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Symposium on Equality versus Priority
My book Weighing Goods (Broome 1991) contains a discussion of egalitarianism and prioritarianism.1At the time the book was written, prioritarianism was well established amongst economists,2but was only just being discovered by philosophers. This note outlines some arguments from the book, very much abridged, in response to Marc Fleurbaey's 'Equality versus priority'.
1.
THE DISTINCTION
Take a fixed population of n people, and imagine various distributions of well-being across those people. Each distribution can be described by a vector of the form (w 1, w 2, . . ., wn ), which lists the well-being of each person in turn.3We wish to compare these distributions together, to determine which is better than which. In fact, we wish to put them into an order according to their goodness, with better distributions ranked higher in the order and worse ones lower. Different ethical views will order the distributions differently. I shall consider only views that are consistent with 'the principle of personal good', as I call it. This is the principle that, if one distribution gives some person more well-being than another distribution does, and if it gives no person less well-being than the other does, then it is better than the other.
One ethical view is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that one distribution is better than another if and only if it has a greater total of well-being, and two distributions are equally good if and only if they have the same total of well-being. This ordering of the distributions can be represented by a particular value function. A value function assigns a value to each distribution. To say it represents the ordering means it assigns a higher value to one distribution than to another if and only if the former is better than the latter, and it assigns two distributions equal value if and only if they are equally good. A function that represents utilitarianism's ordering is the simple total of well-being: [formula omitted: see PDF]
Utilitarianism gives no value to equality in the distribution of well-being. It cares only about the total of well-being, not about how well-being is spread amongst the people....