Kai Nielsen

1
Kai Nielsen

• Radical Egalitarianism

2
Justice

• Formal justice is the idea of treating like cases
  alike.
• What makes cases alike?
• What are the criteria appealed to for
  ascertaining when like cases are alike?

3
Some criteria of alikeness

• Rights
• Desert
• Needs

4
Rights

• What counts as rights?
• Conservatives are more stringent on this question
  (think negative freedoms)
• Liberals are more expansive (think positive
  freedoms)
• Is accessible, affordable health care a right?

5
Rights

• For Nielsen, sticking to negative rights as
  our conceptualization of equal rights will
  predictably lead to very unequal distributions of
  wealth, power, and well-being.

6
Rights

• How do conservatives explain/justify the fact
  that there are great substantive inequalities in
  legal protection and political power even though
  there is formal legal and political equality?
• For Nielsen substantive legal and political
  equality are in reality importantly dependent
  on economic factors and, therefore, formal legal
  and political equality are not nearly sufficient
  conditions for equality.

7
Rights

• Do people have a right to equal portions of
  certain social (as opposed to legal and
  political) goods? If so, which ones?

8
Desert

• What should count in judgments of desert?
• Effort?
• Talent?
• Contribution?
• Luck?

9
Needs

• What should count as a need?
• Do/should needs ever become rights?

10
Equality (legal, political, and social)

• An egalitarian is committed to trying to provide
  the social basis for an equality of condition for
  all human beings. The idealis to provide the
  social basis for an equality of life prospects
  such that there cannot be anything like the vast
  disparities in whole life prospects that exist
  now.

11
Interference with liberty?

• Conservatives argue that providing equality of
  whole life prospects is unfair, unjust since it
  will interfere with liberty. Thus, we must simply
  live with these disparities in life prospects.

12
Non-interference with liberty

• What if the interference in family matters,
  violations of individual rights, and the
  generally posited undermining of liberty were not
  consequences of equality?
• For some (most?) conservatives, especially, say,
  someone like Nozick, would still deem equality as
  unjust.

13
Nielsens conclusion

• Equality, liberty, autonomy, democracy, and
  justice come as a packaged deal.
• Therefore, a certain kind of equality is a
  right and we must not construct our lives
  together in such a way that the needs of any
  human being are simply ignored.

14
The rub for conservatives

• The horror of horrors for conservatives is any
  attempt to bring about equality of outcome.
• For egalitarians (at least radical egalitarians),
  then, justice is a forward looking notion. For
  conservatives it is a backward looking notion.
• The conservative concern with distribution is
  only to try to make it the case that everyone
  gets her due which is, tautologically, what she
  deserves or is otherwise entitled to.

15
So

• Does justice require that we simply allow the
  chips to fall as and where they may? Or does
  justice require some correction for imbalances?