Good morning to all my friends and our respected professor.

Today I am going to discuss

on the topic of Distributive Egalitarianism.

There are two camps of Egalitarians. One of these advocates distributive egalitarianism.
Distributive egalitarianism says that equality means equal share of something such as
welfare, wealth , ability to work etc.

Distributive egalitarians like Richard Arneson, GA Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, John Roemer
and Amartya Sen think that a society is unequal when people have greater or lesser
share of something and also have different views about what it is and should be
distributed equally .

AMARTYA SEN describe it as 'equality of what?'

GA COHEN terms it as currency question.

Different contemporary distributed egalitarians have different meanings about which in

equalities matter the most.

First of this, some defend it is the “distribution of resources” that egalitarians should be
fundamentally concerned about. Since resources are crucial to human beings to meet
various ends. They believe in equalizing the means to these resources and not the ends
themselves. The most influential proponent of this approach is RONALD DWORKIN who
calls his theory as ' equality of resources’.

DWORKIN distinguish between two kind of resources-

1. Impersonal resources- that includes things like wealth , property, goods and
opportunities etc, these are transferrable and can be reassigned by social institutions.

2. Second include personal resources like physical fitness and mental health, etc, that
aren't transferrable.

DWORKIN outline this theory as an alternative to the Rival view of 'equality of Welfare '
as defended by RICHARD ARNESON, GA COHEN, and JOHN ROEMER.
Welfare in this context refers either to preference satisfaction or to happiness. Thus,
one person has more welfare than other is more of their preferences is satisfied and the
experience their life being more enjoyable. We can also evaluate whether society fails
or succeeds to uphold the ideal of equality by looking at whether the enjoy similar levels
of welfare or not.

Adopting Welfare as currency of equality has to counter intuitive implications-

1. First noted by AMARTYA SEN ; that if egalitarians adopt Welfare as currency of

distributive equality the danger is that they may fail to recognize that some people have
already lowered their Horizon due to oppressive circumstances.

2. Other one as noted by DWORKIN is that equalizing welfare would seemingly give
more resources to people with 'expensive taste', Who need more income simply to
achieve same level of Welfare as those with 'less expensive taste'.

DWORKIN also state that egalitarians political community should not aim to mitigate kr
compensate for differences in personality.

COHEN also agreed that egalitarians should not finance expensive taste which people
chose to develop .

ARNESON claimed that individuals can arrive at different welfare levels due to choices
they make for which they alone should be held responsible . he suggested that
egalitarians should aim to equalize people's opportunity for welfare and not welfare
itself.

A final answer to the currency question has been suggested by Amartya Sen and
developed by Martha Nussbaum.

According to which we should compare how will people are faring by looking at their
capabilities to function in particular ways. The difference between capability approach
and other theories as we discussed , is that it requires egalitarians to compare people's
effective abilities rather than what they have or how satisfied they are.
Though capacity approach is considered as an example it still does run into two
difficulties-

1. First is that applying it requires a definitive list of human functioning which has
attracted controversies as they are likely to include things that other regard as
inessential to a truly human form.

2. Secondly, even if it was possible to get people to agree to a list of basic functioning, it
might still fall short of equality, comprehensively understood.

Thus, the capacity approach aims to an ideal of 'sufficiency' rather than 'equality'.