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In Defence of the Priority View: A Response to Otsuka and Voorhoeve

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

ROGER CRISP
ROGER CRISP*
Affiliation:
St Anne's College, [email protected]
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Extract

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present an argument against the so-called ‘Priority View’ of distribution. According to that view, as stated by Derek Parfit, ‘benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are’, by virtue of the fact that a person's utility has ‘diminishing marginal moral importance’ the better off she is. Otsuka and Voorhoeve claim that, because this view fails to reflect a significant difference between the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, it should be rejected.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 105 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Otsuka, Michael and Voorhoeve, Alex, ‘Why it Matters that Some are Worse Off than Others: An Argument against the Priority View’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 37 (2009), pp. 171–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Page numbers in the text refer to this article.

2 Equality or Priority? The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence, 1991), reprinted in The Ideal of Equality, ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 81–125, at p. 104. Cited by Otsuka and Voorhoeve at p. 176.

3 As Otsuka and Voorhoeve put it, ‘[t]his is because a single person has a unity that renders it permissible to balance (expected) benefits and burdens that might accrue to her. A group of different people, by contrast, does not possess such unity.’

4 They may claim that how you should act may depend in part on the inequality your act will produce. But this consideration is not mentioned in the original case of the young adult, in which ‘it would be reasonable for you to share her indifference between [the] two treatments’ (p. 173) or in that of that of the single disabled child. So I am presuming that, for the sake of consistency, we should exclude it here also.

5 I am very grateful to Andrew Williams for helpful comments on an earlier draft.