Holtug Nils - Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism

New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality

EDITED BY
Nils Holtug and
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

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the several contributors 2007

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Virtually everyone believes in some kind of equality. That citizens have an equal right to vote, that people are equals before the law, and/or that public schools and hospitals should serve citizens on an equal basis. Egalitarians, however, believe in equality in a particularly deep sense in that they further believe that, everything else being equal, individuals should have equal shares of resources, or welfare, or equal opportunities to obtain such goods. Nevertheless, a fully developed egalitarian theory will have to say more that this. In fact, as various developments in contemporary political philosophy have revealed, equality is a surprisingly elusive concept.

The chapters in this volume aim to bring greater clarity to the issue and can be seen as contributions to the ongoing project of developing an adequate egalitarian theory. One of the issues dealt with pertains to the foundations of equality, in particular, to how this ideal can be defended. Another pertains to the nature of equality, where various themes are addressed, including the (allegedly) significant distinction between telic and deontic egalitarianism, prioritarianism, how to define the least advantaged group for the purposes of Rawlss difference principle, equal relations between individuals, and whether egalitarianism applies not just to humans but also to sentient non-human animals (and if so, what the implications are). A third type of issue concerns how equality relates to other important values such as desert, responsibility, liberty, and sufficiency. Finally, some specific applications of equality are considered, in particular how equality applies to the issue of health care and whether there are egalitarian reasonsin some casesto restrict the freedom of suppliers who wish to release products that will confer different levels of risk on consumers, depending on their ability to pay.

Most of the chapters in this book were presented at a conference on egalitarianism at the University of Copenhagen in 2004. We would like to thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for financial support, thus making the conference possible. Also, we would like to thank the contributors for their encouragement, cooperative spirit, and, not least, their contributions. Furthermore, we are grateful to Thomas Sbirk Petersen for assistance with organizing the conference. Finally, we would like to thank Claus Hansen for performing the tedious but important task of compiling the index.

N. H. and K. L.-R.

Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Thomas Christiano

Ingmar Persson

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Nils Holtug

Dennis McKerlie

Bertil Tungodden and Peter Vallentyne

Linda Barclay

Peter Vallentyne

Andrew Williams

Richard J. Arneson

Jonathan Wolff

Susan Hurley

Richard J. Arneson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and also Director (this really means associate director), Institute for Law and Philosophy, School of Law, University of San Diego. His current research is mainly on two topics: (1) how best to integrate an appropriate concern for personal responsibility in egalitarian theories of social justice, and (2) to what extent one can defend act consequentialism against rival moral doctrines.

Linda Barclay is Lecturer in Philosophy at Aarhus University. Her main area of research is contemporary political philosophy, particularly liberalism. She has published numerous papers concerned with autonomous agency, liberal neutrality, equality, and multiculturalism.

Thomas Christiano is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Arizona and co-director of the Rogers Program in Law and Society in the College of Law at the University of Arizona. He has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently finishing a book on the egalitarian foundations of democracy and constitutionalism entitled The Constitution of Equality, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He has published The Rule of the Many (Westview Press, 1996) and many articles on the subjects of democratic theory, distributive justice, and moral and political philosophy.

Nils Holtug is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He has worked on various issues in political philosophy, ethics, bioethics, and metaphysics, and is currently writing a book on welfare and its place in morality and distributive justice. His work is published in various anthologies and in journals such as Analysis, Bioethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Economics and Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Journal of Ethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, Theoria, and Utilitas. He can be contacted at nhol@hum.ku.dk

Susan Hurley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is the author of