Why equality? On justifying liberal egalitarianism

Justifying Equality

We consider the problem of finding irredundant bases for inconsistent sets of equalities and disequalities. These are subsets of inconsistent sets which do not contain any literals which do not contribute to the unsatisfiability in an essential way, and can therefore be discarded. The approach we are pursuing here is to decorate derivations with proofs and to extract irredundant sets of assumpt...

Distributive interdependencies in liberal egalitarianism

Liberal egalitarian theories of justice share the egalitarian ideal that inequalities due to factors beyond individual control should be eliminated. This justifies that individuals sometimes receive more (or less) than their marginal productivity, which in turn implies that a change in one individual’s effort sometimes will affect the post-tax income of others. What restrictions should we place...

Liberal Equality and Ethics *

Liberal Egalitarianism and the Harm Principle

This paper analyses Rawls’s celebrated di¤erence principle, and its lexicographic extension, in societies with a …nite and an in…nite number of agents. A uni…ed framework of analysis is set up, which allows one to characterise Rawlsian egalitarian principles by means of a weaker version of a new axiom the Harm Principle recently proposed by [13]. This is quite surprising, because the Harm princ...

Equality of what in health? Distinguishing between outcome egalitarianism and gain egalitarianism.

When deciding how to weigh benefits to different groups, standard economic models assume that people focus on the final distribution of utility, health or whatever. Thus, an egalitarian is assumed to be an egalitarian in the outcome space. But what about egalitarianism in the gains space, such that people focus instead on how equally benefits are distributed? This paper reports on a study in wh...