A common ground for resource and welfare egalitarianism

A Common Ground for Resource and Welfare Egalitarianism By

Article history: Received 1 January 2010 Available online 5 April 2012 JEL classification: D63

A common ground for resource and welfare egalitarianism

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an interpersonally comparable outcome) and starting points may differ. Both conceptions of egalitarianism are natura...

Common ground as a resource for social affiliation

Welfare egalitarianism in non-rival environments

We study equity in economies where a set of agents commonly own a technology producing a non-rival good from their private contributions. A social ordering function associates to each economy a complete ranking of the allocations. We build social ordering functions satisfying the property that individual welfare levels exceeding a legitimate upper bound should be reduced. Combining that propert...

The Pareto principle and resource egalitarianism

This paper introduces and studies the leximin Paretian ordering, which refines the consensual leximin ordering by adding the Pareto principle to the concept of lexicographic egalitarianism. We also provide an alternative characterization of the consensual Rawlsian ordering. We introduce several new axioms, including the Permutation Pareto Principle and Internal Dominance, and study their logica...