[Samuel Scheffler] Some egalitarian liberals have proposed a division of moral labour between social institutions and individual agents, but the division-of-labour metaphor has been understood in different ways. This paper aims to disentangle some of these different understandings, with an eye to clarifying the appeal of the egalitarian-liberal project and the challenges that it faces. The idea of a division of moral labour is best understood as the expression of a strategy for accommodating diverse values. It is not an apology (...) for economic self-interest or a device for justifying personal acquisitiveness. /// [Véronique Munoz-Dardé] Are there distinctively political values? Certain egalitarians seem to think that equality is one such value. Scheffler's contribution to the symposium seeks to articulate a division of moral labour between norms of personal morality and the principles of justice that regulate social institutions, and using this suggests that the egalitarian critique of Rawls can be deflected. In this paper, instead, I question the status of equality as an intrinsic value. I argue that an egalitarianism which focuses on the status of equality as valuable in itself embraces a theory of value with the worst elements of utilitarianism while leaving behind any of the intuitive appeal that utilitarianism has. In its place I press that we need a political conception of egalitarianism which stresses the role we engage beyond those found in the norms of personal morality. (shrink)

[ Samuel Scheffler] Some egalitarian liberals have proposed a division of moral labour between social institutions and individual agents, but the division-of-labour metaphor has been understood in different ways. This paper aims to disentangle some of these different understandings, with an eye to clarifying the appeal of the egalitarian-liberal project and the challenges that it faces. The idea of a division of moral labour is best understood as the expression of a strategy for accommodating diverse values. It is not an (...) apology for economic self-interest or a device for justifying personal acquisitiveness. /// [Véronique Munoz-Dardé] Are there distinctively political values? Certain egalitarians seem to think that equality is one such value. Scheffler's contribution to the symposium seeks to articulate a division of moral labour between norms of personal morality and the principles of justice that regulate social institutions, and using this suggests that the egalitarian critique of Rawls can be deflected. In this paper, instead, I question the status of equality as an intrinsic value. I argue that an egalitarianism which focuses on the status of equality as valuable in itself embraces a theory of value with the worst elements of utilitarianism while leaving behind any of the intuitive appeal that utilitarianism has. In its place I press that we need a political conception of egalitarianism which stresses the role we engage beyond those found in the norms of personal morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I concentrate on two themes: to what extent numbers bear on an agent's duties, and how numbers should relate to social policy. In the first half of the paper I consider the abstract case of a choice between saving two people and saving one, and my focus is on the contrast between a duty to act and a reason which merely makes an action intelligible. In the second half, I turn to the issue of social policy and (...) investigate how if at all numbers can have a bearing there, if there is no obvious duty on individuals to save the greater number. My proposal is that it is not the bare numbers themselves which explain our intuitions in such cases, but rather considerations of the extent to which each of us can make a reasonable claim on others. In short, I argue: numbers don't count, people do. (shrink)

The purpose is to stage a dialogue between a pre-liberal conception of justice, represented by Aristotle as revived with the help of ideas of Lucas, Jouvenel and G. A. Cohen, and a liberal conception, as founded in Kant and refurbished, renewed and worked out in A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Among the questions at issue are the roles of habit, disposition and formation; the nature of the dependency between the justice of the citizen of a polity and the (...) justice of the constitutional arrangements of the polity; the superior prospects of a piecemeal, bottom-up approach to justice or of a top-down, contractual approach; the remedial/restorative conception of justice versus more than merely remedial/restorative conceptions; tolerance of contingency; the propensity of liberal regimes to replace by managerial procedures more and more of the arrangements that previously entrusted important matters to the practical judgement of individuals; the multiplicity and diversity of the neo-Aristotelian requisites for a good polity versus the rather simpler demands of liberalism, which relate mostly to legitimacy; the idea of equality proper to a just and good polity; the closed, open enough, or completely open character of such a polity. (shrink)

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

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?

Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, professa belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devotevery little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examinesways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of thesepeople, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has noimplications for behaviour in an unequal one; that what''s bad aboutinequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce; thatprivate action cannot ensure that others have good lives; that privateaction can only achieve a ``drop in (...) the ocean''''; that private effortis not called for, since justice is a matter for the state to enforce;that private effort cannot remove the fundamental injustice, whichis inequality of power; and that private effort involves an unreasonablylarge psychological burden. (shrink)