Title: A pragmatic theory of responsibility for the egalitarian planner
Abstract:What should an egalitarian seek to equalize? Welfare is, of course, an obvious candidate, and each contributor to the recent discussion has taken it as the foil for his own proposal. To review briefly...What should an egalitarian seek to equalize? Welfare is, of course, an obvious candidate, and each contributor to the recent discussion has taken it as the foil for his own proposal. To review briefly: John Rawls proposes "primary goods"; Ronald Dworkin proposes "resources," a resource being defined in a comprehensive way to include various talents and handicaps; Amartya Sen proposes "capabilities to function"; in two recent articles, Richard Arneson has proposed "opportunity for welfare" as the appropriate equalisandum; G. A. Cohen has recently proposed "access to advantage." All of these proposals attempt to equalize opportunities, rather than outcomes: for Rawls and Dworkin, primary goods and resources, respectively, are the wherewithal with which people carry out projects that lead to outcomes that have value to them; for Sen, the capabilities to function in various ways are the prerequisites for what individuals make of themselves; and Cohen's "access" is similar to Arneson's straightforward "opportunity."Read More
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-02-25
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 667
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot