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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, 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
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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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 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
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
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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.
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 ‘restrictions of public reason may not apply to
‘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).
3 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.: 1971, 94.
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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.
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5
Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York: 1993, 214–15.
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 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
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
10 Morris, ‘Art and Socialism,’ Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, 193, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ 14.
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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 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
Peter Stansky, William Morris, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, 17.
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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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, cooperation, 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 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
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.
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
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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 of a hackneyed harm principle that we
overlook the perfectionist aspects of his thought. But as Anthony Appiah points out, a ‘myfreedom-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
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
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.
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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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 Flourishing
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
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 largescale 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 onesided 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.
27 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, 70-1, 88-9
28
Amartya Sen,Inequality Re-examined, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992, 39.
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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.
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
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.
31 Hurka, Perfectionism, 26.
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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 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
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.
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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potential. It is safe to assume that no society, 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 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.
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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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 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
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.
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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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.
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
40
Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, 97, 162.
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.
41
14
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 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 choicemaking 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 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
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.
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.
43
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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
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
Wolff, 1998.
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.
47
48
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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 selfmastery, 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 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
Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009.
Sovereign Virtue, 280.
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.
50
51
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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
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.
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
Hurka, Perfectionism, 172, 187.
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.
54
55
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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 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
56
News from Nowhere, 147.
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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 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
57
For a sample of views, see D. Bakhurst and C. Sypnowich, eds., The Social Self, Sage, 1995.
20
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 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 only proper that society
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, 246-8.
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.
58
59
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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 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
Sher, Beyond Neutrality, 73.
Liberalism, 76.
63 Ibid., 115.
64 Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, 210.
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.
61
62Hobhouse,
22
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
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 nonexclusive, 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.
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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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.
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?
25