Here, I refute Egalitarianism and the Priority View.
[ *From “Against Equality and Priority,” Utilitas 24 (2012): 483-501. ]
1. Background
A common view in moral and political philosophy is:
Egalitarianism: The view that equality of welfare (people being equally well off) is intrinsically good (or inequality is intrinsically bad).
A popular objection is the “leveling down objection”. Definition:
Leveling down: Achieving equality solely by lowering the welfare of the better-off people, not raising anyone’s welfare.
The objection:
If Egalitarianism is true, then leveling down is good in at least one respect.
Comment: Leveling down is bad in one respect, namely, it reduces total utility. But it would be good in another respect, namely, producing equality.
Leveling down is not good in any respect.
Comment: This is just an intuition. Leveling down seems like a pure bad, as it (by definition) harms some without helping anyone.
Therefore, Egalitarianism is false.
Parfit responded by introducing a similar but distinct view, known as the “priority view” or “prioritarianism”:
The Priority View: The view that benefits for initially worse-off people are intrinsically, morally more important (more valuable) than equal-sized benefits given to initially better-off people.
This view is specifically designed to avoid the Leveling Down Objection — notice that on the Priority View, leveling down is not good in any respect; only actual benefits that someone enjoys are said to have any intrinsic value. It’s just that they have more value the worse off the person is. Notice also that this view still gets basically the results that most egalitarians want.
It’s time to refute both of these views.
2. Methodological Comments
Paradigm counter-examples: We could rebut egalitarianism & prioritarianism by finding a case in which the correct evaluation conflicts with those views. However, if this is a weird, fringe case, the argument would be weak; the egal/prioritarian could say that maybe the value of equality/priority somehow doesn’t apply in some fringe cases, but it still applies in certain central cases. Therefore, we should look for a paradigmatic case in which equality/priority is supposed to apply, and argue that it doesn’t.
Begging the question: To avoid begging the question, we should use premises that would seem plausible to a person who considered them independently of their relationship to the conclusion. (Or: to a person who had no definite commitment for or against the conclusion.)
We should not demand that all the premises of an argument would be accepted by a logically clear-sighted person who rejected the conclusion, since this demand rules out all valid arguments.
(Aside: It shouldn’t be necessary to point this out every damn time you give a proof of something, but it is, because philosophers are so dogmatic that they will say anything to avoid giving up their position. Thus, if there is nothing wrong with your argument, philosophers can be counted on to cite the fact that the premises entail the conclusion and charge the argument with “begging the question.”)
Intuitions: When intuitions conflict, we should generally prefer strong, widely shared intuitions that are tied to the rest of our belief system, over weaker, more controversial intuitions that could be revised with minimal changes to the rest of our belief system.
3. A Refutation
3.1. A+ > A.
Figure 1 is a diagram of two possible worlds. World A is a world of 1 million people, each with a welfare level of 101 (which is very good). World A+ is a world containing the same 1 million people, this time with a welfare level of 102, plus an extra 1 million people with a welfare level of 1 (which is just slightly good).
Claim: World A+ is better than world A. Why? Well, any person who would exist in either world would rationally prefer A+ to A from the standpoint of self-interest. The 1 million people in world A would rather have world A+ (since then they’d have 1 unit more welfare). Those same people in world A+ would also be glad to be in A+ rather than A. Finally, the worse off people in A+ would prefer to be alive at a welfare level of 1 rather than to have never been born, i.e., they would prefer A+ to A. (This is true because by definition, any positive welfare level is such that life is worth living. The worse off in A+ have a positive welfare level, albeit only slightly.)
It’s hard to see how something that is literally better for everyone could somehow be overall morally worse.
3.2. A > B.
Now forget about the previous subsection, and just think about the two worlds depicted in figure 2. World A contains 1 million people, each with the very high welfare level of 101. World B contains 2 million people, each with a welfare level of 50 (slightly less than half the welfare of world A). Which is better?
Virtually everyone thinks A is better than B. (Indeed, prior to my publishing this article, there was probably no one who disagreed with this, and there probably still is no one who disagrees with it for any reason other than that they want to avoid the argument of this article.)
Notice that this question is related to that of the “Repugnant Conclusion” in population ethics.
Repugnant Conclusion (RC): The view that, for any world full of happy people, one could imagine a better world consisting entirely of a sufficiently large number of people with lives just barely worth living.
In ethics, most people reject the RC as highly counterintuitive, but a few philosophers accept it (due to the amazingly strong arguments for it). But all of these people should still accept my premise that A>B.
Everyone who rejects the RC should agree that A>B. If not, then you can imagine a third world, which would have 4 million people each at a welfare level of 25, then a world with 8 million people at 12.5, and so on. You could then get down to some world (call it “Z”) with an enormous number of people with lives just barely worth living. If B isn’t worse than A, then it’s very plausible that C won’t be worse than B, etc. So ultimately Z will be no worse than A. Everyone who rejects the RC will reject this; they will say Z is obviously worse than A.
But also, even those who accept RC would still accept my premise that A>B. These people do not think that it’s just inherently good to have a larger population with lower welfare. Rather, the most extreme position that anyone takes in the direction of the RC is that the value of the world is just determined by the total utility (just add up the welfare of everyone in the world). But even that view still agrees, in my case, that A is better than B. That’s because B not only has a lower average welfare level; it even has lower total utility than world A. So it’s just unambiguously worse.
3.3. A+ > B.
Now let’s compare all three of the worlds mentioned above (figure 3).
We’ve seen that A+ is better than A, and A is better than B. Therefore, A+ is better than B. That’s a refutation of both Egalitarianism and Prioritarianism, since both of those views would say that B is better than A+, and this would be a paradigmatic case for them (i.e., delivering this verdict in this sort of case is the core point of those views).
This inference relies on:
Transitivity: The thesis that if x is better than y and y is better than z, then x is better than z.
Most people don’t need an argument for that. But some philosophers have disputed it, and I have a nice argument for it, so here it is. I start with this premise:
Dominance principle: Suppose you have two collections of states of affairs: {x_1, … x_n} and {y_1, … y_n}. Suppose also that for every i, x_i is better than y_i. In that case, it’s better to have the collection of x’s than the collection of y’s.
Now assume (for reductio) that transitivity is false. Then you could have some states of affairs, x, y, and z, such that x > y > z > x. Now compare two combinations of states: x+y+z versus y+z+x. By Dominance, the first combination is better than the second, since x>y, y>z, and z>x. But this can’t be, since the “two combinations” are the same thing just described in two different ways.
4. What to Reject
Here are five ethical propositions that one might find plausible:
Egalitarianism
The Priority View
Transitivity
The Pareto Principle (a world that is better than another for literally everyone who exists in either world is better overall)
The Unrepugnant Premise (a world with a larger population at a lower welfare level than another, and lower total utility, is worse overall)
#3-5 jointly conflict with each of 1 and 2. To be consistent, we could reject 1 and 2, or reject 3, 4, or 5. What should we do?
Premises 3, 4, and 5 are supported by very strong, widespread intuitions. Premises 1 and 2 are supported by vaguer, much more controversial intuitions. In informal surveys, I find that many people find egalitarianism (properly explained) non-obvious, and many are opposed to it. In particular, #1 and #2 are strongly correlated to political ideology: people of left-wing political orientation tend to find those intuitive. Conservatives are much less likely to find them intuitive. And despite the impression you get from living in the academy, conservatives are a huge group, consisting mostly of normal people with a normal moral sense.
Notice that this is not the case with premises 3-5. None of them is particularly oriented toward one political faction, or one social group of any other kind.
So we should reject 1 and 2. If we won’t reject them in the face of this sort of argument, then we would never reject them, which is to say, we are being maximally dogmatic.
> Virtually everyone thinks A is better than B. (Indeed, prior to my publishing this article, there was probably no one who disagreed with this, and there probably still is no one who disagrees with it for any reason other than that they want to avoid the argument of this article.)
Well, I for one, disagree. And not "to avoid the argument of this article". Historically many others have disagreed. For example people advocating for making do with less, people against consumerism, people in favor of more ecological sustainability throu degrowth, and several other angles as well. I'm actually for all of the above. I don't think "welfare" is well defined, and if it's about "more stuff" I think it's bound by diminishing returns or even negative returns beyond some point.
The world comparison I also found mere abstractions. People advocating for equality advocate for it in this world, and are not concerned with abstract comparisons.
Real advocates for equality also don't advocate for any "perfect" equality (another strawman or slippery slope, as if advocating equality means making everybody 100% equal, as opposed to not having some homeless and others living in $100 million dollar homes).
So the only thing this did, perhaps, is refute some strawman, perfectly abstract and technical (as opposed to real-world-fuzzy and political) arguments about equality, that no actual person actually has.
> I find that many people find egalitarianism (properly explained) non-obvious, and many are opposed to it.
"Properly explained" here is a cop-out, meaning "this abstraction I put forward, and not as what people think of when they use the term and advocate for".
I think there's still a not-totally-dogmatic way a proponent of 1/2 could reject your argument. One can deny the completeness of preferences over worlds by postulating that all worlds with a different number of people are incomparable. This assumption is highly questionable, but someone can hold it for independent reasons: for example, it would also let them avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. This would deny both 4 and 5, and rescue 1 or 2.
I wonder if someone else in the literature has already raised that objection.