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Liberalism, Marxism, Equality and Living Well1

Christine Sypnowich

Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

Contemporary political philosophers tend to think of the relation between

liberalism and Marxism in terms of the former correcting the deficiencies of

the latter, particularly on issues like human rights, the rule of law, or the

efficiency of the market. However, in the case of distributive justice, it

looks like it is the other way round. Egalitarianism is so central to

contemporary liberal political philosophy it might be thought that Marxism,

reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and most ‘actually existing’

socialist societies, can declare at least one philosophical victory for the

argument on behalf of the equal distribution of wealth. Not surprisingly,

1 This paper draws on material from ‘Human Flourishing: A New Concept of Equality,’ in Daniel Weinstock (ed.) Neutrality Revisited, Pagrave Macmillan, London (forthcoming). For help improving on previous versions of this paper, I am grateful to the lively discussions of the colloquium on Liberal Neutrality: A Re-evaluation, at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique de l'Université de Montréal (CREUM), May 1-2, 2008, and the students in my equality seminar over the years. Thank you also to Anrash Abizadeh, David Bakhurst, Harry Brighouse, Andrew Lister and to my former doctoral student, Christopher Lowry, for his enlightening conversation about these issues. Many thanks, too, to the fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who honoured me with a Visiting Fellowship that enabled me to begin work on this project.

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however, the endorsement by liberals of the principle of economic equality

is not unqualified. Whereas Marx took the view that the remedy of

inequality was bound up with a conception of wellbeing and the ideal of

‘communist man,’ liberal egalitarians argue for agnosticism about questions

of how to live. Liberal egalitarians also part company with the Marxist ideal

of distribution based on need, arguing that justice requires that inequality

be remedied only in cases where disadvantage is the result of unchosen

circumstances.

This essay argues for the value of Marx’s ideas for contemporary

theories of equality. I contend that Marx and his followers developed a view

of equality in terms of human flourishing that is illuminating and

compelling. Moreover, the flourishing view can correct the deficiencies of

contemporary liberal argument, such as the mire confronting egalitarians

on the subject of individual responsibility and choice. Indeed, Marx’s

‘egalitarian perfectionism’ points to a robust political philosophy that can

withstand common objections made to theories of equality, on the one hand,

and theories of the good life, on the other.

Neutralist Egalitarianism

Flourishing is not the focus of most egalitarian theories in the liberal

tradition. This is because most contemporary egalitarians are in some

sense neutralists, uneasy with the idea of prescribing how to live. The idea

of flourishing presupposes that we can delineate, in some more or less

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objective way, what counts as living well as opposed to living badly, in order

to promote the former and discourage the latter. Neutralists contend,

however, that individuals’ freedom to choose how to live should be

respected and political theories that take a stand on what counts as living

well are illiberal.

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice set the terms for political philosophy

after the subject had languished for most of the twentieth century. I do not

pretend to offer a sustained analysis of Rawls’s position which is, after all,

not devoid of perfectionist elements.2 Of interest here is Rawls’s idea of

neutrality about the good. Rawls’s concept of the basic structure centres

on the distribution of primary goods, those resources individuals need to

pursue their projects and goals, whatever they may be. For Rawls, the exact

nature of those projects and goals is not within the purview of political

decision-making, or even political theorising. Questions of wellbeing are

relegated to the personal domain, congruent with state neutrality about the

good.

2 For example, Rawls notes that individuals tend to be motivated by an ‘Aristotlean principle’ which attributes greater value to more complex and demanding tasks (A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, 424-33). And in distinguishing the comprehensive or perfectionist from the political, Rawls admits that there are issues such as ‘national parks and preserving wilderness areas and plant species and laying aside funds for museums and the arts’ which might legitimately enter political debate, and the ‘restrictions of public reason may not apply to them’ (Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 214–15). Rawls also qualifies his position by carefully noting that political values only normally or typically take precedence over the non-political. It appears that ‘there are circumstances in which, even with respect to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, non-political values might trump political ones’ (S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, p. 224).

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Under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, once goods (which

include non-material goods) are allocated according to a just principle of

distribution, whether people flourish or not is taken to be a matter of their

own responsibility; as Rawls puts it, ‘it is assumed that the members of

society are rational persons able to adjust their conceptions of the good to

their situation.’3 According to his later work, in contrast to comprehensive

liberalism, political liberalism stipulates that neither political theory nor

political practice can take up the question of what constitutes a life well

lived outside of its impact on citizens’ ability to sustain liberal society.

Should society promote the arts? Preserve historic architecture? Conserve

green spaces? Inculcate values of political engagement in its adult citizens?

None of these questions, according to Rawls, is properly a political one. This

seems a bizarre conclusion. If we consider the ideas of political

philosophers prior

to Rawls, including liberals, let alone how politics is in fact practised in

liberal societies, such matters so vital to the quality of citizens’ lives seem

central to political debate.

Rawls does offer a caveat on his view about the scope of the political.

There are issues, he admits, that are neither ‘constitutional essentials’ nor

questions of basic justice, but which might have ‘fundamental importance’.

Some examples are ‘national parks and preserving wilderness areas and

plant species and laying aside funds for museums and the arts’. Political

debate might legitimately take up such questions, and moreover the 3 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.: 1971, 94.

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‘restrictions of public reason may not apply to them’. 4 Rawls also qualifies

his position by carefully noting that political values only normally or

typically take precedence over the non-political.5

These qualifications are a welcome admission about the inevitability

of certain governmental policies pertaining to human flourishing. But what

Rawls has to say about them is distinctly unhelpful. Lumbered with his

arbitrary divide between the political and comprehensive, Rawls leaves us

unenlightened about how the two might be connected or reconciled. Yet, as

I will argue, questions of human flourishing are essential to questions of

equality.

4 Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York: 1993, 214–15.5 Mulhall, S. and Swift, A., Liberals and Communitarians, Blackwell, Oxford: 1997, 224.

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Socialist Perfectionism

There are historical precedents for a flourishing account of equality; indeed,

the entire nineteenth century egalitarian tradition can be said to have

perfectionist assumptions. The socialist aesthete William Morris is a

significant example of someone whose commitment to equality was shaped

by a conception of living well.6 For him, there was no tension between

perfectionism and egalitarianism.7 For Morris, the revitalization of the arts

required society to interfere with ‘the privilege of private persons to destroy

the beauty of the earth for their private advantage.’ 8 Morris is often said to

have anticipated the philosophy of Britain’s National Trust, which found its

aesthetic aims bound up with egalitarian policy: care of England’s historic

buildings required public stewardship, and public stewardship entailed the

principle of public access to their beauty.9

As Morris’s ideas evolved, he came to see, like his mentor John

Ruskin, the constitutive link between egalitarianism and perfectionism. The

idea of craftsmanship in particular evolved from an aesthetic concept to a

political one, prompting a critique of the inequality of capitalism. ‘A very

inequitably divided material prosperity’ meant that people ‘work as

6 Something bourgeois enthusiasts of Morris’s contribution to drawing-room decor are usually unaware of, or at pains to ignore. In these days of New Labour, it might be said that the British Left, too, looks like it is inspired more by Morris wallpapers than Morrisian socialism!7 The discussion here draws on Sypnowich, ‘How to Live the Good Life: William Morris’s Aesthetic Conception of Equality,’ Queen’s Quarterly, Vol. 107, no. 3, 2000.8 Morris, ‘The Socialist Ideal’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 256.9 Octavia Hill founded the National Trust in 1907 with the rationale that ‘The need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise, and the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all men.’ See the National Trust Website, http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk

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laboriously as ever they did,’ but have ‘lost the solace that labour once

provided,’ that is, ‘the opportunity of expressing their own thoughts to their

fellows by means of that very labour.’ And the result was the diminishing of

the valuable: ‘cheap market wares,’ ‘mere scaffold-poles for building up

profits.’10 Thus Morris’s aestheticism, ‘an act of rebellion against an ugly

age’11 became a political struggle for equality centred on the idea of

wellbeing.

Morris makes it clear that wellbeing is to be understood objectively,

independent of people’s subjective views. As evidenced by the titles of his

lectures, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ ‘Useful Work versus

Useless Toil,’ ‘True and False Society,’ Morris’s idea of social justice

assumed a conception of value. Inequality had so degraded human beings

that their choices were bound to be bad; reduced to a ‘skinny and pitiful

existence’ the worker ‘scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life

much better than that which he now endures perforce.’12

Morris is not unusual among nineteenth century socialists in his

desire to marry perfectionism with egalitarianism. Marx’s critique of

inequality is also a critique of alienation and alienation is an inherently

perfectionist concept. It refers, not just to the unfairness of economic

hardship, but the distortion in values wrought by such hardship, making

10 Morris, ‘Art and Socialism,’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 193, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ 14.11 Peter Stansky, William Morris, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, 17. 12 Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist,’ 281. The inhabitants of Nowhere also lament that ‘the once-poor had such a feeble conception of the real pleasure of life.’ Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. Asa Briggs, Penguin 1984, 121.

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implicit appeal to the idea of the proper form life should take. Thus Marx’s

case against capitalism centred on, for example, how money made for the

‘overturning of individualities,’ (105) its affront to the ‘nobility of man,’

(100) and the way in which its relations of private property make people

‘stupid and one-sided. 87) For Marx, economic inequality is wrong because

it degrades human beings, robs them of dignity, self-determination, the

ability to develop their capacities. The term degradation is illuminating, at

once embodying both egalitarian and perfectionist elements.

At the core of Marx’s perfectionism is the concept of ‘species being’

which centres on human beings’ unique capacities and potential: how we

participate in ‘conscious life activity,’ in which our productive powers, our

‘working up of the objective world,’ enable us to form things ‘in accordance

with the laws of beauty.’13 Our unique capacity to labour, what Marx

contended distinguished the ‘worst architect’ from the ‘best of bees,’ is the

result of essential human characteristics that include, as David Leopold

notes: consciousness, intentionality, language, co-operation, tool use and

tool-making, productive activity and creative intelligence.14 Thus, as Marx

puts it, in labour we duplicate ourselves, ‘intellectually but also actively,’

and therefore contemplate ourselves in the world we have created.15

Under capitalism work is alienated and thus we are unable to fully

flourish. Communism restores to us our free, creative activity so that our

13 Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ in Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker (ed.), Norton, New York: 1978, 76.14 David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2007, 225.15 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 76.

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labour becomes ‘not only a means of life but life’s prime want,’ making

possible the ‘all-round development of the individual.’16. Leopold notes that

for Marx, ‘fulfilling work is central to the good life for human kind.’ Human

needs are diverse, Leopold notes, and include fellowship and community;

moreover, Marx’s idea of human flourishing included such things as

recreation, culture and emotional satisfaction.17

Morris was, of course, a follower of Marx, and pored over (though

with some degree of difficulty), writings such as what he reverentially

referred to as the ‘great work’ of Capital.18 One commentator contends that

Ruskin’s ideas provided a natural route to Morris’s socialism which Marx’s

writings served to confirm.19 Indeed it may be said, with a pleasing irony,

that in the 1880s Morris anticipated Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, not

published until long after Morris’s death.20

It was not just socialists who took the view that the community should

foster worthwhile ways of living. We are so used to thinking of Mill in terms

16 Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme,’ Marx-Engels Reader, Tucker (ed.), 531.17 Leopold, The Young Karl Marx, 225, 278.18 Which Morris read and re-read to such an extent that in the course of less than two years it was so worn that it had to be rebound. See A.L. Morton, ‘Morris, Marx and Engels,’ Journal of the William Morris Society, August 1986, 7, 1, 45. 19 Morton, ‘Morris, Marx and Engels,’ 46.20 For Marx, capitalist inequality means that work, what should distinguish human beings from other species and be the source of human fulfilment, becomes an alien activity, a mere means to satisfy external needs. Marx’s concept of exploitation centred on the unfairness of some people having more wealth than others because of a process whereby owners appropriate the product of workers. But the moral argument of exploitation also focused on the effect of alienation, pointing to what inequality does to people, how it affects their ability to live well. (Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’ Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker, Norton, New York,, 1978, 74.) Compare this with the divide J. Bruce Glasier seeks to make between Marx and Morris in William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1921, 142-50. E.P. Thompson criticises Glasier in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Pantheon, New York, 1977, 747-50.

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of a hackneyed harm principle that we overlook the perfectionist aspects of

his thought. But as Anthony Appiah points out, a ‘my-freedom-ends-at-your-

nose anti-paternalism’ fails to capture Mill’s concern for human

development. In On Liberty the ‘cultivation of individuality’ emerges as

society’s ultimate aim: ‘What more or better can be said of any condition of

human affairs, than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the

best thing they can be?’21

The idea that society seeks to enable individuals to live well continued

to animate liberalism after Mill. L.T. Hobhouse considered the idea of a

common culture vital to twentieth century liberalism when he wrote in 1911

that “we regard liberty as primarily of social interest, as something flowing

from the necessities of continuous advance in those regions of truth and of

ethics which constitute the matters of highest social concern.”22 Thus

when early twentieth-century egalitarians married their ideal of equality to

the principle of a public responsibility for the good life, they were helping

themselves to a widely accepted view. R.H. Tawney, for example, affirmed

a concern for ‘the perfecting of the individual,’ should have as its

‘manifestation an outlook on society which sympathised with the attempt to

bring the means of a good life within the reach of all.’23

21 On Liberty, MacMillan, Toronto, 1966, 82. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, 27. 22 Hobhouse, Liberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1964, 67.23 Ibid., 114. Harold Laski also stresses the idea of the good life in his egalitarian argument during the Great Depression, when he criticizes an emphasis on ‘material acquisition’ that ‘fails to make response to those spiritual springs of discontent’ in which ‘the masses’ find their time is ‘void of the sense of creativeness or power.’ Democracy in Crisis, George, Allen and Unwin, London, 1933, 265.

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Socialists accordingly conceived their goals in terms of the

constituents of flourishing. In the Fabian call for a National Minimum, for

example, the distribution of leisure counted as much as the distribution of

income, since it would enable individuals to ‘nurture and express their

individuality.’24 William Beveridge, one of the architects of the British

welfare state, refers to the amelioration of squalor and the elimination of

idleness, rather than simply increasing income or resources. For

Beveridge, the new commitment to the state provision of social welfare

sought to elevate human fulfilment, capacities and character.25 The answer

to the question of what it is we are trying to make more equal is flourishing,

an answer that was – it appears – commonsensical for egalitarians in

Morris’s time and some time thereafter.26

Capabilities and Flourishing24 See B. Webb and B. Hutchins, ‘Socialism and the National Minimum,’ Fabian Socialist Series No. 6, Fabian Society, London, 1909 and Ben Jackson, ‘Equality of Nothing: Loose Egalitarianism and Social Justice on the British Left in the 1920s,’ unpublished paper delivered to the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop, Oxford, Hilary 2002, pp. 33-4, and Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900-64, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2008.25 Beveridge, The Pillars of Security, MacMillan, New York, 1943.26 Morris’s ideal is not without problems. First, Morris’s antipathy to mass manufacture was paradoxical, since it meant that only the bourgeoisie could afford his labour-intensive goods. In this century, it is all the more apparent that large-scale production can enable wider access to the means of enjoyment. It is a paradox that only today are Morris artefacts, be they only a mug or a tea towel, within the means of most people and this is because they are mass-produced. A second and related problem is Morris’s backward-looking aesthetic itself, which prompted Morris to declare, following Ruskin, that Oxford had been ‘destroyed’ by nineteenth century development, and his focus on aesthetic endeavour that produces art for life. In his preoccupation with decorative arts, tapestries, furniture and wall coverings, Morris seems to rule out the modern, individualistic aesthetic of the single work produced by the great artist. As an aesthetic this is one-sided and detrimental to a pluralist conception of human flourishing. There is in fact lively debate among Morris scholars about the extent of Morris’s medievalism; many see his aesthetic ideas as the inspiration for modernist architecture and design that focuses on lack of adornment, comfort and simplicity.

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The socialist focus on human wellbeing has a contemporary version in the

highly influential work of Amartya Sen. Sen argues that focusing on

equitable shares of goods fails to take account that ‘what goods do for

people’ is subject to enormous variation because of differing circumstances

in how people live.27 Sen’s answer to ‘equality of what?’ is therefore not

goods or preferences for goods, but ‘functionings’ or capabilities to achieve

functionings.28 Sen’s capability view does not, however, directly tackle what

I take to be the root of the problem of alternative approaches, which is their

agnosticism about value. 29 Schemas such as that of Rawls are inadequate

not just because of what Sen calls their ‘goods fetishism’ which takes

insufficient account of the impact of goods on persons.30 The neutralism of

egalitarian positions in the Rawlsian tradition is also a serious defect.

Primary goods or resources are inadequate as a distributive measure

because appeal to them fails to address the question of the purposes to

which goods are put. What is bad about being poor is not simply having

less money than other people, but also deprivation of the constituents of a

valuable life. 27 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, 70-1, 88-928 Amartya Sen,Inequality Re-examined, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992, 39.29 Christopher Lowry notes that Sen refers to the issue of neutrality twice, both times in a footnote; Sen distances himself from perfectionism in one reference, but expresses ambivalence in the other (Inequality Re-examined, 85, n. 26 and 77 n. 12). Lowry makes a good case for thinking that ‘the question of capability and neutrality is a live one.’ See his unpublished paper, ‘Beyond Equality of What: Sen and Neutrality,’ presented to the colloquium, ‘Liberal Neutrality: A Re-evaluation’ Montreal, May 2008, 5. 30 This discussion draws on Sypnowich, ‘Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitanism and Human Flourishing,’ in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lowry contends that Sen should be read as meaning not that Rawls had no interest in the impact of primary goods on persons, but that Rawls too easily assumed primary goods were a sufficient indicator. See ‘Beyond Equality of What?’ p. 10.

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These constituents can be grouped into three categories. First, there

is the ability to choose how to live since, as all liberals must agree, a non-

autonomous life falls short as a flourishing existence. A second constituent

of wellbeing is objectively worthwhile pursuits, for there are better and

worse ways of living and even the freely chosen pursuit can be defective.

Finally, personal contentment is an important feature of flourishing, since

freely chosen objectively valuable pursuits are inadequate sources of

wellbeing if the person derives no pleasure or fulfillment from them.

Though the valuable does not necessarily produce pleasure, this should not

entail an austere version of perfectionism where pleasure figures as ‘an

accretion’ relevant only insofar as worthy pursuits tend to produce it.31

It follows that wellbeing obviously involves more than the satisfaction

of biological needs: people need food, shelter, and health, but they also

need education, friendship and love, participation in public life, play and

sport, experiences of nature, culture, and opportunities for intellectual

reflection in order to enjoy wellbeing. Indeed, it may be that improvements

in wellbeing derived from cultural, aesthetic and social pursuits are more

important than improvements in physical wellbeing, once a threshold of

some kind has been met.32 As Morris puts it ‘beauty, which is what is meant

by art, using the word in its widest sense, is…no mere accident to human 31 Hurka, Perfectionism, 26.32 James Griffin, Wellbeing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, 52-3. G.A. Cohen’s ideal of community, where justice requires individuals being prepared to contribute for the sake of the satisfaction of needs other than their own, suggests individuals care not just about who has what, but how they are doing with their respective shares, whether they are able to derive fulfilment from their share of resources. See Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality and Community,’ in Stephen Darwall, Equal Freedom, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994.

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life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity

of life.’33

Wellbeing is not amenable to levelling. Egalitarians have sometimes

suggested that we should aim to make people equal in all the constituents

of human happiness, and where this is not possible, compensation should be

provided. Shoeless Joe is poor, but has love and friendship. Rupert is rich,

but has no friends. A life without friends is a life unequal to that of most

human beings in a way that is of great importance to human contentment.34

The nineteenth century French utopian socialist, Charles Fourier,

considered inequality in love and sex a matter of redistribution, and

proposed that in utopia, the unattractive and uncharming would be

befriended and romanced by those more fortunately endowed. 35

We can live under ideal conditions for flourishing and still fail to

flourish; one’s lack of human relationships might just be the inevitable

result of a certain kind of character. Some of us are like Eeyore in Winnie-

the-Pooh: determined to take a grim look on life. Others of us resemble the

lazy aristocrat Oblomov in Russian literature: slothful persons who don’t

make the most of our potential. It is safe to assume that no society, 33 Morris, ‘The Beauty of Life,’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 54.34 Public provision of opportunities for social interaction can be seen therefore as an equalizing policy; indeed, community and participation are much more important than affluence in making a person content, according to happiness experts in psychology and economics: see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Knopf, New York, 2007, Daniel Nettle, Happiness: the Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Penguin, London, 2005.35 Charles Fourier, Harmonian Man, ed. Mark Poster, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., ch. 1, 4, and 5. This is an extreme version of what John Roemer, paraphrasing Marx’s idea of ‘communist man,’ calls the ‘socialist person’ assumption, where conditions of equality nurture more altruistic, comradely individuals for whom contribution to the community is automatic (Roemer, A Future for Socialism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1995).

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however successful its policies, can wholly eliminate glumness or sloth. A

flourishing approach must therefore accept shortfalls in flourishing that

derive from personalities.

Although flourishing itself cannot be equalized, we can attend to

levels of flourishing to determine whether shortfalls in flourishing are the

result of conditions that can and ought to be improved by public policy. And

we should have a demanding set of expectations as well as an imaginative

preparedness to see the environmental roots of deficits in wellbeing. Strict

equality is ruled out by my position because flourishing by its very nature

cannot be precisely calibrated, let alone equalised. I will say little here

about how flourishing is to be measured, but it follows from the flourishing

idea that the just society will seek to bring its members up to a threshold of

equal wellbeing, ambitiously understood. This is achieved by equalising

flourishing at a base level and then raising it in stages, to ensure that the

flourishing of the worst off is improved. The flourishing view thus construes

egalitarianism in terms of sufficiency, but ambitiously understood.36 Sen’s

argument brings these issues into focus for egalitarians, but he is reluctant

to defend the perfectionist implications of his argument. For Sen,

functioning, which involves the exercise of a capability, should be jettisoned 36 I discuss these issues in greater detail in my manuscript, ‘Equality Renewed.’ The requirement that we attend to the worst off should be relaxed, however, if aggregate flourishing threatens to be seriously reduced. Certainly the flourishing approach rejects leveling for its own sake. Though the idea of a threshold suggests a lack of interest in equality above the level of sufficiency and a lack of interest in excellence below the level of sufficiency, in fact both considerations play a role throughout the distributive model. This model draws on elements of Nussbaum’s use of a threshold; see Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,’ in M. Nussbaum and J. Glover, eds., Women, Culture and Development, Clarendon, Oxford, 1995, 81-2 and Arneson, ‘Perfectionism and Politics,’ 55-59.

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in favour of mere capability, which gives scope for choice. Sen notes that

capability, rather than functioning, has the advantage of leaving people free

to decide what capabilities to realise. The idea of capability focuses on the

accessibility of x, y, and z, even if people only opt for x.

However, wellbeing involves not just access to a fulfilling life, or the

capacity for such a life, but living it.37 It would be a paltry ideal of

communist man if it meant he merely had the opportunity to hunt in the

morning, fish in the afternoon, criticise after dinner, but opted instead for

lying on the couch!38 A culture of fatalism and low expectations can be

transmitted across generations so that people fail to flourish even when

they have capabilities available to them that they lacked before. This

suggests that capabilities depend on functioning; indeed, often we need to

do things in order to be able to do them. It is greater equality of flourishing

that is the proper aim of an egalitarian policy and the extent to which this

aim is realized will be assessed according to, in considerable part, whether

people actually flourish.

Desert and Distribution

Socialists tend to assume that the equal society will consist of industrious

and fulfilled persons sustaining equality through their contributions,

perhaps generalizing from their own enthusiasm for work (which in Morris’s

37 The argument here draws on Sypnowich, “From Marxism to Liberalism (and Back Again)” Political Studies Review, September 2003.38 Marx and Engels, ‘German Ideology,’ Marx-Engels Reader, 160.

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case, at least, was both interesting and lucrative). Exactly how much

people contributed compared to what they received was, as the liberal Will

Kymlicka quotes Tawney, a mere ‘detail of the countinghouse.’39 It did not

occur to these thinkers that self-reliance might atrophy in a society that

provides unconditional income, and that responsible citizens could end up

subsidising the costly ways of life of irresponsible citizens.

Putting the question baldly, are the lazy entitled to the fruits of the

industrious? Egalitarians, resisting the Victorian idea of the ‘undeserving

poor,’ might counter with another crude question: should the lazy starve?

Marx’s slogan, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his

needs,’ makes a clear separation between contribution and distribution. (It

is worth noting that under Stalin, Marx’s heady utopianism was overturned

with the ominous warning: ‘those who do not work do not eat.’) There is a

conundrum here: it would be an unjust society that permitted its

unproductive members to starve, and yet it would be an unjust society

where members shirk a duty to contribute. Moreover, both societies

cultivate impoverished relations of responsibility and reciprocity; neither

admits that enabling the welfare of others is a duty of citizenship.

A well-known example of an argument for equality without duties of

contribution is the ‘welfare for surfers’ credo of Phillippe Van Parijs. If we

are to leave individuals autonomous in their choices, then we must not

make social welfare contingent on making choices that are productive.

39 Kymlicka, ‘Left-Liberalism Revisited,’ Christine Sypnowich (ed.) The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2006, 13.

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Moreover, human diversity is such that it would be difficult to find a fair

way of rewarding the different degrees of ‘disutility’ different kinds of work

impose on individuals.40 Thus Van Parijs bites the bullet: lazy surfer though

he may and always will be, the shirker is entitled to a social minimum. Van

Parijs makes no demands of the lazy, but it can be argued he is demanding

of the hardworking;41 under-contributors can only be looked after if there

are willing over-contributors. The upshot may be political disaster, but it

also may be unfair. Moreover, an unconditional largesse that asks nothing

of citizens also shows little respect for individuals’ capacity for self-

discipline, responsibility and direction of their lives.42

One solution favoured by liberals is to modify Rawls’s theory of

distribution in order to take into account considerations of desert and

responsibility. Rawls sought to mitigate the position of the worst off, and

though his task presupposes fair equality of opportunity, it does not set any

conditions for the amelioration of disadvantage. Ronald Dworkin, in

contrast, argues that though a hierarchy of reward is not justified if it is the

outcome of talents for which people cannot be responsible, it is justified if it

is the outcome of freely chosen decisions.43 The influence of this argument

40 Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, 97, 162.41 Just as Fourier relied on the over-contributions of the beautiful.42 Thus the Right derides the ‘nanny state,’ where the nourishment of the nursery is always on offer, even if you spill or waste it; indeed, in the egalitarian case, we don’t even have nanny’s reprimands or inducements to reform squanderers of social welfare.43 Sovereign Virtue, 73-8. See also Dworkin, ‘Sovereign Virtue Re-visited,’ Symposium on Ronald Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue, Ethics, Vol. 113, No. 1, October 2002, 106-143. This contrasts with traditional meritocratic views which assume a system of rewards and burdens that distinguishes between less and more valuable contributions. See David Miller, Principles of Social Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, chapter 9.

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is such that the majority of contemporary egalitarians, however diverse,

have been dubbed ‘luck egalitarians’ for favouring a metric which somehow

distinguishes between ‘option luck,’ features of one’s lot that are shaped by

choice, and ‘brute luck,’ features of one’s lot that are immune to choice.44

Indeed, even the quasi-Marxist G.A. Cohen endorsed the luck egalitarian

position.

This approach tends to assume that we can distinguish between

outcomes that are chosen and those that are not. Yet prudent decision-

making skills might be one of those innate capacities, like others of Rawls’s

‘natural lottery,’ for which one should not take (full) credit or blame.45 The

brute luck-option luck distinction is hard to draw if economic condition can

affect our choice-making capacity; bad choices can be a consequence of

economic disadvantage, not the other way around. Why not blow one’s pay

on a Saturday night to compensate for the drudgery of the week even if it

leaves nothing for a rainy day? The familiar ‘culture of poverty,’ where poor

people are acculturated into a set of fatalistic attitudes and practices,

discourages people from taking steps to improve their lot.46 It seems harsh

44 Elizabeth Anderson coined this term in her provocative critique ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics, 109, 1999. The diversity among egalitarians, however, is such that Dworkin himself eschews the term ‘luck egalitarianism’ and distances himself from subsequent adherents. See ‘Equality, Luck and Hierarchy,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 31, No.2, 2003, a response to Samuel Scheffler’s ‘What is Egalitarianism?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 31, no. 1, 2003. Other versions include Richard Ameson, ‘Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare,’ in Equality: Selected Readings, ed. Louis Pojman and Robert Westmoreland, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997; G.A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,’ Ethics, 99, 1989; John Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.45 Richard Arneson, ‘Egalitarianism and the Undeserving Poor,’ Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1997, 332.46 Hurka, Perfectionism, 170. See Michael Harrington, The New American Poverty, Firethorn, London, 1985.

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to condemn the imprudent to impoverishment, particularly if an initial bad

decision can produce a class-divided society with lasting intergenerational

effects.

Moreover, assuming it were possible, the task of discerning precisely

which disadvantages merit amelioration and which do not would involve

intrusive surveillance. Critics argue these measures are especially

distasteful in a society whose egalitarian ambitions are predicated on some

measure of social solidarity. As Jonathan Wolff puts it, ‘shameful revelation’

is out of place in the egalitarian society that must complement its pursuit of

justice with respect for persons.47 Policing the home life of welfare

recipients, requiring that citizens use social benefits for certain designated

expenditures through a coupon system, insisting that those on welfare

submit to training or report for work are responses that are callous and

disrespectful of the privacy and self-determination of individuals.

Nonetheless, I want to suggest that a flourishing account gives desert

a role; not in determining entitlement to human flourishing, but in

flourishing itself. Feeling deserving of resources – which comes from being

productive – is constitutive of wellbeing just as resources themselves are.

Not being hungry, of course, is a more important source of wellbeing than

feeling deserving of food! Yet getting and feeling that one has earned what

one is getting is better than just getting. Thus there are wellbeing grounds

for a community to be wary of simply picking up the tab for bad choices.

Morris concludes: ‘Would you think it unreasonable or unjust, that such 47 Wolff, 1998.

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community should insist on every sane and sound person working to

produce wealth, in order that he might not burden the community?’48

We should consider the matter of individuals’ contribution, not in

order to punish the under-contributors, but to help them enjoy more

fulfilling lives. Working gives structure to one’s life, exposes one to

different experiences and people, provides scope for cooperation and

interaction with others in the public domain, enables one to develop skills

and earn respect for them, to become self-directed, self-controlled and

ethical.49 Instead of a sink-or-swim approach to equality which punishes

the less productive, we should see non-contribution as itself a form of

disadvantage, a shortfall in flourishing. And the community that socialism

presupposes requires that all see themselves as full participants, something

that Cohen, for all his luck egalitarian inclinations, also underscored.50

Luck egalitarians tend to be neutralists who eschew a social

commitment to the idea of wellbeing; they are thus ill-placed to consider

how responsibility is a constituent of living well. If we are seeking equality

in living the good life, and if the good life is in some sense a life of self-

mastery, then queuing for income does not render the beneficiary the equal

of others. This is worth bearing in mind when considering the problem of

‘welfare bums,’ who as the phrase suggest, live lives that are in some sense

contemptible.51 Of course, productivity is not necessarily constitutive of

48 Morris, ‘Monopoly; or how Labour Is Robbed’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 109.49 As Arneson says, ‘for most poor people, having a job is good for you whether you think so or not.’ ‘Egalitarianism and the Undeserving Poor,’ 348.50 Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009.51 Sovereign Virtue, 280.

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living well; some might venture that the pleasure-seeking grasshopper has a

better appreciation of the good life than the toiling ant.52 The flourishing

model has the advantage of taking a broad view of what constitutes a

contribution to society. Once we steer away from the allocation of goods

and focus instead on the constituents of flourishing we can give up

productivist obsessions to embrace a wide-ranging view of the worthwhile.

Finally, we should stress the phenomenon of the undeserving rich –

people whose wealth is the result of inheritance, dividends, mere ownership

of assets. We can easily overlook how many of the wealthy are undeserving

of their wealth and moreover, fail to contribute to society; as a Canadian

socialist leader once put it, there are ‘corporate welfare bums.’53 Moreover,

easy access to income means whole lives can be aimless and frivolous,

devoid of projects, let alone exertion or struggle, and preoccupied with the

status conferred by luxury goods, falling far short of the most basic notions

of human flourishing. The perfectionist Thomas Hurka notes, ‘if it is

corrupting to receive a welfare cheque…should it not also be corrupting to

receive an inheritance or dividend cheque?’54 Thus the relation between

responsibility, wealth and flourishing set out by our egalitarian theory

should apply to both rich and poor.

Paternalism and Perfection

52 For a delightful inquiry into this question see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper : Games, Life, and Utopia , Broadview Press, Toronto 2005.53 The phrase was coined by David Lewis, former leader of the New Democratic Party. See his Louder Voices: Corporate Welfare Bums, James Lorimer, Toronto, 1972. 54 Hurka, Perfectionism, 172, 187.

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The view that we should hold people responsible for their choices follows

from another liberal ideal: that we should respect people’s capacity to make

such choices. Here we have the crux of a fundamental controversy facing

the idea of egalitarian perfectionism. On the one hand, its focus on

flourishing suggests people need direction as to how to live, and on the

other, flourishing seems undermined by such direction. Perfectionism is

dogged by the problem of paternalism.

The paternalism critique has two aspects. First is the charge that

perfectionism is committed to a monist conception of human flourishing

which prohibits diversity. Second is the charge that perfectionism is

coercive. The perfectionist might appear to have an easy answer to the first

charge in Marx’s communist man, who hunts, fishes, criticizes, and so forth;

Marx’s ideal, however, offers not the diversity of pluralism, but rather that

of a single, yet variegated, way of life – the Morris way of life, if you will,

given William Morris’s own example of a life devoted to a variety of

worthwhile activities.55 But what counts as a worthwhile activity?

Beethoven, but not Bieber? Talking, not texting? Here we might note the

‘old fogey’ problem with perfectionism, whereby an old-fashioned or

snobbish conception of taste or value underlies the perfectionist idea of the

good.

55 So varied and prodigious was his industrious pursuit of the good that his physician said that Morris died from ‘simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.’ Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, Faber and Faber, London 1994, vii.

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Critics of perfectionism have certainly played up this stereotype.

Dworkin, for one, offers examples of elite tastes such as plovers eggs and

champagne, books and opera; if so-called worthy activities given priority,

this would, he insists, be contrary to the liberal principle of treating people

as equals (1985, 191-8). But is the old fogey anti-egalitarian? The old fogey

can respond that ultimately his or her aim is that as many people as

possible disavow the bad and avow the good, rather than preserving the

good for the privileged and well off. Moreover, the fogey should concede

that what counts as the good and what counts as the bad must be conceived

in an open, plural and provisional way, for the sake of autonomy, but also

for the sake of the good; Impressionism, after all, was deemed rubbish by

art critics when it emerged in the nineteenth century. Just as Marx noted

that the diversity of human beings requires an egalitarian distribution

which apportions unequally, according to different human needs, so too

must we recognise that like needs, human talents and interests are diverse,

and thus human flourishing is variegated in character. Wellbeing figures as

what we might call a ‘provisional universal,’ wherein wellbeing is a

universal goal that can be aspired to in many different ways.

These considerations about pluralism do not, however, settle the

second aspect of the paternalism critique, that is, that perfectionism

involves compulsion. Neutralist liberals sometimes suggest that

perfectionism involves the first form of choice restriction, that is, coercion,

whereby people will be forced to subscribe to certain ways of life, as in the

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Spanish Inquisition. Egalitarian perfectionists certainly declaim coercion;

after all, coercion was one of the grounds for Morris’s critique of capitalism:

‘while you live,’ he lamented, ‘you will see all round you people engaged in

making others live lives which are not their own.’56

Egalitarian perfectionists would likely eschew this too. We only know

what the good is in light of reasons. Choosing the putatively good without

understanding why is a poor basis for making choices and it will also

diminish our choice-making capacity in the long term. Objectivism about

value, so central to perfectionism, thus gives us grounds to be uneasy about

the diminishing of choice since our capacity to choose must be exercised in

order to live well. On this view even the more benign examples of the

restriction of choice – the use of incentives and efforts to institutionalise

and enable worthwhile ways of living – are problematic insofar as they

distort our choice-making capacity.

Living autonomously is an elusive idea: it involves freedom from the

interference of others, but it also refers to a type of freedom, a moral

freedom of self-determination. We do not live autonomously if we live lives

that are purposeless, empty, plagued by ignorance and lethargy, even if no

one stands in our way to do otherwise. We should see autonomy in terms of

self-realisation, something that can be diminished by bad choices.

The debate about choice must take account of this modest ‘social

thesis’ wherein persons are inevitably influenced by their environment. The

56 News from Nowhere, 147.

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idea of responsiveness to reasons, at the heart of our ideal of autonomy,

involves a conception of the person with grounds for choice outside the self;

the choosing self is not pure will, but a being responsive to considerations

adduced by reflecting on external sources of information. The tastes of

friends, the values of parents and those with authority or influence,

formative experiences in one’s life, superficial factors such as the symbolic

value of a pursuit, all contribute to choices about how to live.57

In market societies, many of these factors are the effect of

advertising, packaging or ‘imaging,’ and are not conducive to choices made

on the basis of reasons. Moreover, market actors who influence choices are

not held to public account or democratic control. Indeed, the market,

touted for supporting the neutralism of the liberal state because its

exchanges are conducted according to the supposedly contentless measure

of profitability, in fact makes for quite significant consequences for the

kinds of values one can pursue. And the effects are often deleterious for

human flourishing. Thus it is particularly damning of neutralist positions

that they continue to evoke the ‘marketplace of ideas’ in making their case.

Marx’s astute diagnosis of how our alienation under capitalism enables

irrational strategies for fulfilment such as the fetishizing of commodities is

prescient of the hyper-consumerism of contemporary society. (Capital 321)

Kymlicka, for example, uses the metaphor of a ‘cultural marketplace’

to defend the ‘free association of individuals’ who can forge shared cultures

57 For a sample of views, see D. Bakhurst and C. Sypnowich, eds., The Social Self, Sage, 1995.

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or good ways of life; thus ‘social perfectionism’ is to be preferred to ‘state

perfectionism.’58 On the general question of the state’s role in promoting

good ways of living, Kymlicka insists on a neutral position. This position,

however, is at odds with Kymlicka’s multiculturalist views; in his argument

for special rights for minority cultures, he in fact rejects ‘the cultural

marketplace,’ contending that without state intervention some are

disadvantaged in the pursuit of valuable ways of life.59

Confronting sources of the good that are vulnerable or threatened

such as natural wilderness areas or historical artefacts, Kymlicka’s

response, like that of other liberals, is that the state should offer support for

the sake of neutrality, seeking to offset ‘wear and tear’ so that these

pursuits remain options for future individuals. The reasons to think that the

market will fail to preserve what has antecedently been selected as valuable

are also the reasons to think the market will fail to identify the valuable in

the first place. The political community cannot ensure a ‘valuable range of

options’ without determining what the valuable, however plural, might be.

After all, there will be many options that are threatened, and not all of them

can or should be protected. It seems inevitable that protecting the valuable

entails action that counteracts the market and what one economist calls its

‘myopic bias.’ 60 Given these inevitable bad forms of the social thesis, it is

58 Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, 246-8.59 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 113.60 Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Wellbeing in the United States and Britain Since 1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, 74.

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only proper that society attempt to exert good forms. ‘Why not take

‘(benign) advantage of a causal process that would occur anyhow?’ 61

Thus Hobhouse insisted that we should not coerce people for their

own good, not out of indifference to the good, but because we value it, and

know coercion cannot secure it; but he also insisted that our concern for the

good should mean we arrange social conditions so people will elect to live

good lives.62 Indeed, even Dworkin in his later work allowed that what he

called ‘ethical liberalism’ can endorse ‘short-term educational paternalism

that looks forward, with confidence, to genuine, unmanipulated

endorsement.’63 Rawls, too, though he divorces political liberalism from

more ‘comprehensive’ doctrines, nonetheless maintains that political

institutions are ‘just and good’ to the extent that they allow ‘worthy ways of

life.’64

If by coercion we mean society rendering some choices more

attractive than others, then egalitarian perfectionism is guilty as charged,

but then so is just about any polity. Liberal societies today, for example,

encourage some ways of life and discourage others, in state support for the

arts and education, and lack of support for, even discouragement of, other

leisure activities such as the consumption of alcohol. Indeed in some

domains today there seems an excessive, puritanical perfectionism which

61 Sher, Beyond Neutrality, 73.62Hobhouse, Liberalism, 76.63 Ibid., 115.64 Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, 210.

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Morris, the plump, pipe-smoking and wine-drinking lover of beauty, would

never have countenanced. 65

Thus the question is probably not whether perfectionism, but whither,

since it is difficult to imagine any society not taking an interest in the values

– however private – of its citizens. The most important way in which an

egalitarian conception of flourishing can enable citizens to live well is

equality itself. After all, bad choices are often made because people are

vulnerable and vulnerability is especially likely where people are

disadvantaged. Disadvantaged people are often under-educated, oppressed

or alienated, prey to easy comforts, mind-numbing pleasures or imprudent

investments.66

65 The charming encounter between the hero and the children shop clerks in the matter of a hand-crafted pipe and tobacco pouch in Morris’s News from Nowhere would be hard to imagine in any present-day conception of utopia. See Morris, News from Nowhere, Chapter VI.66 A contemporary example that gives credence to how equality itself can help realise an egalitarian conception of perfectionism is the ‘war on drugs.’ ‘Law and order’ conservatives in the United States have argued that tougher measures are required to stop the traffic and use of illegal drugs. The opposing view is usually thought to rest on the idea of freedom of choice, that people should be free to pursue whatever conception of the good they choose, however misjudged. But our considerations about the conditions for choosing well qualify this view. Robert Goodin notes of smoking, many take drugs, knowing of their dangers, because they suffer from an addiction in which drug-taking is a compulsive behaviour, and cannot really be described as the result of autonomous choice. (No Smoking, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989, 25-8.) In the ghetto or slum, many become addicted to drugs out of hopelessness, in the belief they have no other option; they make what we might call a non-choice. Of course, in the unequal society, drug addiction may also be the lot of the relatively privileged. People can feel alienated despite access to wealth: the bored suburban housewife who relies on ‘mother’s little helper’; the pressured investment banker addicted to cocaine; the indolent and aimless playboy who takes luxury drugs at exclusive dance clubs. On the egalitarian conception of perfectionism, coercion is the wrong response to the irrationality of drug addictions; society should instead seek to remedy the social conditions that cause people to find these choices reasonable. At the same time, a more open attitude to drug use as a potential Millian ‘experiment in living,’ under certain, highly specified conditions, is more likely in the flourishing approach. A commitment to autonomy as a central feature of living well, coupled with an egalitarian concern for the deprived social conditions that produce choices inimical to living well, produce an argument for attending to bad choices without banning them.

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Principles of Egalitarian Human Flourishing

We can now formulate some general principles about egalitarian human

flourishing:

1) A theory of equality should focus on the quality of people’s lives. A

crucial, but non-exclusive, source of wellbeing is resources. But the reason

we seek equality in the distribution of resources is in order to better

equalise human wellbeing.

2) Flourishing is both a subjective and objective measure, and is a

mix of three ideas: being able to choose how to live; living a life that

involves self-mastery and objectively worthwhile pursuits; and personal

contentment.

3) Flourishing differs from standard accounts of distribution that

deploy a measure of equality which is also the thing that is equalized (e.g.

resources or primary goods). Society should seek higher and more equal

levels of human flourishing, yet flourishing itself cannot be equalized.

Flourishing goals can only be achieved indirectly by such policies as, for

example, ensuring a basic income, or the improvement of social sources of

flourishing, be it culture or recreation.

4) We can live under ideal conditions for flourishing and still fail to

flourish (the Eeyore problem). A flourishing approach is able, nonetheless,

to consider all shortfalls in flourishing as potentially within the scope of

public policy.

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5) Egalitarian policy should not be concerned exclusively with

resource distribution, but must also promote a social and cultural

environment conducive to wellbeing. Society should foster good choices

about how to live by means of support for egalitarian policies for the arts,

education, nature, and culture more generally.67

6) Finally, egalitarian flourishing is able to avoid the pitfalls of

egalitarian approaches that risk a harsh justice in order to punish the

irresponsible, on the one hand, and on the other, perfectionist approaches

that tend to the paternalistic. Active, contributing individuals flourish on

this account, and thus the lay-about is treated, not as a shirker, but as a

have-not in need of inculcation in living well. As Morris notes, ‘useful,

honoured work’ serves as a ‘tribute to the community.’68 Fears that

violations of individual autonomy will dog a perfectionist politics can be

addressed by a conception of autonomy, coupled with a social thesis, which

justifies improvements to the cultural environment to enable better

informed choices conducive to self-determination.

67 Consider obesity, a cause of diminished flourishing, particularly prevalent among economically disadvantaged people. It seems a paradox that excess is a form of deprivation; yet another indication that the pursuit of equality is a more complex matter than simply increasing access to goods. Possible responses to obesity are policies that encourage physical exercise and the consumption of healthy food. Obvious examples are policies that enable methods of transportation such as cycling, policies regarding schools such as health curriculum but also the menus of school cafeterias; even something as mundane as providing free fresh fruit in workplaces would be the kind of policy that might help combat unhealthy eating. The recent debate initiated by the British celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, about the quality of school meals, is interesting in its concern for, not just healthy eating, but also the aesthetics of good food.68 Morris, ‘Art and Socialism,’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 193, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ 14.

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Conclusion

The welfare state has marked both the triumph of the egalitarian vision of

Karl Marx and its disappointment. On the one hand, most Western liberal

societies have taken on some kind of obligation to assure access to the

means of subsistence, and it is difficult to imagine the commitment to some

redistribution of wealth, however unevenly assured, ever disappearing. On

the other hand, this commitment is, in even its most ambitious forms,

limited. It is, of course, evident in only some, privileged parts of the world.

And even in those parts of the world where egalitarianism has had some

impact, there is considerable pressure to limit equality to the provision of

opportunities, severed from ideas about how to improve the way people live.

I have argued that equality should focus on human flourishing. Such

a focus can address both the problem of individual responsibility that besets

egalitarianism and the problem of paternalism that besets perfectionism.

Wellbeing or flourishing does not admit of straightforward measurement or

a catch-all formula or recipe. Yet it is flourishing, a partly subjective, partly

objective criterion, that best captures what disadvantage and advantage

amount to. And it requires, not just a radical redistribution of resources,

but the maintenance of a rich cultural environment, and a constant, open

and lively inquiry into that ancient question that inaugurated political

philosophy and pervaded the doctrine of Marx: how should we live?

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