The most influential egalitarian perspective is undoubtedly Rawls's (1971, 1993), which assigns absolute priority to the least advantaged in society (the difference principle). However, many have claimed that even though an egalitarian perspective should imply some priority to the worst off, the Rawlsian perspective is too demanding. One response to this criticism is to argue in favour of an egalitarian perspective that never assigns absolute priority to the worse off, but which still includes limited priority to those members of society (...) in distributive conflicts. A different response to the demandingness criticism is to agree that the worse off should not always be given absolute priority, but to argue that there are some cases where they should be. In this paper, we elaborate on this view, and look at the possibility of deviating from the leximin approach within this category of egalitarian principles. (shrink)

The context-free weak ordering principle is viewed by many as a cornerstone of rational choice theory. McClennen, for example, claims that this principle is one of a pair on which '[t]he theory of rational choice and preference, as it has been developed in the past few decades by economists and decision theorists, rests', and Sen characterizes a version of context freedom as ‘a very basic requirement of rational choice’. But this principle is certainly not uncontroversial: there are examples of principle (...) is certainly not apper irrational. (shrink)

Over the years, egalitarian philosophers have made some challenging claims about the nature of egalitarianism. They have argued that egalitarian reasoning should make us reject the Pareto principle; that the Rawlsian leximin principle is not an egalitarian idea; that the Pigou–Dalton principle needs modification; that the intersection approach faces deep problems; that the numbers should not count within an egalitarian framework, and that egalitarianism should make us reject the property of transitivity in normative reasoning. In this paper, taking the recent (...) philosophical debate on equality versus priority as the starting point, I review these claims from the point of view of an economist. (shrink)

John Rawls's famous difference principle is capable of at least four distinct statements, each of which occurs in A Theory of Justice. According to what I shall term the Crude Principle it is a necessary and sufficient condition for the justice of an institutional scheme which expands social and economic inequality that, subject to the satisfaction of more weighty principles, it increases the level of advantage of the least advantaged. Expressing this principle Rawls writes that,Assuming the framework of institutions required (...) by equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate. (shrink)