Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

Inequality is widely regarded as morally objectionable: T. M. Scanlon investigates why it matters to us. He considers the nature and importance of equality of opportunity, whether the pursuit of greater equality involves objectionable interference with individual liberty, and whether the rich can be said to deserve their greater rewards.

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

Can outcome equality (say, in welfare) ever be unjust? Despite the extensive inquiry into the nature of luck egalitarianism in recent years, this question is curiously under-explored. Leading luck egalitarians pay little attention to the issue of unjust equalities, and when they do, they appear not to speak in one voice. To facilitate the inquiry into the potential injustice of equalities, the paper introduces two rival interpretations of egalitarianism: the responsibility view, which may condemn equalities as unjust (when they reflect (...) unequal levels of personal responsibility); and, the non-responsibility view, which does not. It then teases out the implications of these two views, in the hope of establishing that the latter is at least as plausible as the former. The paper thus establishes that the egalitarian ideal can be plausibly formulated in a way that condemns only (certain) inequalities but never equalities, and that this formulation is both coherent and attractive. (shrink)

:The paper seeks to defend Telic Egalitarianism by distinguishing two distinct categories into which typical objections to it fall. According to one category of objections TE isgroundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad. The other type of objections to TE focuses on itscounterintuitiveimplications: it is forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants, or between us and worse-off aliens from other planets. The paper shows that once we unpack (...) these two types of objections to TE they become much less persuasive. (shrink)

In Chapter 6 (“Why the Aim to Neutralize Luck Cannot Provide a Basis for Egalitarianism”) of her Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, Susan Hurley defends two claims: that “the aim to neutralize luck [does not] contribute to identifying and specifying what egalitarianism is”, and that it also provides no “independent non‐question‐begging reason or justification for egalitarianism” (p. 147). In the present response, I reject the first of Hurley's claims, and I show that the second, while true, lacks polemical force. I said, (...) in “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” (Ethics, 1989), that. (shrink)

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen tackles all the major questions concerning luck egalitarianism, providing deep, penetrating and original discussion of recent academic discourses on distributive justice as well as responses to some of the main objections in the literature. It offers a new answer to the “Why equality?” and “Equality of what?” questions, and provides a robust luck egalitarian response to the recent criticisms of luck egalitarianism by social relations egalitarians. This systematic, theoretical introduction illustrates the broader picture of distributive justice and enables (...) the reader to understand the core intuitions underlying, or conflicting with, luck egalitarianism. (shrink)