My critics Richard Arneson, Thomas Christiano, and David Sobel offer numerous penetrating

criticisms of my article, "What is the Point of Equality?" I shall first address their criticisms of my
view, democratic egalitarianism, and then turn to their defenses of luck egalitarianism, the view I
criticize.
Criticisms of Democratic Equality
Arneson, Christiano, and Sobel offer a range of criticisms of democratic equality, ranging from (1)
matters of fundamental moral principle to (2) challenges that require clarification on my part of the
implications of democratic equality.
1. A Matter of Principle: Is the value of equality reducible to its impact on welfare? Of all of my
critics, Arneson expresses the most fundamental disagreement with my position. He argues that
relational equality matters only for its causal impact on people's welfare. I argue that it involves
matters of principle that cannot be reduced to welfarist considerations. To fully engage this
disagreement, we would have to confront the difference between Arneson's consequentialism and my
anticonsequentialist moral theory. It would take a book to show what is wrong with consequentialism.
For those who want to know I recommend my Value in Ethics and Economics.
Instead of pursuing our disagreement at this unwieldly level, I will instead try to illustrate it with an
example. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that
racially segregated schools, even if they were provided with equal resources, violated the principle of
equality guaranteed by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Although virtually
everyone today agrees with the Court's decision in this case, disagreements remain about the grounds
for reaching it. The Court cited social scientific studies that attempted to show that racial segregation
"generates [in black students] a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community" and thereby
interferes with their ability to learn (387 U.S. 483, at 494). This is to condemn racial segregation for its
negative causal impact on black students' welfare.
My own view is that the system of racial segregation would still have been morally wrong and ought to
have been judged unconstitutional, even if the social scientific studies had shown that black students
were not harmed by segregation. Suppose the black students had had extraordinary spiritual strength,
and bore the indignities of segregation without suffering psychological trauma, low self-esteem, or the
like. It would still have been wrong to brand them as inferiors, as the system of racial segregation did.
It is morally wrong to heap indignities even on those who can "take it." Such action is wrong on
account of the principles of contempt or inferiority that it expresses, whether or not it has a negative
impact on others' welfare. Indeed, I am confident that the Court intuitively understood this,
notwithstanding its appeal to the welfare impact of segregation, when it declared that "separate
educational facilities are inherently unequal" (387 U.S. 483, at 495, emphasis mine).
When I say that considerations of relational equality ought to constrain political decisions as a matter of
principle, not on account of their impact on welfare, I mean this in the same sense that the Court had in
mind when it declared that racial segregation of schools is wrong on account of being inherently
unequal. Arneson, given his consequentialist cast of mind, is liable to interpret this to mean that I
oppose the state of affairs of state-mandated racial segregation, regardless of the consequences. Then
he could pose this challenge: suppose black and white children had radically different physiological
responses to the same highly contagious flu virus, such that what caused a mere cold in black children
threatened death for white children? Could this not justify racially segregating the schools for the
duration of the flu epidemic?
My answer is: of course such an emergency could justify racially segregating the schools. But such an
action represents no compromise of the principle of racial equality. The principle of racial equality is a
nonconsequentialist principle. This means that it does not constrain action by mandating that some
specific state of affairs obtain. Rather, it constrains action by limiting what considerations may count
as reasons for pursuing an end by certain means. Centrally, but not exclusively, it forbids
considerations of contempt and hostility for racial groups from counting as reasons for engaging in
racial classification. If the state were to racially segregate the schools as a necessary means to save
children's lives, this reason for engaging in racial segregation would not be based on racial contempt or
hostility, and so would not violate the principle of racial equality.
Thus, equality can and does matter in principle, apart from its impact on people's welfare. It matters,
not as a state of affairs to be achieved, but as a constraint on what kinds of considerations count as
acceptable reasons for the state to act. Whatever reasons the state acts on must be consistent with
regarding all persons as moral equals, that is, with expressing equal respect for all. I do not believe that
any interpretation of this principle of moral equality will yield moral precepts of a consequentialist
form (e.g., to maximize welfare, treating equal units of welfare equally, regardless of who enjoys
them). But that is another story, for which you will have to read my book.
2. Clarifying the Implications of Democratic Equality. My critics draw some implications from
democratic equality with which I do not agree, although they are not unreasonable interpretations of the
text of my article. Let me here clarify some of my positions.
(a) Cash or in-kind benefits? Sobel argues that, because democratic equality is committed to providing
the social conditions for people's freedom, and therefore to provide capabilities rather than specific
functionings, it should in general prefer to provide benefits in cash rather than in kind. People who
need a wheelchair to get around should not be provided with a wheelchair (a specific functioning), but
rather with its cash equivalent, which would give them a wider range of options, and thereby expand
their freedom.
I reply, first, that democratic equality regards freedom as a count noun, not a mass noun. It seeks to
secure specific freedoms to people--for instance, the freedoms to move about, and to appear in public
without shame--not to increase the total "amount" of generic freedom people enjoy. There is no metric
of freedom that can make sense of the latter goal. Second, the provision of a wheelchair to a disabled
person is the provision of a capability, not a functioning. That is, what wheelchairs do for people who
lack full use of their legs is give them the freedom to move about. Whether they actually decide to
move around to a significant degree--that is, whether they will then exercise the functioning of
mobility--is up to them. Thus, democratic equality affords no general presumption in favor of cash over
in-kind benefits. Some capabilities require the provision of nondivisible means. Wheelchairs cannot
secure the freedom to move without a public infrastructure that accommodates them. In other cases,
vouchers may be a preferred option. Rental vouchers are usually preferable to the construction of
public housing projects as a means for providing adequate shelter to the poor. In other cases, cash is
appropriate. These are pragmatic issues to be considered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the
social setting and the particular freedom to be secured.
(b) A relative, or absolute measure of capabilities? Sobel argues that democratic equality cannot avoid
the charge of pitying the beneficiaries of redistribution, because it measures capabilities relative to
what others have, rather than against an absolute standard. It is true that the determination of adequate
levels of certain capabilities in a given society--for example, what kinds of clothing are necessary to be
able to appear in public without shame--is not absolute. But neither is this determination relative to
what others actually have. It is relative to social norms for dignified appearance in the society in
question. Thus, to determine whether the demands of democratic equality have been met, one need not
compare what the worst off have compared to the better off. No considerations of pity or envy enter
into the evaluation.
(c) Is democratic equality simply a matter of securing thresholds of specific capabilities? Arneson
interprets democratic equality as requiring the absolute guarantee of certain thresholds of capabilities,
while remaining completely indifferent about all inequalities beyond these thresholds. It is true that
one implication of democratic equality is that all citizens are entitled to a sufficient level of certain
capabilities that they can escape oppression by others and function as equals in civil society. Although
this is the core of the view, concerns about equality do not stop there. As I note on p. 326 of my article,
the more wealth is effectively convertible into goods such as political influence, the more of an interest
democratic equality has in reducing great wealth inequalities, say, through highly progressive taxation.
Moreover, my discussion of the economy as a comprehensive system of joint production is intended to
provide a way of viewing the contributions of low-wage workers that could in principle motivate
redistributive policies that push equality beyond ensuring that all have a minimum income. I just doubt
whether this way of viewing the matter would motivate equalization policies as ambitious as Rawls'
difference principle. To put the matter more concretely: although there is a spectacular wealth
difference between my family and Bill Gates' family, my family enjoys such a fully satisfactory level
of prosperity that I think only considerations of envy could motivate resentment on my part of Gates'
superior wealth. I see no morally compelling reason to worry about wealth disparities between the
prosperous middle class and the super-rich, provided the super-rich don't use their wealth to undermine
democracy--for example, by buying elections--or to oppress other people.
This does not imply that democratic equality must be indifferent between, say, a progressive income
tax and a flat tax with a high personal deduction. There are compelling reasons to prefer a progressive
income tax, independent of its tendency to globally reduce distributive inequality. Instead of viewing
the tax system as a tool for achieving an independently defined global pattern of just distribution, one
can view the problem of just taxation as a matter of local justice. A reasonable principle of just
taxation is that people should share roughly equal burdens for supporting state projects, where burdens
are relative to people's overall prosperity. Bill Gates will never feel the difference between a 25% and
a 35% marginal tax rate on income over $60,000, but the ordinary middle class will. Of course, the
principle of equal burdens is not the only principle of taxation; incentive effects, administrative
efficiency, and numerous other considerations must also be factored in.
(d) Does democratic equality absolutely guarantee threshold capabilities to all, regardless of the cost?
Arneson argues that this is an unreasonable principle, because some individuals are so handicapped that
it would take a spectacular expenditure of resources to bring them up to threshold level. Democratic
equality manifests a concern for equality in two places. First, equality is built into the contractualist
framework through which questions of justice are answered. Contractualism asks what principles of
social ordering can be collectively willed by a community of equals--that is, by reasonable people who
have equal rights of participation and claims to be addressed as subjects to whom principles of
collective living must be justified. Only those principles (reasons for action) that can be collectively
justified to all reasonable people, regarded as moral equals, are justified. This is the sense in which
equality matters in principle, as argued above. The community of equals postulated in answering this
question is a hypothetical one.
Second, the aspiration to actually achieve a certain kind of egalitarian community represents an
interpretation of what goal a contractualist political theory would yield under modern conditions.
In this second sense, the community of equals represents an ideal, not an absolute moral requirement.
There will always be some individuals who lack the basic equipment to function effectively as an
equal, or whose needs are so costly to satisfy up to threshold levels that compromises must be made.
To see what compromises of this ideal are reasonable, we would have to go back to our contractualist
framework and ask what compromises can be collectively willed--what compromises can be justified to
everyone, especially those left worst off by them. Sen has shown that even some very poor societies
have achieved impressive threshold levels of capability for nearly everyone. This suggests to me that,
especially for very prosperous societies such as those in North America and Western Europe, it is
reasonable to allow exceptions to the general demand for equality only at the margins.
(e) Does democratic equality pose an absolute bar to conditioning access to the capabilities necessary
for functioning as an equal on responsible behavior? Sobel and Arneson seem to think it does, and
articulate counterexamples where the just allocation of scarce resources (organs, emergency rescue
efforts) intuitively depends on judgments of how responsible people have been. Democratic equality
takes a more nuanced approach to questions of personal responsibility than either barring these
considerations altogether or letting them in without constraint.
First, it is evident that no system of criminal justice can operate without making judgments of
responsibility, and that convicts can justly lose some of the freedoms constitutive of equal citizenship
as punishment for their crimes.
Second, no just system needs to tolerate manipulation or abuse of its rules and entitlements for
purposes other than those for which the system was designed. As I note on p. 313n72 of my article,
people's right to be taken seriously in political discussion may be suspended if they keep on lying or
behaving like cranks. The same reasoning applies to Sobel's case of the alcoholic who keeps selling his
medical provisions so he can buy more to drink. In cases like these, restoration of access to the
capabilities provided by democratic equality can be made conditional on a persuasive demonstration of
readiness to act in good faith. But accessible means of rehabilitation--that is, restoration of access to
the means to equality--must be provided to the irresponsible.
Third, to administer this system, some limited judgments of individuals' capacities to function in the
manner required need to be made. For example, in my article I argue that in the normal case, an adult's
access to a decent income will be conditional on performing some role in the productive system,
whether under contract for payment or under obligation to care for dependents. People who are
capable of performing some such role, and for whom a job is available, can reasonably be expected to
take it as a condition of getting a decent income, and will not be entitled to live off the dole forever.
For those suspected of abusing the worker's disability system, some determination must therefore be
made of whether they are actually capable of holding down a job and just malingering, or truly disabled
or otherwise effectively unemployable.
Fourth, the limitations just set forth on the proper uses of conditioning access to benefits on judgments
of responsibility apply only to state provision of citizens' entitlements. There will of course be many
systems of local justice that condition access to other goods on the basis of more fine-grained and
comprehensive judgments of personal responsibility. Democratic equality does not insulate the smoker
from the reproach of her friends and family for her nasty habit.
So what do I say about Arneson's choice between rescuing the children, the drunks, or the reckless
climbers in a national park? Of course we should rescue the children, since we have special
responsibilities to take care of children. And it is reasonable to give priority to those who have abided
by the rules of entitlement over those who have abused them. However, if there were no shortage of
rescue workers then it would be unjust to abandon the drunks and the reckless climbers just because
they abused the rules. They don't deserve the equivalent of the death penalty, even for such
irresponsible behavior. The proper course is to rescue them, and then assess fines or other penalties for
abusing their entitlements.
Sobel's case of allocating scarce organs is different. In the U.S. today, organs are allocated strictly on a
prospective basis. If more years of life can be gained by giving a liver to an alcoholic than to an
innocent patient dying of hepatitis, it goes to the alcoholic. I believe such a purely prospective system
is more just than one that tries to allocate organs on the basis of moral desert. This is because of the
violations of dignity and privacy entailed by making the fine-grained, open-ended judgments of
responsibility that would inevitably be invoked in the competition for moral deserts among the gravely
ill. Who should get the heart transplant, the patient who smoked or the one who ate fatty foods and
never exercised? I do not believe that the state should be in the business of judging who led the most
virtuous life. The gravely ill have enough to worry about without being pressed into such a degrading
moral competition, in which they are required to show that they deserve to live more than someone
else.
(f) Does private insurance make no difference to entitlements? Christiano seems to think that
democratic equality requires that we ignore differences in private insurance when deciding how to
allocate the goods of concern to democratic equality. This argument confuses what should be done in a
just society with what should be done in a society that does not meet the requirements of democratic
equality. In a just society, access to adequate levels of medical care would be collectively secured. In
such a society, no one would be uninsured, so health care providers would never have to choose
between giving care to an insured and an uninsured person.
In the U.S. today, access to adequate health care does depend on private insurance. As a global matter,
this is unjust. But as a question of local justice, there may well be a contractual obligation between
certain health care providers and insurance holders that entitles insurance holders to priority in service.
Moroever, while hospitals have obligations of charity, they cannot fulfill them if they lack the
resources to deliver health care for free. These resources can only come from those who pay for it. As
a practical matter, then, under present conditions hospitals cannot do their best for the uninsured
without giving some priority to the insured. This is unjust, but less unjust than the alternative, given
the global injustice that leaves so many without health insurance altogether.
None of this reasoning applies to access to emergency care. In the U.S. today, hospitals are required to
treat all comers to their ER. As in the organ transplant case, the only relevant considerations are
prospective, and determined by triage. I believe this is just. Death's door is not the place to decide
whether people have prudently or imprudently decided not to insure themselves.
Defenses of Luck Egalitarianism
My critics try to undermine two of my charges against luck egalitarianism: (1) that it expresses pity
and disrespect for the less fortunate and (2) that it unjustly abandons even the prudent to awful fates.
1. Against My Charge that Luck Egalitarian Principles Express Pity and Disrespect for the Less
Fortunate. All three of my critics argue that luck egalitarianism compensates people simply for being
less fortunate than others, not for being inferior to others. It is true, as Sobel and Christiano contend,
that the bare idea of compensating people for misfortune does not itself express the view that the
unlucky are pathetically inferior. It is also true, as Arneson contends, that his prioritarianism--the idea
that priority in distribution should go to those whose lives are going worst, as measured by an objective
scale of well-being--does not in itself express pity or disrespect for those worst off. Rather, luck
egalitarianism runs into trouble when it combines these ideas with either of two other principles: (a)
compensating for misfortunes that consist in the possession of personal qualities that others find
repugnant or pathetic, and/or (b) "responsibility catering"--conditioning the entitlement to
compensation on a demonstration that the unfortunate are not responsible for their plight.
Consider first (a). This is the principle that inclines luck egalitarians to extend compensation to the
ugly and unpopular. Here, the source of people's disadvantage just is the low esteem in which others
hold their personal qualities--it consists in the fact that others regard them as sadly inferior. My
objection is not, as Christiano supposes, that luck egalitarians must regard those they compensate as of
lower moral worth. It is that they put the state in the business of making official, humiliating
judgments of estimability. People get compensated only on condition that they are officially stamped
as despicable, repulsive, or dorky. This is deeply insulting.
Now consider (b). Luck egalitarians distinguish between those who truly lack talent and those who
have voluntarily refrained from developing and using their talents. According to luck egalitarians, only
the former--the truly inherently incompetent--are owed compensation. To gain access to compensation,
therefore, people have to demonstrate that they are inherently incompetent, not just voluntarily
choosing a different labor/leisure tradeoff. This is a humiliating exercise, for it requires people to
expose themselves to the low regard with which others hold their talents as a condition of access to a
decent standard of living. It stips them of their pride by disambiguating their situation--by making it
clear that their low wages are due to the inferiority of their innate talents rather than to their decision to
focus their efforts on something other than paid employment.
By contrast, democratic equality calls for raising the income of low-wage workers in part on grounds of
their entitlements as citizens, and in part on the ground that they play an underappreciated role in the
economy, regarded as a system of joint production: by devoting themselves to the tasks that command
a low market wage, they free others to exercise their talents in more productive ways. This rationale
for narrowing income gaps does not inquire into whether people in low-wage jobs are there because
they lack the talent to do better. Even in a society where all had identical talents, it might still be most
efficient to have a division of labor in which only some workers are exercising talents that command
high market wages. Christiano's carefully crafted luck egalitarian rationale for compensating the deaf
for the misfortune of being marginalized by the prevailing mode of communication avoids the charge
of expressing pity and disrespect for the deaf by avoiding the two objectionable principles (a) and (b).
But precisely for that reason, this rationale does not stand as a model for all of the misfortunes luck
egalitarians want to compensate for. It does not even cover all of the misfortunes of being deaf for
which many luck egalitarians would want to compensate. Those who accept van Parijs' test of
undominated diversity as a criterion of compensible disadvantage invite people to judge the degrees of
compensation owed to the deaf in terms of how much less worthwhile living the life of a deaf person
feels to hearing people. It is hard to interpret this criterion other than as a test of how pathetic the lives
of the deaf seem to the hearing. Alternative preference-based tests, such as Arneson's criterion of equal
opportunity for welfare, avoid the pity objection only at the cost of allowing private satisfactions to
compensate for public marginalization. I think the only way around this is to limit compensation to the
objective goods democratic equality cares about, or to find a rationale for confining compensation to
some other objective list. Democratic equality has an internal justification for this limitation, which
luck egalitarianism lacks.
2. Against My Charge that Luck Egalitarians Allow the Victims of Bad Option Luck to Fall into Dire
Straits. If luck egalitarians are committed to a sharp distinction between brute luck and option luck,
and hold that only the misfortunes due to brute luck are compensable, then they are stuck with the
unattractive position that even the prudent who assumed risks and lost could be left in a miserable
condition. But Christiano cogently argues that the sharp distinction between brute luck and option luck
cannot be sustained within the terms of luck egalitarianism. Between two people who responsibly
assumed the same risk, where one person won and the other lost, the only difference is one of brute
luck. It is inconsistent for luck egalitarians to refuse to compensate for this difference, since they agree
that all differences due to brute luck are compensable.
I think this is a compelling argument against the way luck egalitarians have developed their view. But
this seems to me more a criticism of luck egalitarianism as actually developed by its proponents, almost
all of whom stress the importance of the distinction between brute and option luck, than it is an
objection to my critique. I am not criticizing a straw man when I take luck egalitarians to task for
abandoning the prudent to catastrophic fates.
Still, Christiano is right to wonder whether a more consistent version of luck egalitarianism, which
gave up the sharp moral differentiation of misfortunes due to brute and option luck, would escape my
criticism. He suggests that the main concern that motivates the brute/option luck distinction is to make
sure that egalitarian redistribution is not so comprehensive as to undermine incentives to productive
risk taking--that is, the risks entailed by innovation, exploration, and entrepreneurship. This is just an
efficiency concern, and can be accommodated without resorting to the drastic principle of letting the
chips fall where they may for all cases of voluntarily undertaken risk. One simply allows for some
tradeoffs between equality and efficiency, limiting egalitarian redistribution for the sake of enhancing
productivity. I have two replies to this. First, it is not clear to me that the primary moral motivation
behind the brute/option luck distinction is based on a concern for efficiency. It seems rather to be
based on notions of moral desert. As Arneson says in his commentary, "It is morally more valuable to
provide a gain in well-being of a given size for a person with a given well-being prospect if she is less
rather than more responsible for her present condition (if it is bad)" [emphasis mine]. I take it that
Arneson's appeal to the greater moral value of improving the prospects of the blamelessly unfortunate
over those whose misfortune is their fault is meant to contrast with the thought that this is merely more
instrumentally valuable. And he rigs his National Park Service rescue case to eliminate incentive
effects, so that only the element of differential moral responsibility remains. Finally, his advocacy of
"responsibility catering prioritarianism" appears to be a combination of what he calls the principle of
"moral meritocracy"--that people should get what they morally deserve--with prioritarianism--that,
other things equal, benefits should go to the worst off.
Whether the moral concern behind the focus on responsibility is based on considerations of efficiency
or desert, one could still hold, as Arneson and Christiano do, that considerations of responsibility
should not pose an absolute bar to compensation for blameworthy or voluntarily risked misfortune, but
merely have some moral weight. I believe this represents a substantial softening of Arneson's position
from his past published views. It certainly departs significantly from the positions of such luck
egalitarians as Rakowski and Dworkin, who tend to be hard-liners when it comes to the brute/option
luck distinction.
I address my second reply to this softer position. I agree that it represents a moral advance over the
hard-line position. But it does not specify how the tradeoff between moral desert and prioritarianism
(Arneson) or between efficiency and equality (Christiano) is to be made. How far down are (law-
abiding) risk-taking individuals to be allowed to sink in the name of other values? Democratic equality
provides an answer: in general, not so far down as to threaten the social conditions of their freedom,
their ability to stand as equals before others in society. I have provided a principled rationale for this
view. I suspect that any credible answer will have to appeal to principles outside the scope of luck
egalitarianism. But until the other side offer its own specification, it is hard to compare our views.
Perhaps there might be, as Christiano suggests, some tendency toward convergence between the views
of luck egalitarianism and democratic equality. At least we can see, in this softening of luck egalitarian
positions, a potential for allowing democratic equality to step in and specify some of the parameters left
undetermined in the general luck egalitarian position.