This symposium was organized by the Law and Philosophy Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusale... more This symposium was organized by the Law and Philosophy Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with financial support from the Israel B. Greene and Sara Mann Greene Fund, and the Phillip & Estelle Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law.
This symposium was organized by the Law and Philosophy Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusale... more This symposium was organized by the Law and Philosophy Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with financial support from the Israel B. Greene and Sara Mann Greene Fund, and the Phillip & Estelle Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law.
Equality is an undisputed political and moral value. But until quite recently, political philosop... more Equality is an undisputed political and moral value. But until quite recently, political philosophers have not fully explored its complexity. This article tackles the vast literature on equality and egalitarianism of the past thirty-five years or so, and shows how complex and multi-layered the concept of equality can be. Specifically, it unpacks three major questions we might ask about equality. We first ask what is equality. This question can be unpacked into two sub-questions. Distinguishing first between formal and distributive accounts of equality, we may ask what the currency of egalitarianism can be. The article goes through currencies such as welfare, resources, and capabilities, showing their respective strengths and weaknesses. A second important sub-question here is what is the relevant scope as well as temporal dimensions of equality. Among whom is equality valuable, and in what time-frame, precisely, is it valuable? This hints at our second major question, namely concerning the value of equality. Is equality indeed valuable, or are we confusing it for some other value, be it giving priority to the worse off, or lifting individuals above a certain threshold of deprivation. The article goes through some famous criticisms to equality's purported lack of value (the leveling down objection), explores some potential answers, and then examines the relative strength of equality's two main rivals, namely priority and sufficiency. The third major question we ask concerns what is the proper account of egalitarian justice. In particular, setting aside the question of currency, should our conception of distributive justice be informed by responsibility-sensitive accounts, or rather be focused on a responsibility-insensitive accounts that moreover place an emphasis on equality of relations rather than individuals holdings? We explore this in the two final sections, one devoted to understanding luck egalitarianism, and the other to its rival, relational egalitarianism.
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Papers by Shlomi Segall