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Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (eds.), Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ix + 257 pp.
Karl Marx thought it was a damning feature of egalitarianism (or "bourgeois right") that the very same people will seem equal or unequal depending on what aspect of their situation we focus on.1 He observed:
Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only.2
In his famous paper "Equality of What?" delivered as a Tanner lecture in 1979, Amartya Sen turned Marx's undeniable observation into the basis of a lively and constructive debate among egalitarians. To favor equality without specifying what aspect of people's situation is salient would be to uphold an indeterminate view; and in fact, all egalitarian views have assumed an answer to the "equality of what" question. (Indeed, any social evaluation, egalitarian or otherwise, must select as salient some aspect of people's circumstances. A poverty index is a case in point: the poor could be defined as those who have the least income, or those whose urgent needs are unmet. Although these things often go together, they need not.)
As Sen also noticed in that path-breaking paper, there are a number of competing answers to the question at hand (which has since been dubbed the question of the "currency," or "metric," of justice), one of which was the then recent one offered by John Rawls, which Sen criticized and to which he sketched his alternative proposal. Rawls proposed that, for purposes of justice, we should seek equality, roughly speaking, in the "primary social goods" that people have at their disposal. These include a number of resources and social conditions, such as income and wealth, certain educational and employment opportunities, and central liberties and civil and political rights. Sen noted that Rawls's focus on primary social goods was an improvement on its main competitor, welfarism, which judges how well off people are in terms of their subjective states, understood either in terms of people's preferences or...