This thesis is an evaluation of the badness of disability and equality. It argues that disability poses a problem for equality and that, given the new advances in reproductive and gene technologies, egalitarians should strive to give an answer to how we should best reduce the inequality between disabled and non-disabled individuals of future generations. To support the claim that disabilities pose a problem for equality, I argue against the recently proposed Mere Difference View of disability. Firstly, the view is (...) not successful in responding to why, if disabilities are neutral, inflicting disability is still impermissible. Secondly, some intellectual disabilities, for example, do not bring about positive features capable of compensating for the negative features that they also bring about. If some disabilities are bad states of being, some disabled individuals will be worse off than non-disabled individuals other things being equal. Given that disabled individuals are subject to inequality due to their disability, I analyse how able traditional compensatory accounts of egalitarian justice are when it comes to improving this inequality. I conclude that given the existence of intellectual disabilities, traditional compensatory accounts are not fully satisfactory and that egalitarians should look at whether other means, like enhancements and preventive techniques, would do this job better. Paradoxically, techniques that lead to the reduction in the incidence of disabilities make things worse with respect to one new aspect of inequality, namely the concentration of inequality. In scenarios of disability reduction, where there are only a few remaining disabled individuals and a great number of non-disabled individuals, disabled individuals would be worse off than a great number of non-disabled individuals. This situation can potentially also have a negative impact in the wellbeing of the few remaining disabled individuals if the fact that disabled individuals become a very small minority puts less pressure in society to accommodate them. I conclude that reducing the incidence of disabilities can make things worse for inequality in at least one respect. This conclusion has crucial consequences for policy making. I recognise that the question remains about how this aspect should be weighed against the fact that scenarios of disability reduction promote utility - they contain more individuals with higher wellbeing - and against the fact that, under views that ascribe positive value to relations of equality, scenarios of disability reduction would also be, in one way, promoters of equality. (shrink)

Deprivations normally give rise to undeserved inequality. It is commonly thought that one way of improving a situation with respect to equality is by reducing the incidence of deprivations. In this paper I argue that there is at least one respect in which reducing the incidence of deprivations can make things worse from the point of view of equality. While eliminating deprivations leads to the elimination of inequalities, reducing the incidence of deprivations leads to an uneven distribution of the pairwise (...) relations of inequality of a population, which leads to the concentration of pairwise relations of inequality in the worse off. If my argument is correct, egalitarians have reasons to broaden their dimensions of concern: egalitarians should not only be concerned about the unequal distribution of goods, but also about the unequal distribution of pairwise relations of inequality of a population. (shrink)

How many people should there be? Can there be overpopulation: too many people living? I shall present a puzzling argument about these questions, show how this argument can be strengthened, then sketch a possible reply.

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

1. Introduction. In a famous passage near the beginning of A Theory of Justice, John Rawls discusses utilitarianism’s notorious difficulties with justice. According to classic forms of utilitarianism, a certain course of action is morally right if it produces the greatest sum of satisfactions. And, as Rawls points out, the perplexing implication is “…that it does not matter, except indirectly, how this sum of satisfactions is distributed among individuals any more than it matters, except indirectly, how one man distributes his (...) satisfactions over time.” He concludes the passage by saying that “[u]tilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.”. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

A search is under way for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in population axiology. The object of this search has proved elusive. This is not surprising since, as we shall see, any welfarist axiology that satisfies three reasonable conditions implies at least one of three counter-intuitive conclusions. I shall start by pointing out the failures in three recent attempts to construct an acceptable population axiology. I shall then present an impossibility theorem and conclude with a short discussion of (...) how it might be extended to pluralist axiologies, that is, axiologies that take more values than welfare into account. (shrink)

1. Introduction. In a famous passage near the beginning of A Theory of Justice, John Rawls discusses utilitarianism’s notorious difficulties with justice. According to classic forms of utilitarianism, a certain course of action is morally right if it produces the greatest sum of satisfactions. And, as Rawls points out, the perplexing implication is “…that it does not matter, except indirectly, how this sum of satisfactions is distributed among individuals any more than it matters, except indirectly, how one man distributes his (...) satisfactions over time.” He concludes the passage by saying that “[u]tilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.”. (shrink)

Continues the discussion of theoretical and practical perfection by examining the considerations that give some beliefs and intentions more quality and therefore value than others. It argues that Aristotelian considerations about rationality as essential to humans require measures of quality to be formal, considering only formal properties of beliefs and ends rather than their substantive content. There are two such measures: the extent of a belief's or end's content in space, time, and objects involved, and the degree to which different (...) beliefs and ends are organized in a hierarchical structure. Together, these measures value explanatorily organized knowledge, a unified life, and complex, difficult activities such as games. (shrink)

Fred Feldman has proposed a desert-adjusted version of utilitarianism,, as a plausible population axiology. Among other things, he claims that justicism avoids Derek Parfit's. This paper explains the theory and tries to straighten out some of its ambiguities. Moreover, it is shown that it is not clear whether justicism avoids the repugnant conclusion and that it is has other counter-intuitive implications. It is concluded that justicism is not convincing as a population axiology.

An argument against the bias towards the near; how a defence of temporal neutrality is not a defence of S; an appeal to inconsistency; why we should reject S and accept CP.

In Chapter 17 of his magnificent Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit asks what he describes as an ‘awesome question’: ‘How many people should there ever be?’ For a utilitarian like me, the answer seems simple: there should be however many people it takes to make the world best. Unfortunately, if I answer Parfit's awesome question in this way, I may sink myself in a quagmire of axiological confusion. In this paper, I first describe certain aspects of the quagmire. Then I (...) introduce and explain some of the elements of a novel axiological view – ‘justicism’. Justicism is derived from some ideas originally suggested by Franz Brentano. It was developed in an effort to solve certain other problems confronting utilitarianism – problems explicitly about justice. I think, however, that as a sort of happy by-product, justicism also generates a plausible answer to Parfit's awesome question. This may come as a bit of surprise, since justicism is a form of totalism, and it is widely thought that no totalistic theory can provide a satisfactory answer to Parfit's question. After presenting and explaining my proposed solution, I address some objections. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

This paper puts forward the following claims: (i) The size of inequality in welfare should be distinguished from its badness. (ii) The size of a pairwise inequality between two individuals can be measured by the absolute or the relative welfare distance between their welfare levels, but it does not depend on the welfare levels of other individuals. (iii) The size of inequality in a social state may be understood either as the degree of pairwise inequality or as its amount. (iv) (...) The badness of a pairwise inequality may differ from its size in several ways; for example, the badness measure might go by the distance between priority-transformed welfare levels and/or it might assign heavier weight to larger distances. (v) The badness of a pairwise inequality may be either personal or impersonal, with the personal interpretation being internally consistent and, pace Temkin, independently tenable even if we reject the so-called Slogan (i.e., the Person-Affecting Claim). (vi) The aggregation procedure by which we arrive from the badness of pairwise inequalities to the badness of the inequality in a social state takes different forms depending on whether the badness of a pairwise inequality is interpreted in a personal or in an impersonal way. (vii) Since Temkin’s complaint-based measures of the badness of inequality follow the format appropriate for the personal interpretation, they seem out of place if one, like him, treats the badness of inequality as an impersonal value. (shrink)

Temkin presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality that challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others, and has significant implications on both a practical and theoretical level.

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called ‘Equality of What?’ Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect of a person’s condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental?

This is a wide-ranging defense of a distinctive version of hedonistic act utilitarianism. It is plainly written, forthright, and stimulating. Also, it is replete with disputable assertions and arguments. I shall pursue one issue here, after sketching the project of each substantial chapter.

The article assesses recent attempts to deflect two persistent objections to Positive Egalitarianism (PE), the view that equality adds to the goodness of a state of affairs. The first says that PE entails bringing into existence individuals who are equal to each other in leading horrible lives, such that they are worthnotliving. I assess three strategies for deflecting this objection: offering a restricted version of PE; biting the bullet; and pressing alevelling outcounter-objection. The second objection points out that for any (...) world A containing many individuals all leading very satisfying lives, and in perfect equality, PE prefers a much larger, perfectly equal population Z with much lower (yet positive) well-being. I review two main strategies for avoiding this Repellent Conclusion: a Capped Model and making egalitarianism sensitive to welfare levels. Both solutions, I show, are worse than the problems they are meant to solve. (shrink)

Traditional ethical theories have paradoxical implications in regards to questions concerning procreation and our moral duties to future people. It has been suggested that the crux of the problem resides in an all too ‘impersonal’ axiology and that the problems of population axiology can be solved by adopting a ‘Person Affecting Restriction’ which in its slogan form states that an outcome can only be better than another if it is better for people. This move has been especially popular in the (...) context of medical ethics where many of the problems of population axiology are actualized. Examples are embryo or egg selection, pre-implantation genetic testing, assisted reproduction programmes, abortion, just to mention a few. I discuss a number of different interpretations of the Restriction and in particular one interpretation which I call Comparativism. According to this view, we should draw a distinction between uniquely and non-uniquely realizable people. The former people only exist in one out of two possible outcomes, whereas the latter exist in both of the compared outcomes. The idea is that we should give more weight to the well-being of non-uniquely realizable people or take it into account in a different way as compared to the well-being of uniquely realizable people. I argue that the different versions of the Person Affecting Restriction and Comparativism either have counterintuitive implications of their own or are compatible with traditional theories such as Utilitarianism. (shrink)

Standard welfarist axiologies do not care who is given what share of the good. For example, giving Wlodek two apples and Ewa three is just as good as giving Wlodek three and Ewa two, or giving Wlodek five and Ewa zero. A common objection to such theories is that they are insensitive to matters of distributive justice. To meet this objection, one can adjust the axiology to take distributive concerns into account. One possibility is to turn to what I will (...) call Meritarian axiologies. According to such theories, individuals can have a claim to, deserve, or merit, a certain level of wellbeing depending on their merit level, and the value of an outcome is determined not only by people’s wellbeing but also by their merit level. (shrink)

Total Utilitarianism is the view that an action is right if and only if it maximizes the sum total of people’s well-being. A common objection to Total Utilitarianism is that it is insensitive to matters of distributive justice. For example, for a given amount of well-being, Total Utilitarianism is indifferent between an equal distribution and any unequal distribution, and if there would be a tiny gain in well-being by moving from an equal distribution to an unequal, we have a duty (...) to do so. To meet the objection from justice, Fred Feldman has suggested a desert adjusted version of Total Utilitarianism ---‘Justicism’ --- which in addition to the value of wellbeing takes into account factors concerning people’s desert.1 Feldman’s suggestion is novel and interesting but his theory has been severely criticized as a theory of distributive justice.2 In the present paper, I shall try to salvage what I think might be a kernel of truth in Feldman’s suggestion, or at least a kernel that is worthy of further investigation. (shrink)

Derek Parfit has argued that (Teleological) Egalitarianism is objectionable by breaking a person-affecting claim to the effect that an outcome cannot be better in any respect - such as that of equality - if it is better for nobody. So, he presents the Priorty View, i.e., the policy of giving priority to benefiting the worse-off, which avoids this objection. But it is here argued, first, that there is another person-affecting claim that this view violates. Secondly, Egalitarianism can be construed as (...) person-affecting in a weaker sense. Thirdly, it is possible to construct a Relational version of the Priority View which incorporates the Egalitarian value of just equality in this sense. Two reasons are given for why this Relational View and Egalitarianism are superior to the Parfitian Absolute Priority View. However, no attempt is made to abjudicate between the first two views, the main point being that they both accept the value of just equality in the same sense. (shrink)