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Telic egalitarianism is the view that inequality is in itself bad (Parfit 1991: 4), that is, even when it is not bad for anyone in particular (Parfit 1991: 29).1Many people reject Telic egalitarianism (Miller 1982; Frankfurt 1987; Parfit 1991; O'Neill 2008; Holtug 2010: ch. 7; Hausman and Waldren 2011), and they do so for a variety of reasons, most prominent of which is of course the levelling down objection. In this paper, I want to try and defend the following understanding of Telic egalitarianism:
Telic Egalitarianism (TE): Inequalities (in whatever it is that ultimately matters to individuals, e.g. welfare) among equally deserving (in whatever sense of that term)2individuals make an outcome intrinsically bad in (at least) one respect.3
An implication of this view is that some inequalities, namely undeserved ones, are always bad, even if they are not bad for anyone in particular (compared with other alternative distributions).
In defending TE I shall distinguish two distinct categories into which the most prominent objections to it fall. According to one category of objections TE is groundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad.4This is allegedly evident, for example, when equality benefits no one (the levelling down objection).5The other type of objections to TE, I want to say, focuses on its counterintuitive implications. Some critics, for example, point out that Telic egalitarians are forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants (Parfit 1991: 7), or between us and aliens from other planets (assuming the latter are worse-off than us) (Arneson 2002: 179; Hausman forthcoming: 3; cf. Fabre 2006) an implication that they find absurd. On this type of objection, then, TE leads to consequences that are either undesirable or simply silly. Rather than (merely) revealing TE to be groundless, this type of objection arguably shows it to be (also) counterintuitive. The accusation of groundlessness, then, is essentially the claim that there is nothing good about equality (or bad about inequality). And in contrast, the accusation of counter-intuitiveness is the claim that there is something bad about (pursuing) equality. Put differently, the groundlessness objection to TE says that there is no reason to...