RESEARCH
I am currently developing the following research papers:
What Egalitarians Shouldn't Believe
In his influential article, “What Should Egalitarians Believe?”, Martin O’Neill (2008) argues, inter alia, that: (a) the Levelling Down Objection does not give us reason to choose Deontic Egalitarianism over Telic Egalitarianism; (b) the most plausible form of egalitarianism, which O’Neill calls Non-Intrinsic Egalitarianism, does not fit straightforwardly on either side of the distinction between Deontic Egalitarianism and Telic Egalitarianism; and (c) Non-Intrinsic Egalitarianism is a variety of instrumental egalitarianism. In this paper, I argue that we should reject all three of O’Neill’s claims, and that we should instead accept that: (d) the Levelling Down Objection gives only Telic Egalitarianism a case to answer; (e) the most plausible form of egalitarianism, which O’Neill does a lot of the work of delineating, should be identified as a variety of Deontic Egalitarianism; and (f) Deontic Egalitarianism can further be identified as a variety of intrinsic egalitarianism. It follows from the soundness of claims (d)-(f), then, that the most plausible form of egalitarianism is what I call Intrinsic Deontic Egalitarianism.
If You're an Egalitarian, How Must You Think?
According to John Rawls’s egalitarian liberal conception of justice, distributive equality is to be pursued only through the design and functioning of our major social, political and economic institutions—what Rawls’s calls society’s ‘basic structure’—and not through our decisions as individual agents. The ‘egalitarian critique’ of Rawls’s proposal, chiefly pursued by G. A. Cohen, calls into question whether this division of moral labour is consistent with taking the value of equality seriously. Cohen argues that sufficient concern for equality requires that the pursuit of distributive equality features directly in individual agents’ deliberations. Through reflection on a pair of hypothetical decision scenarios that Bernard Williams famously used to critique utilitarianism, in which a morally motivated agent must decide upon a course of action that affects their own life as well as the lives of other strangers, I expose a problem in the way that Cohen’s conception of distributive egalitarianism, just like utilitarianism, guides an agent’s practical deliberation.