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A NOTE ON CONDITIONAL EGALITARIANISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2007

NILS HOLTUG
NILS HOLTUG*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
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Abstract

Roughly, according to conditional egalitarianism, equality is non-instrumentally valuable, but only if it benefits at least one individual. Some political theorists have argued that conditional egalitarianism has the important virtue that it allows egalitarians to avoid the so-called ‘levelling down’ objection. However, in the present article I argue that conditional egalitarianism does not offer the egalitarian a plausible escape route from this objection. First, I explain the levelling down objection and suggest some particular concerns from which it derives its force. Then I provide a more precise definition of conditional egalitarianism. Finally, I give two arguments against this principle. According to the first, it violates the transitivity of the betterness relation (or more specifically, ‘betterness with respect to equality’). According to the second, there is no plausible explanation of why equality must benefit at least one individual in order to be non-instrumentally valuable.

Type
Essay
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 45 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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