Introductory Remarks

It should be clear from the discussion in the previous Part of this book that there are several ways in which one might try to realize luck egalitarianism, some of which are more successful than others. The scope of this chapter is considerably broader, extending far beyond responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism to encompass the nature of egalitarianism itself. The primary purpose of this is to provide a framework for establishing whether luck egalitarianism really quali- fies as a theory of equality in any substantial sense. As we shall see in the next chapter, this has been disputed by many writers. The discussion of egalitarianism here will prepare the ground for the later specific assessments of the various arguments that have been put forward by these writers. Our first task is a largely descriptive one: how do we identify a theory of distributive justice as being egalitarian? Answering this question is a more complicated undertaking than one might imagine.

The most basic feature of equality is probably its comparative or relative character. Whether equality, in whatever regard, holds or not is a matter of whether a particular state of affairs holds between two or more entities. Where those entities are persons – as they will be in all cases considered here – equality of x is a state of affairs in which all persons hold the same (amount of) x. Theories which aim to justify such a situation, or one which is as close an approximation of it as is possible, are, in a weak sense, egalitarian.