1. INTRODUCTION Professor Dworkin's writings on moral and political subjects have never failed to interest me in the past, and the two-part article “What is Equality” which is the subject of this paper, is no exception. Its wealth of relevant distinctions is bound to be useful to every serious student of the subject, whatever – or, in view of the range of opinions on these matters now current, perhaps I should say almost whatever – his ideological proclivities, and whether or (...) not he is sympathetic to Dworkin's position. The present treatment will be devoted, needless to say, primarily to disagreements, criticisms, and the raising of further questions, most of them designed to call in question either the general idea that equality should be regarded as a legitimate and important goal of social institutions or Dworkin's particular formulations of that equality. This largely negative-seeming consideration, I need scarcely add, is not intended to discount or detract from the positive contributions of Dworkin's work, which are very substantial indeed. It's just that having been ably set forth by Dworkin himself, they scarcely need seconding from this source. (shrink)

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, (...) Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work? (shrink)

The subject of this essay is political, and therefore social, philosophy; and therefore, ethics. We want to know whether the right thing for a society to do is to incorporate in its structure requirements that we bring about equality, or liberty, or both if they are compatible, and if incompatible then which if either, or what sort of mix if they can to some degree be mixed. But this fairly succinct statement of the issue before us requires considerable clarification, even (...) as a statment of the issue. For it is widely, and in my view correctly, held that some sort of equality is utterly fundamental in these matters. We seek a principle, or principles, that apply to all, are the same for all. In that sense, certainly, equality is fundamental and inescapable. But this is a very thin sort of “equality.” It will almost equally widely be agreed that the principles in question should in some more interesting sense “treat” people equally, e.g., by allotting to all the same set of rights, and moreover, rights that are – again we have to say “in some sense” – nonarbitrary, so that whatever they are, persons of all races, sexes, and so on will have the same fundamental rights assigned to them. Taking this to be, again, essentially uncontroversial, though not without potentially worrisome points of unclarity, it needs, now, to be pointed out that this characterization does not settle the issue that this essay is concerned with. That issue is about economic matters in particular. (shrink)

Justice as mutual advantage appears to show inadequate concern for those that are insufficiently useful to others, implying that those that are most in need of the protections of justice fall outside the scope of justice as mutual advantage. Vanderschraaf offers a novel reply to this objection. He presents a game–the Indefinitely Repeated Provider-Recipient Game–which establishes that in some situations justice as mutual advantage can show concern for the vulnerable. This finding, however, does not match the problem raised by the (...) vulnerability objection, for the objection says that in all relevant situations, justice requires equal basic concern for all–vulnerable and non-vulnerable alike. (shrink)

In the liberal egalitarian literature, the concept of talent is inflected according to its use in broader arguments surrounding the nature of justice. In particular, sometimes talent is understood as a desirable inborn property, while at other times it is understood as a matter of inhabiting a favorable social position. Rawls’s arguments in A Theory of Justice provide useful expressions of these two very different conceptions of talent and their relationship to justice, and much of this paper involves an exploration (...) of those arguments. The former sense of talent informs Rawls’s fair equality of opportunity principle: those with equivalent levels of talent and effort are to face similar prospects. According to the latter, what is significant about talent is not its innate origins, but rather its enabling the possession of desirable goods. This second sense of talent is implicit in Rawls’s difference principle: though it is arbitrary that the talented have the ability to command high wages, it is nonetheless fair to keep those wages because the worst off benefit most from that arrangement. In this paper I explore how the two conceptions of talent operate in these influential arguments, with the broader aims of clarifying the nature of talent and its relevance to social justice. (shrink)