Abstract
Is equality a distributive justice principle? Or, to what extent and under what conditions do individuals employ equality as a distributive justice principle? The goal of this chapter is to raise this question and, at minimum, to provide enough evidence to suggest that we should take the question seriously. In order to do so, I first reexamine some representative treatments of equality in the history of philosophy, specifically those by Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rawls. First, I show that equality does not in fact play a central role in these political and moral theories. Second, I argue that the conversion of distributive justice claims into procedural justice claims, first seen in Hobbes but brought to its culmination in Rawls, has the effect of privileging equality not as a distributive justice principle, but as a privileged outcome that is the result of treating the allocation problem as a procedural one. With this reexamination of the role of equality in the history of philosophy in mind, I then turn to a few representative empirical studies of justice behavior in order to raise questions about what is actually going on when we see individuals behave in a way that seems to accord with the theoretical expectation that they are treating equality as a distributive justice principle and to suggest that they may not actually be doing so. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the implications of this examination for the empirical study of justice beliefs and behavior and suggest some potentially fruitful lines of further research.
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- 1.
Subsequent references to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics will include only the standard referents to book, chapter, and Bekker page number.
- 2.
Subsequent references to Aristotle’s Politics will include only the standard referents to book, chapter, and Bekker page number. I have also eliminated the brackets included by the translator to indicate words or phrases which he interpolates to make Aristotle’s highly compressed prose make sense in translation.
- 3.
Descartes makes the same misleading argument at the beginning of Part One of his Discourse on Method.
- 4.
On an autobiographical note, I want to add that the central question of this chapter as a whole—whether equality is a distributive justice principle—was first raised by James Konow after I presented the research contained in the first two of these studies in an invited talk in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). My subsequent conversations with James on this subject led me to write this paper, and I want to acknowledge him in this regard.
- 5.
For an approach that embraces the method of cutting the cake, see Brams and Taylor 1996.
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Scott, J. (2014). Cutting Your Cake and Having It Too: Or, Is Equality a Distributive Justice Principle?. In: Bornstein, B., Wiener, R. (eds) Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0623-9_2
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