The rules, moreoever, are not simply a given. They are human artefacts that we can tweak and adjust so as to achieve more or less egalitarian outcomes
I believe equiality and inequality reflects not only rational choices but also mentalities and values whose origins are not to be found (solely) in rational thoughts (I find this book to be an important reference on this topic, if you can’t read french maybe this one). However, I believe every reasonnable person, whatever his political preferences (supposing he is in favor of democracy) and cultural attitudes, can accept the idea that each citizen has a right to enter the game of defining the rules. So everyone, not 99%, should in my opinion have access to the social conditions (that includes but is not restricted to material wealth) necessary to enter the democratic arena. Méditations pascaliennes have very beautiful pages about universalizing the access to universalized values with which I couldn’t agree more (and which supersede Rawls’ work in my very humbe opinion).

It’s certainly true that distributions can be so unequal as to yield absolute loss of capability. Yet the fix for this need not be equality; rather, all that is required is a distribution that does not yield absolute loss of capability. This may still be an unequal distribution.

I raise this point because one often sees a two different conceptions or justifications of equality run together. In the first version, equality is a tool. This is the advocacy of equality supported by positional goods arguments, and by relative inequality—> absolute incapacity arguments. The idea being that the current distribution causes various problems that a more equal distribution would ameliorate. In these cases, we shouldn’t make a fetish of “equality”—what we are seeking is, for lack of a better term, propinquity of a relevant kind.

The second version comprises cases where we really do want to insist on equality: equality before the law, equality in respect, equal treatment. These are cases where our moral motivation is fairness or respect.

I think there are enormous intellectual and tactical benefits from clearly separating the two ways in which equality can be a goal. And without giving it too much thought, I would diagnose the shift between these two justifications, and the overly broad use of fairness/respect arguments for equality as responsible for so much of the egalitarianism that liberals like Anderson finds embarrassing.

I think your 4th point (which you also make further up) is helpful for sorting out a great deal of the non-normative part of the discussion that’s going on in this thread, so when I have time (which may not be for anohter week, in fact) I’ll take the liberty of using it to do a post on the lessons I think I’ve learned from this debate. Thanks again.

Here’s the preface; I don’t think that income and wealth inequalities matter except insofar as they have an impact on people’s prospects for having flourishing lives…. Then the quality of life (the level of flourishing, whatever you call it), which is what really matters, is not rising with growth. So the growth putatively caused by inequality does not benefit the poor.

So here’s my first response:

1.While self-reported happiness hasn’t increased in the past half century (or rather, it’s only increased very slowly), life expectancy for the poor has increased by about 10 years. If the poor are as happy as they were 50 years ago, then they should now live even happier lives overall because they live longer lives. For example, suppose that I live 5 years and these are very happy years. If I live 5 more years in addition to the first 5, then overall I’ve lived a happier life. Perhaps we can’t sum happiness across a life in this way. However, intuitively I would say that, to the extent that I live longer, I live a more valuable and worthwhile life, provided that my life was valuable in the first place.

2.Rising life expectancy is probably at least partly caused by new medicial technologies and drugs. There is plenty of research to corroborate this point. And this new medicial technology would probably never have been developed without additional wealth to finance medical R&D.

3.These are my own musings and I don’t know if they’re right. For a more sophisticated view, I would recommend Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which makes the following points. First, while the overall wealth of a society doesn’t seem to increase self-reported happiness, the rate of growth does have an impact. If an economy is growing rapidly, people become more optimistic and optimism is important for happiness. Second, if growth is proceeding rapidly, society becomes more generous, inclusive, and progressive because people feel that the struggle for wealth is not a zero-sum game and so are more willing to finance redistribution and welcome unskilled immigrants, among other things.

4.None of this directly speaks to the point that the United States’ current distribution of income is necessary to achieve rapid growth. It certainly may not be. Other countries have experienced relatively rapid growth without American levels of income inequality (several Scandinavian countries come to mind).

“Evidence that insufficiency is harmful does not constitute evidence that inequality is harmful”

Agreed. But one reason to be opposed to great inequality is because relative disadvantage in the space of commodities can lead to absolute disadvantage in the space of capabilities (and thereby to a fall below a sufficiency threshold with respect to some capability). See Sen’s famous paper “Poor Relatively Speaking”.

You ask for more comments on positional goods. In the previous thread on the Schmidtz paper Harry linked to a paper he’s written with Adam Swift on precisely this question, so I refer you there:

http://tinyurl.com/sxwwc

On the “society as a race” question I think you are wrong to say that we mischaracterize Schmidtz. As we say above (the three paras beginning “At its foundation ….) Schmidtz denies that society is a race but helps himself to lots of metaphors of games, winners, losers etc when it suits him.

On sufficiency. I’m generally more sympathetic to an Anderson-like sufficientarian position than Harry is, but whether a view turns out to be sufficientarian or egalitarian will sometimes turn on the metric we use for interpersonal comparison. On this see Sen’s comments in his Inequality Re-examined on Frankfurt’s sufficientarian “Equality as a Moral Ideal”. I would however deny, for reasons of fairness, that there is no injustice when everyone is above the sufficiency threshold. Example: senior women executives who suffer worse career prospects than their male colleagues are victims of comparative injustice, even though both they and their male colleagues are wealthy enough to enjoy good lives. (The example needs lots of qualification and further specification, but you should be able to supply that for yourself.)

But especially on matters of personal health, personal choice can have quite a bit to do with it. Americans are famous for making poor choices about eating and exercising. It may very well be that some sub-groups emphasize even worse choices than the US mean. That isn’t a failure of income distribution. If anything it may be indicative of a malign success. The US is so fantastically rich, even for its poor members, that someone can indulge in bad habits for decades before the consequences catch up with them. This is a social problem, indeed. But not a problem of inequality.

1. Positional goods/impact of relative position

I hope we all admit that if relative position on a distribution leads to lower absolute human flourishing, this is a point in favor of equalizing that distribution. (just as I likewise hope that “X lowers human flourishing—> ceteris paribus, we should oppose X” is a general argument form accepted by all). Fine.

I find very plausible the claim that some goods are positional, and that the impact of positional goods on human flourishing can be substantial. Nonetheless I join with many other people on this thread in asking Harry and Chris to do more to clarify what evidence they believe supports the importance of positional goods. There’s not much meat on this topic here. In that sense the Harry and Chris’ discussion parallels Schmidtz’s claim (via Anderson) that luck egalitarian policies involve disrespect. Perhaps, but one wants evidence.

2. Fairness

Giving one runner a 50M head start in the 100M dash is unfair, and this is an unfairness to be opposed. Is life within a society a race, or isn’t it? Here, Chris and Harry’s rhetorical sleight of hand mischaracterizes Schmidtz. Schmidtz doesn’t view society as a race. He doesn’t think it a concern of justice that two people have different chances of achieving the nth position. He does, I suspect, consider it a concern of justice to increase every person’s chance of living a worthy life. These conceptions aren’t the same, and one wants to hear a great deal more from Chris and Harry about why the race conception is the correct one.

To put the point another way, for inequality due to unfairness to be bad, it simply must be the case that net increases can be bad. Thus, we must be concerned not merely about someone having less through no fault of his own, but with someone having more through no virtue of his own. I don’t know what Chris and Harry think about this. Their comments suggest that because access to certain advantages is competitive, society can correctly be viewed as a something like a race. If so, initial advantages (and not just deficits) can be bad, and should (ceteris paribus) be leveled. Is this in fact their view?

3. Last point: Confusing inequality with want

This is probably beneath mention, but because all these essays are at least a bit polemical, I will anyway. Here’s a point we should all agree on:

Evidence that insufficiency is harmful does not constitute evidence that inequality is harmful

It is indeed very terrible that 25% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. It is terrible when people lack the material preconditions necessary to live a fully flourishing human life. What is terrible here, however, is insufficiency. Egalitarians may believe that inequality causes or exacerbates insufficiency, or that inequality in the absence of insufficiency is unjust. What they cannot do is simply point to the harm of insufficiency as evidence for their position.

In a free society, poverty is usually a consequence of bad choices. (Usually, because luck is a factor, too, even if over-rated in the long run.) And bad lifestyle choices lead to poor health, of exactly the sort that you see in the poor in this country. I don’t see how you can avoid the correlation between poor health and poverty, then, so long as people are free to eat junk food and not exercise, and the people smart enough to take care of themselves are also smart enough to do well.