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Inequality: Do Not Disperse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2020

David O'Brien Open the ORCID record for David O'Brien [Opens in a new window]
David O'Brien*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many egalitarians incorporate a concern for interpersonal welfare inequality as part of their favored axiology – that is, they take it to be a bad-making feature of outcomes. It is natural to think that, if inequality is in this sense a bad, it is an impersonal bad (one that makes an outcome worse, while not in itself being worse for any person). This natural thought has been challenged. Some writers claim that egalitarian judgments can be accommodated by adopting an expanded view of a person's good, according to which being worse off than others is one of the factors that, in itself, makes one's life go worse. The putatively impersonal bad of inequality is thereby “dispersed” among individuals. I argue that this dispersion strategy fails. In a slogan: if you care about inequality, do not disperse it.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 193 - 203
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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