The Levelling-Down Objection and the Additive Measure of the Badness of Inequality

Economics and Philosophy 36 (3):401-406 (2020)
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Abstract

The Levelling-Down Objection is a standard objection to monistic egalitarian theories where equality is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Most egalitarians, however, are value pluralists; they hold that, in addition to equality being intrinsically valuable, the egalitarian currency in which we are equal or unequal is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I shall argue that the Levelling-Down Objection still minimizes the weight that the intrinsic badness of inequality could have in the overall intrinsic evaluation of outcomes, given a certain way of measuring the badness of inequality, namely, the Additive Individual-Complaints Measure.

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Johan E. Gustafsson
University of Texas at Austin

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