IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/ecnphi/v31y2015i02p219-228_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Equality Versus Priority: A Useful Distinction

Author

Listed:
  • Broome, John

Abstract

Both egalitarianism and prioritarianism give value to equality. Prioritarianism has an additively separable value function whereas egalitarianism does not. I show that in some cases prioritarianism and egalitarianism necessarily have different implications: I describe two alternatives G and H such that egalitarianism necessarily implies G is better than H whereas prioritarianism necessarily implies G and H are equally good. I also raise a doubt about the intelligibility of prioritarianism.

Suggested Citation

  • Broome, John, 2015. "Equality Versus Priority: A Useful Distinction," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 31(2), pages 219-228, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:31:y:2015:i:02:p:219-228_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0266267115000097/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. BLACKORBY, Charles & BOSSERT, Walter & DONALDSON, David, 2003. "Population Ethics and the Value of Life," Cahiers de recherche 05-2003, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    2. Armando Barrientos & Stephan Dietrich & Franziska Gassmann & Daniele Malerba, 2022. "Prioritarian rates of return to antipoverty transfers," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(3), pages 550-563, April.
    3. Matthew D Adler & Nils Holtug, 2019. "Prioritarianism: A response to critics," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 18(2), pages 101-144, May.
    4. Dean Spears & Stéphane Zuber, 2023. "Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 61(1), pages 101-129, July.
    5. Anders Herlitz & David Horan, 2017. "A Model and Indicator of Aggregate Need Satisfaction for Capped Objectives and Weighting Schemes for Situations of Scarcity," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 133(2), pages 413-430, September.
    6. Dean Spears & Mark Budolfson, 2021. "Repugnant conclusions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 57(3), pages 567-588, October.
    7. Anders Herlitz & David Horan, 2016. "Prioritizing the “worse off” under attainability constraints: An indeterminacy problem for distributive fairness," Working Papers 201608, Geary Institute, University College Dublin.
    8. Karin Enflo, 2021. "Quantity, quality, equality: introducing a new measure of social welfare," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 57(3), pages 665-701, October.
    9. Charles BLACKORBY & Walter BOSSERT & David DONALDSON, 2002. "Critical-Level Population Principles And The Repugnant Conclusion," Cahiers de recherche 15-2002, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:31:y:2015:i:02:p:219-228_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eap .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.