Equality for Inegalitarians

by George Sher

This book offers a new and compelling account of distributive justice and its relation to choice. Unlike luck egalitarians, who treat unchosen differences in people's circumstances as sources of unjust inequality to be overcome, Sher views such differences as pervasive and unavoidable features of the human situation. Appealing to an original account of what makes us moral equals, he argues that our interest in successfully negotiating life's ever-shifting contingencies is more basic than our interest in achieving any more specific goals. He argues, also, that the state's obligation to promote this interest supports a principled version of the view that what matters about resources, opportunity, and other secondary goods is only that each person have enough. The book opens up a variety of new questions, and offers a distinctive new perspective for scholars of political theory and political philosophy, and for those interested in distributive justice and luck egalitarianism.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2014

Reviews

[Nick Geiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting little book. Sher both criticizes luck egalitarianism and extends luck egalitarianism's commitments in interesting directions. Luck egalitarians roughly believe that inequalities are justified just when they result from individual's choices, and unjustified when they result from luck or other factors outside of an individual's control. The basic challenge for any LE theorist is to explain why inequalities resulting from luck are more objectionable than those resulting from choice, and Sher argues convincingly that LE can't explain this distinction.

Luck egalitarianism tries to fit two ideas together: one, that we're moral equals, and two, that we make choices and those choices are important to us. The bridge from LE to Sher's own view is Dworkin's "equality of resources" view, which tries to justify both the egalitarian and inegalitarian features of LE by appealing to "resources" as the distribuendum for justice. Sher argues that instead, each person is owed an equal share of a more abstract resource--what he calls the ability to lead our lives "effectively." On Sher's view, we are equals because we are each conscious, deliberating, and choosing creatures who are (occasionally) aware of reasons and respond to them. Sher argues through this account of our moral nature that we each have an equal interest in leading a life where we have effective opportunities/resources/skills to make choices and face the consequences. Sher ends up defending a kind of sufficiency view because effectiveness turns out to be a threshold good (everyone who has enough resources/opportunities/capacities beyond a threshold can live effectively). This is the most stimulating book of moral philosophy I've read in recent memory.