Abstract

It is impossible for an agent who is classically economically rational to have so much wealth that it is harmful for them, since such an agent would simply give away their excess wealth. Actual agents, vulnerable to akrasia and lacking full information, are not economically rational, but economists, ethicists and political philosophers have nonetheless mostly ignored the possibility that having too much might be harmful in some ways. I survey the major philosophical theories of well-being and draw on ethics and the social sciences to point out several ways in which, on the most plausible of these theories, having too much, relative to other members of one’s society, might be harmful to oneself (for instance, by making it harder for one to have appropriate relationships with others, or by making it more likely than one will develop undesirable character traits). I argue that because egalitarian policies prevent these harms and provide the advantaged with other benefits (such as access to public goods which help rich and poor alike), egalitarian policies are not as harmful to the rich as is commonly supposed, and may even be helpful to them on balance. I close by discussing the practical implications of this.

Highlights

  • In 2013, around the time the idea which later became this paper initially occurred to me, the twenty-five highest earning hedge fund managers in the United States together brought in about24.3 billion dollars in personal income (Vardi 2014)

  • Average median income for an American wage earner that year was estimated to be $28,031.02 (Social Security Administration 2013), which means that the twenty-five hedge fund managers collectively made as much as about 867,000 median wage earners

  • Because much of their income derives from “management fees”, which they receive regardless of how well their funds perform, managers can rake in tremendous amounts of money even when it’s questionable whether they contribute anything to the economy, much less as much as thirty-five thousand average workers (Vardi 2014; Creswell 2011)

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Summary

Introduction

In 2013, around the time the idea which later became this paper initially occurred to me, the twenty-five highest earning hedge fund managers in the United States together brought in about. Treating the fact that living a life of vast wealth is bad for one as a reason to implement egalitarian distributive policies may be objectionably paternalistic, though I argue that this is far from obvious. My arguments will imply that those living lives of vast wealth are harmed both because they do so while others do not have enough and because they do so while having vastly more than the others members of their society, regardless of whether those others have enough I hope to establish that there is a strong case in favor of my conclusions

Accounts of Well-Being
Hedonic States
Desire Satisfaction and Objective Goods
Possible Benefits
Possible Harms
Egalitarian Societies
Implications
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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