When the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero died in the 1890s, he supposedly “ended his days in madness, obsessed with the idea that he might be consuming more than his fair share of sunshine.”
That probably apocryphal story vividly illustrates how the egalitarian left might look from an unsympathetic perspective. In this picture, leftists are obsessed with leveling for the sake of leveling. Why, after all, is it so bad for some people to have a bit more than others?
In truth, the Left’s best thinkers have thought hard about the question of inequality. Most socialists believe that a certain amount of inequality is inevitable. The questions are how much inequality is tolerable, and what kind of inequality the best form of society would allow.
Some left-wing philosophers are unconcerned with inequality, per se. These thinkers, so-called “sufficientarians” like Harry Frankfurt, argue that as long as everyone has a sufficient minimum, then other people getting more — even a lot more — doesn’t really matter.
But for most of us, if we’re being honest, there really is something morally troubling about inequality, even when everyone starts from a reasonable minimum. To put it in concrete terms, it is a problem that, under capitalism, even those workers at Amazon who have decent jobs have to carefully plan and save for vacations while their boss was recently in a position to casually send his fiancée on a private space flight. Even if we were able to solve for the fact that capitalism keeps part of the population in a position of abject poverty, sleeping under bridges or on park benches, this egregious gap in privilege and resources would still be a moral violation.
Cohen calls his view ‘luck-egalitarianism.’ He thinks inequalities are objectionable when they’re outside of the control of whoever gets the short end of the stick.
Nevertheless, we recognize that not everyone in a highly complex society will have exactly the same…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
