Equality and distributive justice

Almost everyone professes to believe in equality; the disagreements begin the moment we ask equality of what? That question, made famous by Amartya Sen's 1979 lecture of that title, organises the modern debate. To be an egalitarian is not yet to have a view: one must say which 'currency' of advantage justice requires us to equalise — welfare, resources, capabilities, opportunity — and what room to leave for individual responsibility.

Two great divides structure the field. The first is over the metric: Ronald Dworkin argues for equality of resources, against equality of welfare; Sen and Martha Nussbaum argue that what ultimately matters is people's capabilities — the real freedoms they have to do and be valuable things — not the resources they hold. The second divide is over the role of choice. The family of views known as luck egalitarianism (Dworkin, Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen) holds that justice should neutralise the effects of brute luck — the circumstances we did not choose — while holding people responsible for their genuine choices. Against this, relational egalitarians (Elizabeth Anderson, Samuel Scheffler) argue that equality is not fundamentally about the pattern of any distribution at all, but about people standing to one another as social and political equals.

This note works through the metric debate (welfare, resources, capability), the luck-egalitarian distinction between brute and option luck and the machinery Dworkin builds on it, and the relational challenge that the whole 'distributive' picture misconceives equality's point. It is the natural sequel to Rawls — luck egalitarianism can be read as radicalising Rawls's thought that natural and social fortune is 'arbitrary from a moral point of view' — and it picks up Sen's capability critique of Rawls's primary goods, and Cohen's critique of the difference principle, that you met there.

The debate is a child of A Theory of Justice. Rawls had measured advantage in primary goods and had grounded the difference principle in the thought that the distribution of natural talents is morally arbitrary. Both moves provoked a generation of refinement and dissent.

The metric question was opened by Amartya Sen's Tanner Lecture 'Equality of What?' (1979), which argued that neither utility nor Rawlsian primary goods is the right measure, and proposed instead a focus on human capabilities. The responsibility question was sharpened by Ronald Dworkin's two-part article 'What is Equality?' (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1981), whose Part 1 rejected equality of welfare and Part 2 defended equality of resources, introducing the now-standard distinction between brute luck and option luck. Richard Arneson ('Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare', 1989) and G.A. Cohen ('On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', 1989) generalised the underlying idea into what would later be called luck egalitarianism: the view that it is bad — unfair — for some to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own.

The label 'luck egalitarianism' was in fact coined by a critic, Elizabeth Anderson, in 'What Is the Point of Equality?' (1999), which mounted the most influential attack on the whole programme and revived a relational conception of equality — equality as a matter of how people stand to one another, not of how much they each have. Samuel Scheffler ('What is Egalitarianism?', 2003) developed the relational view further. The field today is a three-cornered contest between resourcist, capability, and relational understandings of what equality requires.

Equality of what? Three currencies

The first question is the metric or 'currency' of egalitarian justice — the thing justice asks us to distribute equally (or to attend to in distributing).

• Equality of welfare holds that what matters is people's well-being, happiness, or preference-satisfaction. Its fatal difficulty is expensive tastes: if we equalise welfare, a person who has cultivated a craving for plovers' eggs and pre-phylloxera claret must be given more resources than someone content with simple fare, which seems unfair to the cheaper-to-please. Equalising welfare appears to reward extravagant preferences.
• Equality of resources (Dworkin) holds that justice equalises the means — the external resources and, suitably handled, the personal endowments — people have, and then lets welfare fall where individuals' own choices take it. People are held responsible for their tastes and ambitions, but compensated for disadvantageous circumstances.
• Equality of capability (Sen, Nussbaum) holds that neither resources nor welfare is fundamental: what matters is people's capabilities — the real freedoms they have to achieve valuable 'functionings' (being nourished, healthy, educated, able to take part in community life).

The practice questions for this topic — with model answers and mark schemes across foundation, standard, and challenge tiers — are set out below. Attempt each under timed conditions before revealing the model answer, then mark your work against the scheme.

The primary articles and the leading literature are listed below. Read Sen's 'Equality of What?' and Anderson's 'What Is the Point of Equality?' first, then Dworkin's two-part 'What is Equality?' (or the relevant chapters of Sovereign Virtue) for the resourcist machinery.