The value of equality

Abstract

Over the years, egalitarian philosophers have made some challenging claims about the nature of egalitarianism. They have argued that the Rawlsian leximin principle is not an egalitarian idea; that egalitarian reasoning should make us reject the Pareto principle; that the numbers should not count within an egalitarian framework; that egalitarianism should make us reject the property of transitivity, that the Pigou-Dalton principle needs modification, and that the intersection approach faces deep problems. In this paper, taking the recent philosophical debate on equality versus priority as the starting point, I review these claims from the point of view of an economist.