Resource Egalitarianism Research Articles

Open borders via natural resource egalitarianism: a failed route

Immigration restrictions close-off large portions of the earth to large proportions of the earth’s population. For those who regard the earth and its natural resources as belonging to mankind equally and in common, this is a morally impermissible state of affairs. This is because, if the earth and its resources belong to all equally, then the exclusion of anyone from any portion of the earth will be a violation of their natural ownership rights. A commitment to Natural Resource Egalitarianism (NRE) is therefore held to entail a commitment to substantially more open, or even fully open borders. This paper does not seek to directly refute the claims of NRE, but rather seeks to demonstrate the failure of arguments from NRE, to establish the moral necessity of a general opening of borders. This paper addresses the two most prominent accounts of Open Borders NRE—Equal Division NRE and Egalitarian Ownership NRE—as well as a more recent attempt to advocate for open borders by combining these two positions into a so-called ‘Combined Model’. This paper argues that none of these three positions can plausibly and coherently account for the moral necessity of open borders.

Equality of Resources and Non-domination: Can the Two be Compatible?

Social egalitarians hold that one fundamental requirement of the ideal of social equality is that people should stand in relations of non-domination to one another. In the light of this, they reject luck egalitarian principles of justice as incompatible with a society of equals, because the former violate the non-domination requirement. I call this the domination objection. In this paper I examine its force against Dworkinian resource egalitarianism. There are two reasons why equality of resources might be thought to be vulnerable to it. First, Dworkin has been interpreted to maintain that as long as people’s preferences are authentic, people should be consequentially responsible for the choices that flow from such preferences. However, Dworkin’s view on when people’s choices should be considered to be authentic does not rule out that the latter are sometimes influenced by norms and processes that are the outcome of domination and oppression, and so holding people fully consequentially responsible for choices that are the outcome of such preferences is itself unjust. Second, equality of resources objectionably permits bad-option-luck victims to become vulnerable to domination. I argue that Dworkinian egalitarianism is not susceptible to either of the two parts of the domination objection and defend the view that it is—contrary to the social egalitarian criticism—faithful to the social egalitarian demand for non-domination.

Optimal Tax Theory as a Theory of Distributive Justice

The literature on taxation and transfers primarily relies on two theories of distributive justice: resource egalitarianism and welfarism, as elaborated through optimal tax theory.In recent years, optimal tax theory has garnered even greater prominence. But nonwelfarists argue it fails to address a number of serious philosophical objections. This article considers the primary critiques of optimal tax theory, especially by resource egalitarians. It argues the gap between these two theories is narrower than most appreciate. Indeed, once one focuses on egalitarian optimal tax theory and reads that literature broadly, the ideal policy design principles implied by each theory largely mimic the other. In addition, this article explores how both theories have dealt with concerns that they respond inadequately to preferences to help or harm others, hold individuals unduly responsible for their choices, or fail to account for real world social dynamics and human behavior. It argues that egalitarian optimal tax theory has responded—or, as laid out here, could respond—more effectively to these objections than resource egalitarianism.Specifically, optimal tax theory should adopt three innovations: (1) applying welfare-weighted Pigouvian taxes and subsidies to other-regarding preferences, (2) modeling the optimal endowment tax as one that is risk-neutral and only partially based on ex ante potential income, and (3) treating choices as providing less information about well-being when they are further in the past or relatively predictable. More explicitly and consistently adopting these assumptions and modeling approaches would clarify that egalitarian optimal tax theory does not entail the extreme limits on autonomy, and unrelenting responsibility for prior choices, that have troubled nonwelfarists.Instead, the focus of egalitarian optimal tax theory would move toward sequalizing outcomes, and away from equalizing ex ante endowments.

EGALITARIANISM AND PUBLIC FUNDING FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECTOGENESIS

Abstract Anna Smajdor claims that one means of addressing the declining fertility rate of Western countries is to develop artificial womb technology and to provide widespread access to this technology. Smajdor claims that Ronald Dworkin’s resource egalitarianism justifies this approach. In this essay, I argue that Dworkin’s resource egalitarianism does not justify the development of artificial womb technology. I furthermore claim that we must examine a variety of issues, including how the presence of artificial womb technology will affect society, before developing this technology.

Subsidizing Charity Liberally

Our Constitution enshrines two bedrock principles of Western liberal democracies: limited government and equal opportunity. This Chapter explores the extent to which the charitable tax subsidies reflect these principles, as expressed in the two theories of distributive justice respectively associated with them, libertarianism and resource egalitarianism. This analysis shows that the subsidies’ current structure is much broader than necessary to reflect libertarian ideals, even under the more permissive classical liberal theories. As a result, the subsidies undermine the principle of limited government by coercing taxpayers to subsidize activities that are not the legitimate purview of government. The subsidies’ relation to resource egalitarianism is more complex: They are broader than the most common interpretations of resource egalitarianism justify, and undermine basic equality of opportunity notions both by subsidizing activities that increase the head-start of the wealthy and by giving wealthy taxpayers more say over government resources than poorer taxpayers. That said, the subsidies do reflect less well-known and more controversial accounts of resource egalitarianism that address expensive tastes and talent-pooling.

The Holistic and Policy-Focused Interpretation of Hypothetical Insurance

AbstractThis paper argues that the best interpretation of Ronald Dworkin’s hypothetical insurance scheme is a holistic one that allows the parties to make choices between the policies that are available. This interpretation contrasts with the hypothecated and insurance-focused aspects that are traditionally understood as part of the procedure. The paper argues that the holistic interpretation better fits with the ideal of resource egalitarianism that people should have as much choice as possible from an equal starting point. It does so by allowing people a choice over the policies that will be used to achieve their insurance preferences.

Exploitation, inequality and power

The concept of exploitation is central in social and political theory, but there is no precise, widely accepted definition. This paper analyses John Roemer’s seminal theory, which construes exploitation as a distributive injustice arising from asset inequalities, with no reference to notions of power or dominance. Firstly, an intertemporal generalisation of Roemer’s static economies is set up and several doubts are raised on the claim that exploitation theory can be reduced to a kind of resource egalitarianism. Then, Roemer’s philosophical arguments that exploitation should be defined as a merely distributive concept are also questioned and it is argued that a notion of power, or dominance, is an essential part of the definition of exploitation.

ON SEVERAL APPROACHES TO EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

The formal theory of equality of opportunity emerged as a response – a friendly amendment – to Ronald Dworkin's (1981) characterization of resource egalitarianism, as defined by the allocation that would emerge from insurance contracts arrived at behind a thin veil of ignorance. This article compares several of the prominent versions of this response, put forth in the period 1993–2008. I argue that a generalization of Roemer's (1998) proposal is the most satisfactory approach. Inherent in that generalization is an indeterminism, which reflects a philosophical problem: that we do not know what comprise the ethically correct rewards to effort. The indeterminism should be resolved, I propose, by an ancillary theory which limits the degree of inequality which is acceptable.

A common ground for resource and welfare egalitarianism

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agentsʼ abilities (to transform the resource into an interpersonally comparable outcome) and starting points may differ. Both conceptions of egalitarianism are naturally modeled in this context as two allocation rules. The two rules are jointly characterized by the combination of three appealing axioms: no-domination, solidarity, and composition.

Justice, Territory and Natural Resources

Territorial self-determination and global distributive justice seem to be at loggerheads. Cosmopolitans hold that institutions such as states can be justified only derivatively on global justice. But ‘self-determinists’ insist that territorial self-determination is independently significant. The current article hypothesizes that the core disagreement is not over the justification of global resource egalitarianism, but rather over the conception of resources per se. The article presents three conceptions of resources – the familiar ‘natural resources’ conception, Tim Hayward's ‘physical’ conception and Ronald Dworkin's ‘constructivist’ conception – and argues that, particularly when appended to egalitarian global distribution principles, each is importantly flawed. The article then presents and defends an ‘intentional’ conception of resources as fungible means. This account treats resources as intentional kinds rather than natural kinds. As such, they can be identified only after discerning whose intentional states are decisive in a given case. Discerning that is the role of a theory of territorial rights. A resource is such when the morally legitimate territorial right-holder treats it as a fungible means. The theory of territorial rights is universal, and the resource distribution principle is morally cosmopolitan; but the determination of what counts as a resource is claimant-relative, respecting self-determination. The article then works out implications for global justice, with special attention to the global environment and through comparisons with Hayward's eco-space egalitarianism. The result is a sketch of a unified theory of global resource justice, giving due weight to both cosmopolitan egalitarianism and to territorial self-determination.

Resource egalitarianism with a dash of efficiency

We study the problem of defining inequality-averse social orderings over allocations of commodities when individuals have different preferences. We formulate a notion of egalitarianism based on the axiom that any dominance between consumption bundles should be reduced. This Dominance Aversion requirement is compatible with Consensus , a version of the Pareto principle saying that an allocation y is better than x whenever everybody finds that everyoneʼs bundle at y is better than at x . We characterize a family of multidimensional leximin orderings satisfying Dominance Aversion and Consensus.

Two Conceptions of Sustainability

Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees describe the ‘ecological footprint’ (i.e. the ecological capacity, measured in hectares of biologically productive land, needed to supply a given person's consumption of natural resources and absorb their waste) as a conception of environmental sustainability, and have accumulated significant data to measure the footprints of nations, cities and even individual persons. Although the authors refrain from explicitly drawing normative inferences from their measurements, such implications lie not far beneath the surface of their work. Besides providing an empirical tool for assessing efforts to improve environmental performance, the footprint implies a normative ideal of global resource egalitarianism, once the conception is examined through the lens of contemporary political theory. In this article, I trace out the normative implications of ecological footprinting in comparison and contrast with those of carrying capacity, an alternative conception of sustainability which the footprint ought (or so I shall argue) to replace.

Review essay, “The 2006 world development report: Equity and development”

The 2006 World Development Report, issued by the World Bank and entitled“Equity and Development,” marks a major step forward in the discussion of povertyand development, and it is a significant event that this step has been taken by soaugust an institution as the Bank. For many years, economic development has beenviewed as co-extensive with the growth rate of GDP per capita; that view has beenincreasinglychallenged,ascontemporarypoliticalphilosophyandwelfareeconomicshave been brought to bear on the analysis of development. Notably, the UNDPinitiated, some years ago, an annual report in which a ‘human development index(HDI)’ was calculated for a large panel of countries, an index in which GDP percapita is averaged with measures of education and health. The political philosophywhich motivated the HDI was Amartya Sen’s idea of functionings and capability [14,15]. In contrast, the political philosophy upon which the 2006 WDR draws has, at itsroot, the idea of equal opportunity, as it was first outlined by Ronald Dworkin [6]in his theory of resource egalitarianism, amended and modified by Richard Arneson[1] and G.A. Cohen [4], and reduced to an economic algorithm by John Roemer [11,12]. The 2006 WDR is by far the most thorough application of these modern ideas inpolitical philosophy, and welfare economics, to evaluating economic development.Because I believe that economic development must be conceived of in terms ofthe development of human welfare (I do not here wish to take on the more subtlequestionwhetherthewelfareofallsentientbeingsshouldbemadetocount,asSinger[16], for example, advocates), and because the deep questions of how to conceive ofhuman welfare are most seriously addressed by philosophers, I think the Report ismoving in just the right direction.In this review, I will first give a brief presentation of the theory of equal opportu-nity; then a very brief outline of what “Equity and development” covers; and thenspend the majority of my space on some critical reflections on the Report. That

Capabilities, resources, and systematic injustice: a case of gender inequality

Focusing on the debate between resource egalitarians and capability theorists, with particular attention to gender equality, this article rejects the prevailing assumption that the ‘capability approach’ to equality, as outlined by Amartya Sen, is better able to respond to important empirically identifiable inequalities than its resource egalitarian alternative, as developed by Ronald Dworkin. Developing and expanding upon the often overlooked Dworkinian ‘principle of independence’, the article contends that resource egalitarianism is capable of identifying and responding to a complex set of structural inequalities that remain outside the purview of the capability approach.

Dworkin’s auction

Ronald Dworkin’s argument for resource egalitarianism has as its centerpiece a thought experiment involving a group of shipwreck survivors washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who decide to divide up all of the resources on the island equally using a competitive auction. Unfortunately, Dworkin misunderstands how the auction mechanism works, and so misinterprets its significance for egalitarian political philosophy. First, he makes it seem as though there is a conceptual connection between the ‘envy-freeness’ standard and the auction, when in fact there is none. Second, he fails to appreciate how idealized the conditions are that must be satisfied in order for his results to obtain. This leads him to draw practical conclusions from the thought experiment that do not follow, such as his claim that the principle of equality generates a presumption in favor of the market as a mechanism for the distribution of resources. The result is that Dworkin saddles resource egalitarianism with a set of commitments that are, in fact, inessential to that view.

I—Andrew Williams

It is difficult for prioritarians to explain the degree to which justice requires redress for misfortune in a way that avoids imposing unreasonably high costs on more advantaged individuals whilst also economising on intuitionist appeals to judgment. An appeal to hypothetical insurance may be able to solve the problems of cost and judgment more successfully, and can also be defended from critics who claim that resource egalitarianism is best understood to favour the ex post elimination of envy over individual endowments.

Utilitarianism and the disabled: distribution of resources.

Utilitarianism is more convincing than resource egalitarianism or welfare egalitarianism as a theory of how resources should be distributed between disabled people and nondisabled people. Unlike resource egalitarianism, utilitarianism can redistribute resources to the disabled when they would benefit more from those resources than nondisabled people. Unlike welfare egalitarianism, utilitarianism can halt redistribution when the disabled would no longer benefit more than the nondisabled from additional resources. The author considers one objection to this view: it has been argued, by Sen and others, that there are circumstances under which utilitarianism would unfairly distribute fewer resources to the physically disabled than to nondisabled people, on the ground that the disabled would derive less benefit from those resources. In response, the author claims that critics of utilitarianism have fallaciously exaggerated the circumstances under which the disabled would benefit less than the nondisabled from additional resources. In those limited circumstances in which the disabled really would benefit less from resources, the author argues, it does not seem unfair to distribute fewer resources to them.

Resource Egalitarianism and the Limits to Basic Income

In his widely-discussed book, Real Freedom for All, Philippe Van Parijs argues that justice requires the provision of a universal, unconditional basic income. Some critics reject that conclusion on the grounds that it violates requirements of reciprocity or prohibitions on exploitation, free-riding and parasitism. This paper explores a less familiar critique, which operates within the same resource egalitarian parameters as Van Parijs's argument, and leaves unchallenged his conviction that justice requires a basic income. Instead the paper suggests two reasons to doubt his ambitious claims about its magnitude. First, the paper argues that if envy elimination is the fundamental egalitarian aim then Van Parijs's argument for boosting basic income by including jobs within the class of external assets to be equalized is unsuccessful. Second, it argues that Van Parijs fails to show that the provision of basic income should not be constrained by a more restrictive principle for correcting inequalities in personal resources than his favored compensatory norm. Before defending these criticisms, two preliminary sections describe Van Parijs's distributive principles and his central argument for basic income.

A Challenge to Neo-Lockeanism

The neo-Lockean justification of the highly unequal distribution of income in capitalist societies is based upon two key premises: that people are the rightful owners of their labor and talents, and that the external world was, in the state of nature, unowned, and therefore up for grabs by people, who could rightfully appropriate parts of it subject to a ‘Lockean proviso.’ The argument is presented by Nozick. Counter-proposals to Nozick’s, for the most part, have either denied the premise that people should morally be viewed as the owners of their talents, or have challenged Nozick’s Lockean proviso.Rawls, and to a more limited extent Ronald Dworkin, deny self-ownership. As Rawls writes: ‘…the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset … The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.’ Behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, those who deliberate about justice are deprived of knowledge about characteristics whose distribution is morally arbitrary. In Dworkin’s proposal for resource egalitarianism, agents calculate the insurance policy they would hypothetically ask for, were they denied knowledge of what talents they will draw in the birth lottery. Compensation for unequal talents is, according to Dworkin, properly made by taxing and transferring income according to the way it would have been distributed as a consequence of such insurance. Dworkin’s veil of ignorance is thin, because agents in the appropriate posture for deliberating about income distribution know their preferences and attitudes toward risk, but not their talents. For both Rawls and Dworkin, the self-ownership premise is challenged by constructing a veil of ignorance in which people are deprived of knowledge of certain personal characteristics, knowledge of which would bias their opinions, from a moral viewpoint.

Equality of Resources and Equality of Welfare: A Forced Marriage?

There are many points in John Roemer's paper which I would like to discuss. Since I am in general agreement with his criticisms of bargaining theory as an approach to distributive justice, I will focus on question of equality of welfare versus equality of resources and striking theorem which Roemer states in fourth section of his paper. This theorem purports to show that, insofar as it claims to differ from equality of welfare, idea of equality of resources is incoherent: there are elements within this idea itself which lead inexorably to conclusion that any acceptable allocation mechanism must be welfare equalizing. In addition, Roemer suggests that his axioms render the distinction between preferences and resources extremely hazy (p. 107) and force upon us a reductionst, determinist program (p. 109). Roemer's conclusion is not that we must advocate equality of welfare but, rather, that adequate principles of distributive justice must move beyond economic environments and be sensitive to names of goods: they must take into account which goods are being distributed, not merely level of utility (preference satisfaction) that is produced. I agree with this conclusion, and I imagine that any defender of equality of resources would have agreed from outset. This leads me to look back at Roemer's axioms with a more critical eye. In what follows I will argue, first, that axioms which Roemer puts forward as a characterization of resource egalitarianism in fact include principles which only a welfarist would accept. Second, I will argue that welfarism which these axioms require is not as extreme as Roemer suggests: they do not force upon us a reductionist, determinist program unless all forms of welfarism do so. Finally, in concluding sections of paper, I will consider some problems which Roemer's discussion raises for resourcism and discuss issue of ideal versus second-best theory.