instrumentally – e.g., insofar as it promotes wellbeing
- It’s neither instrumentally nor intrinsically valuable, but it is tied up with some other source of value
For an explanation of the value of equality, we want something which:
- Accurately describes the reasons why we believe equality to be valuable
- Justifies and grounds this value, in whichever sense we’ve identified it
- I’m going to set aside the purely instrumental accounts, because we’re primarily interested in equality about the distribution of welfare, not resources.
One account which directly values equality: telic egalitarianism.
- They might resist any attempt to explain the value of equality by appeal to something else.
- A hedonic-welfare utilitarian wouldn’t explain the value of pleasure by appeal to anything else – they just maintain that it is good; and this is intuitively highly plausible.
- Consider two worlds alike in most respects except equality.
  - i.e. total welfare is the same, the individuals are the same.
  - Seems like the more equal world is better!
Appeal to fairness suggests that there’s something unjust about inequality, which leads us to a deontic view.
- It’s unfair to take actions which promote inequality, and unfair to fail to reduce inequality where we can do so without violating other constraints.
- But this appeal to fairness doesn’t seem very robust. Consider Divided World. It doesn’t look like there’s much unfairness coming into it – but that inequality still looks bad. So appeal to fairness isn’t the best way to explain the value of equality.
  - Cf Rawls himself, who says that justice does not come into matters which cannot be otherwise.
- A possible reply: fairness does come into it; it’s unfair that the world is in such a way that some people are well-off and others are badly-off.
  - This is a better claim. But is the badness really coming from the unfairness? Intuitively it is simply bad that some are worse off than others.
  - [would be good to come up with a thought experiment here but am struggling. Maybe something about risk where each person has the same ex ante probability of suffering but only a few people have it realised – problem is that this too involves unfairness from Nature]
Parfit’s view: we’re confusing value of equality with diminishing marginal moral value of welfare.
- Present Prioritarianism; separable view where equality & relative positions don’t in themselves matter.
- So equality does not have intrinsic value on this account, but just is tied up with what matters, when we fix total welfare.
Conclude: insofar as we think equality has value, looks best to explain it in terms of brute goodness. Fairness appeals miss out on the fact that inequality is bad even when not caused by act or omission.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

It’s wrong to conflate fairness-based accounts with deontic view.
- Temkin is the main proponent of fairness-based accounts, and moreover he is a telic egalitarian!
- From his paper:

Isn’t it unfair for some to be worse off than others through no fault of their own? Isn’t it unfair for some to be blind, while others are not? And isn’t unfairness bad?

The core idea is that comparative fairness is an impersonal good. So inequality which is undeserved or unchosen is bad!
Some more points about Temkin’s view (from Wikipedia)
- It’s important that equally deserving people fare equally well, even if, in absolute terms, they are not getting what they deserve.
- Comparative fairness can come apart from comparative desert.
  - Suppose Susan is an excellent person who supererogatorily donates most of her money; John (permissibly, ex hypothesi) spends money on himself.
  - Susan is predictably worse-off than John, even though she’s more morally deserving than him.
  - But there’s not comparative unfairness here; she autonomously decided to make herself worse-off.
A counterargument to the brute-goodness view: if equality were valuable as such, then any inequality would be in-a-respect bad, including that which is deserved or freely-chosen.
- I think you can bite the bullet on this though. Cf Brown on reductive view of in-a-respect badness; it really is a mild claim.
- One escape the brute-goodness egalitarian might try to use: qualify with “only undeserved inequality is bad”. But now they’ve imported the fairness/desert qualifier, so they’re appealing to fairness anyway.
The LDO is relevant because it pushes the point that the egalitarian needs to explain in which respect is it better to level down.
- If they can point to the respect, then presumably this is what explains the value of equality.
- For Temkin, it’s comparative fairness.
- For the brute egalitarian, it’s just equality simpliciter.
- Remember Temkin’s rejection of the Slogan, that a state of affairs is better than another only if it’s better for someone; this is where the LDO being an objection comes from.
Be careful about the part setting aside instrumental value of equality and seeming to equivocate with resources.
- Yes, equality in resource distribution is a natural home for instrumental-based accounts. But some people (e.g. Dworkin) think that resource distribution matters in itself, not only because of welfare.