Relation to others· Power and justice
Egalitarianism
Axis: Distributive justice — How should wealth and resources be distributed in society?
A just society corrects inequalities that do not result from people's own choices: birth, talents, circumstances. Redistribution is not an assault on freedom but the condition for fair cooperation among citizens.
Movements 2
Marxismexplicit
The argument begins from an analysis, not from indignation: the wage pays the value of labor power (what it costs to reproduce it), but the worker produces more than that, and this surplus, surplus value, is captured by the owner of the means of production. Exploitation is therefore not an abuse or a contingent injustice but the normal mechanism of profit, concealed beneath the appearance of a free and fair exchange of wages for work. This rejects both classical political economy, which took that exchange to be just, and market libertarianism: so long as private ownership of the means of production persists, formal equality masks a real domination that only a classless society can lift.
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) · Marx, Capital, vol. I, on surplus value
Show inferred positions (1)
Utilitarianisminferable
Each person's happiness carries equal weight in the calculus, and the diminishing marginal utility of goods gives the movement a moderate redistributive leaning: the same resource benefits more those who have less. The tendency stays cautious, however, since utilitarianism is aggregative rather than strictly egalitarian: it maximizes the sum of welfare more than it equalizes its distribution, which could in principle justify increasing the suffering of a few to raise the total.
Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics · Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5
Philosophers 7
Marxexplicit
For Marx, private property in the means of production is no natural right but the very lever of exploitation: it is what allows the worker's surplus labour to be captured, so that distributive justice is won not by sharing better within that framework but by abolishing the framework. Yet he refuses to enshrine abstract equality as an ideal: a right that measures all men by the same standard remains an unequal right, since needs differ. Full communism therefore grounds distribution on need, beyond the horizon of right itself, which makes it a radical opposed to any legitimation of merit or of the market.
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 2 (abolition of private property)
Rousseauexplicit
The second Discourse makes inequality the major political evil: born of property, it warps self-love into and institutes domination. There is no real liberty where gaps of fortune allow some to buy and others to sell themselves. A resolutely egalitarian stance, which sets him apart from Lockean property liberalism and will inspire revolutionary thought.
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Rousseau, The Social Contract, II, 11
Benthamexplicit
In reckoning collective happiness, everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one: no interest weighs more by reason of rank or birth. This egalitarianism of the count, joined to the idea of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, inclines Bentham toward a more equal distribution of well-being, without his advocating a strict equality of goods, which would wreck security.
Principles of the Civil Code (the diminishing utility of wealth, security and equality) · Maxim reported by J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. V
Show inferred positions (4)
Beauvoirextrapolated
Close to Marxism and committed on the left, Beauvoir sees material inequalities as a concrete obstacle to the freedom of the oppressed: liberation requires transforming economic and social conditions, not merely mentalities. This egalitarian leaning is, however, inferred from her engagements more than from any systematic theory of distributive justice.
The Second Sex (1949), the material conditions of emancipation · Force of Circumstance (1963), her commitments on the left
Millinferable
Concerned with the condition of workers, Mill criticises the distribution of wealth under laissez-faire and, in his later years, leans toward forms of cooperative socialism and limits on inheritance. The principle of utility, which counts each person's happiness equally, and the diminishing marginal utility of income tilt his distributive justice toward , without abolishing the market.
Principles of Political Economy (1848), book II (on distribution, socialism and inheritance) · Utilitarianism, ch. 5 (each to count for one, all happiness counted equally)
Confuciusinferable
Confucius worries less about poverty than about inequality and disorder: what troubles the ruler is not scarcity of people but unequal distribution, not poverty but instability. The sovereign must provide for the people's welfare before instructing them, which betrays a concern for the equitable sharing of resources, within a hierarchical order.
Analects, XVI, 1 (what is to be feared is not poverty but inequality) · Analects, XIII, 9 (enrich the people, then instruct them)
Platoinferable
The justice of the city rests on a distribution according to each person's function and natural aptitude: to each the task for which the soul is suited, and the community of goods among the guardians abolishes private wealth as a source of discord. This principle of "to each according to nature and function", foreign to market desert, leans toward a distribution fixed by the whole rather than by free exchange.
Republic, IV, 433a-434c · Republic, III, 416d-417b
Argument
- Where each of us starts out in life, our family, our era, our talents, our health, comes down to a lottery we did not author: no one chooses to be born gifted rather than frail, well-off rather than destitute.
- Institutions that let these unchosen advantages convert directly into income and power therefore reward what no one has earned: they enshrine luck, not effort alone. For no one is the of the gifts that fell to them.
- A rule of distribution is fair if each could consent to it without knowing in advance which place they will occupy, rich or poor, gifted or not. This impartial standpoint can be pictured as a .
- Now, in that position, no one would gamble on a society that abandons them should they fall to the bottom: one would accept inequalities only if they also improve the lot of the least advantaged.
Therefore So a just society corrects the inequalities that flow from the natural lottery and tolerates only those that also benefit the worst off: neither authoritarian leveling nor the rule of the most gifted.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the reasoning
- The argument first grants that no one deserves their talents, then concludes that society may redistribute their fruits.
- But 'not deserving' something does not mean that others have a right to it: from the fact that I do not deserve the color of my eyes or the affection of those close to me, it does not follow that they belong to the collective.
- Between 'no one deserves their gifts' and 'society may dispose of them', a premise is missing: that each person's talents are a common asset. But that is exactly what is in dispute.
Therefore So the argument leaps from the undeserved to the redistributable: remove the hidden premise of collective ownership of talents, and the natural lottery no longer justifies redistribution.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position Thought experiment
- Start from a distribution the egalitarian judges perfectly just, equal if you like.
- Each person, of their own free will, slips a small coin to someone they admire, a player, an artist; in the end that person is far richer than the others, without anyone having been wronged.
- If the starting point was just and each transfer free, at what moment would injustice have arisen? To restore equality, one would have to undo these exchanges, hence forbid people from using as they see fit what is theirs.
Therefore So to maintain a pattern of distribution is to have to control people's lives without end: liberty upsets patterns.
See the page- PrescriptivePolitical & legalEquality of what?
To distribute fairly, should one equalize incomes, resources, well-being, or each person's real capabilities to act? One cannot be just without first saying which advantage is at issue.
the advantage to distribute - PrescriptiveMoralDesert or natural lottery?
Do we deserve the fruits of talents and efforts of which we are not the ultimate authors? If our gifts come down to a natural lottery, is meritocracy just?
desert - PrescriptivePolitical & legalTo each according to what?
Should we distribute according to need, according to merit, or equally among all? Three criteria of the just share that sketch three different societies.
each one's share - PrescriptivePolitical & legal Thought experimentA just outcome, or just exchanges?
Is a distribution just by the outcome it produces, a certain sharing of wealth, or by the way each person legitimately came to hold what they have, through labor and free exchange?
a distribution - PrescriptivePolitical & legal Thought experimentChoosing without knowing one's place
What principles of distribution would we choose if we did not know the place we will occupy, rich or poor, gifted or not? Does this veil secure impartiality, or does it skew it?
society's principles - PrescriptivePolitical & legalEquality of shares, or of relations?
Is equality a matter of shares to be distributed, or first of all a certain relation between persons, without domination or hierarchy, in which no one stands above another?
social relations - PrescriptivePolitical & legalEquality against liberty?
Does every redistribution restrict the liberty of those it taxes, or does real liberty already presuppose a certain equality of means?
the political order