Abstract
This article surveys a variety of egalitarian theories. We look at a series of different answers to the question of what the metric of justice should be. Then we survey different interpretations of the egalitarian distributive rule, including ‘equality’, ‘prioritizing benefit to the least advantaged’ and ‘sufficiency’. Theories also differ by whether they see equality as properly holding within social institutions or being a principle that applies more cosmically. Finally, we observe that egalitarian theories differ as to the weight they grant to egalitarian values relative to other values.
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Brighouse, H., Swift, A. (2018). Egalitarianism. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2710
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2710
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