L4 - equality Flashcards
intro
what is the language of equality?
- in class terms (for the privileged equality feels like oppression)
- in rights terms
- in economic terms
is equality even a value?
= naturally we are all inequal
- obviously people are naturally unequal: people are bigger, faster etc.
- and they are logically unequal: in math, if 2 things are equal, they are identical, but humans aren’t
in polsci: equality is not a fact but a value -> why do we value equality?
- bc ceteris paribus, its better that people be considered equal
how much do we value equality?
- equality over “quantity of stuffs”?
- egalitarian = equality over quantity
-> is equality really a value?
bc even the most committed egalitarian would pick 99,100 over 1,1
equality of what?
is it that we think we should have…
- equality of resources - things at our disposal, like money
- equality of opportunity - ability to take positions in society
- equality of outcomes - success in having achieved those resources and positions
- equality of well-being - general contentedness with one’s lot
or if it is not about equality at all. do we believe….
- we should have enough to live on sufficiency
(e.g. with aid giving, not aim to create equality but that they get sufficiency) - that people in great need are taken care of first priority
Dworkin
suggests a diff between welfare and resources
- welfare-egalitarian cares about outcomes (that everyone is happy)
- resource-egalitarians care about opportunity (that everyone starts in the same place)
Dworkin argues against welfare bc:
- how do you define or measure welfare/happiness?
- problems, e.g. what to do about expensive taste? (system would be negative for people with expensive taste - is this fair?)
- welfare eliminates individual responsibility - you have to find your own way to be happy: you can’t expect the gov to do this for you
Dworkin’s point is not the welfare/utility is not important. what you need is a balance between utility and equality
- “a just society will make some compromise between efficiency and distribution. it will sometimes tolerate less than perfect equality in order to improve average utility”
he begins by stipulating that a functioning market econ is the friend, not enemy of equality
- markets are good for establish the value of goods
- and how do you account for the distribution of tastes? - markets help us identify what are values are (what we find more important/pretty/tastes)
thought experiment = immigrants land on a desert island -> how do you start a society:
- use the market: establish an auction to determine the value of goods…
- auction allows to determine what things are worth to people - … and the “envy test” to correct for errors of judgement
- “Equality of resources supposes that the resources devoted to each person’s life should be equal. That goal needs a metric. The auction proposes what the envy test in fact assumes, that the true measure of the social resources devoted to the life of one person is fixed by asking how important, in fact, that resource is for others. It insists that the cost, measured in that way, figure in each person’s sense of what is rightly his and in each person’s judgment of what life he should lead”
- in the end only works if in the end everyone is happy with the outcome, if no on is envious (otherwise you need to redo the auction) - also a hypothetical insurance scheme
- “[To supplement the auction the immigrants] now establish a hypothetical insurance market which they effectuate through compulsory insurance at a fixed premium for everyone based on speculations about what the average immigrant would have purchased by way of insurance had the antecedent risk of various handicaps been equal”
- everyone would buy insurance: sounds a bit Rawlsian (risk averse to put money in there)(without assumption stick figure)
Dworkin: use the market to determine our values
Dworkin system vs Rawls’ system
on its face, Dworkin’s system sounds like Rawls’ system (specifically via the insurance scheme)
(Dworkin wants a society as equal and just as that of Rawls without the far-from reality thought experiment BS)
but it improves it in certain ways:
- starts with a baseline of equality, but allows for diff in ambition = it is AMBITION-SENSITIVE, BUT ENDOWMENTS INCENSITIVE
- ambition sensitive = it cares about your ambitions (e.g. if you are lazy vs hardworking -> how much you earn)
- endowments incentives = whether you are born rich or smart or whatever should not matter
- inequality is justified if it comes from ambition, not justified if it is based on endowments
it seems like a starting gate theory (like Nozick) but it isn’t:
- “Our theory does not suppose that an equal division of resources is appropriate at one moment in someone’s life but not at any other … So we must reject the starting-gate theory, and recognize that the requirements of equality (in the real world at least) pull in opposite directions. On the one hand we must, on pain of violating equality, allow the distribution of resources at any particular moment to be (as we might say) ambition-sensitive. It must, that is, reflect the cost or benefit to others of the choices people make so that, for example, those who choose to invest rather than consume, or to consume less expensively rather than more, or to work in more rather than less profitable ways, must be permitted to retain the gains that flow from these decisions in an equal auction followed by free trade. But on the other hand, we must not allow the distribution of resources at any moment to be endowment-sensitive, that is, to be affected by differences in ability of the sort that produce income differences in a laissez- faire economy among people with the same ambitions. Can we devise some formula that offers a practical, or even a theoretical, compromise between these two, apparently competing, requirements? … We want to find some way to distinguish fair from unfair differences in wealth generated by differences in occupation. Unfair differences are those traceable to genetic luck, to talents that make some people prosperous but are denied to others who would exploit them to the full if they had them”
-> how do we create such a system?
- option luck = matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out -whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he/she should have anticipated and might have declined
- brute luck = matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles
Dworkin’s achievement + issues
adapts the Rawlsian thesis to allow for differences of ambition…
and controls for the kind of luck that is oblique to concerns of justice
-> “luck-egalitarianism”
- brute luck = shouldn’t matter: it is arbitrary -> insurance system or smth should be there
- option luck = should matter: equality because diff ambitions (you choice to bet your money)
problems this position raises:
- inter-generational giving: do we get to pass gifts down to our kids?
- radical mind changes: what if we change our conception of the good? does this legitimate a “fresh stock of resources”?
- profligacy: what if one wastes everything to point where they are below subsistence?
(no one wants to live in a cold system where we don’t give anything to/about people that wasted all of their money) - politics: how do we control for political power? is a theory of eco equality without political equality coherent?
-> captures intuitions about justice, but in the extremes it creates a lot of inequality and is rather cold
the egalitarian plateau
nearly all political philosophers agree with the principle of equality to some degree - what Kymlicka calls the ‘egalitarian plateau’
- all individuals (within a politica community) should be treated as equals - i.e. with concern and respect
- equality as citizens: right to vote, right to run for office, etc.
- equality before the law: there is only one law for black/white, men/women, etc.
but are these so straightforward?
- equality as citizens: do we really think that the rich have the same voice as the poor?
- equality before the law: but does this formal fact of law signify equal treatment by the law?
–> question of whether we care about ‘formal freedom’ or ‘effective freedom’
- most think we have formal equality, real question is if we have effective equality
equality as recognition
= problem isn’t equality as such, but rather the kind of thing that inequality brings - namely hierarchical relationships between peoples
recognition = recognition of rights + cultural appreciation + love
usually social relations leads to numerous harms:
- marginalization
- exploitation
- domination
this doesn’t distill to redistributive claims: LGBT communities may want to be treated as equals, but don’t necessarily have redistributive demands
- may also feedback into redistribution: these themselves may correlate with inequality of goods
- they are treated as unequal despite money, the wealth doesnt necessarily matter - the hierarchy does
!recognition language more used than language of redistribution
recognition: a case against inequality
(copy paste slide)
Recognition and Feminism.
- Is gender equality (just) about equal pay? Or is it also about “relational” equality:
- Swift: “Some theorists who call themselves egalitarian … are more concerned with eliminating oppressive relationships. Feminists in this camp are likely to want an end to patriarchy (Greek pater = ‘father’, arche = ‘rule’) – moving beyond a social order in which men have authority over women who are subordinate to them. The problem is not that men and women have unequal chances of getting high paying jobs. That’s at best a rather trivial symptom of a much deeper concern … The very way that we think of ourselves and others when it comes to gender – what it means to be a man or a woman, what kind of behaviour is and isn’t appropriate – is a social construction that reflects millennia of male domination” (110).
Recognition and Self-Respect
- “A person’s self-respect depends significantly on what she can do relative to others, partly because that influences how she is regarded by those others … What matters is not just that all people have enough to eat … It matters also that whatever people have is enough, relative to what others have, for them to participate in the shared life of the society, to be regarded as fellow members by others, and hence to be self-respecting members of the society” (121).
Recognition and Community (here: “fraternity”).
- “Even if inequality does promote growth, and does tend over time to increase everybody’s economic position (including that of the least advantaged), it may also lead to a stratified and divided society … In such a society there will be no feeling of solidarity or community, of people being ‘members one of another’. People may be richer than they would be in a more equal society, but they will lack a sense of togetherness or community that is also crucial for human well-being” (12
addendum 1: positional goods
what about goods that can’t be redistributed anyways - positional goods (e.g. university slots)
positional goods = These are goods where the fact that some will gain necessarily means that others will lose. Or, in Rawlsian language, goods where there is no way to improve the position of the worst off
addendum 2: utilitarianism and equality
some positions look egalitarian but aren’t
utilitarianism = maximizing the greatest amount for the most people -> value is utility rather than equality
“To aim at maximizing the total amount of anything is, by definition, to have only an incidental and instrumental interest in the distribution of that thing (here, utility), or of whatever it is that produces that thing (here, resources). You will go with whatever distribution achieves the overall maximum” (128).
addendum 3: priority and sufficiency
some positions look egalitarian but aren’t
prioritarianism (Raz) = our belief in equality doesn’t derive from equality:
- but rather the feeling that some people need things more than others, and thus satisfying those needs is of greater value
He terms these “diminishing principles”: “where the strength of the reason to give someone a good depends on the degree to which they possess the property that qualifies them to have the good, and the more they have already got diminishes the reason to give them any more … The hungrier a person is, the greater to the reason to feed them. But once you have fed them they become less hungry, so there is less reason to give them more food … Diminishing principles may well lead us to redistribute goods from those whose claims are less to those whose claims are more urgent. But there is no thought here that equality matters” (129).
in short: the underlying principle is not equality: it is “prioritarian” (Rawls is considered to be prioritarian)
-> but how much priority should be given? do we really care about the position of the worst off when everyone is doing OK?
= sufficiency: point here is not equality, but simply the desire that everyone has enough (but how do you define the threshold of sufficiency)
