In this post, I review Harry Frankfurt’s classic and influential polemic against equality, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”. I will mostly focus on presenting, rather than evaluating, Frankfurt’s arguments. But, I should note at the beginning, Frankfurt’s text is one about which I feel a certain ambivalence.
On the one hand, as an argument against certain ways of arguing for equality, I think, Frankfurt’s text is successful. This is not to say that all of Frankfurt’s arguments work; many don’t, at at least not for the claims that Frankfurt sees them as supporting. But some do, and these ought to force egalitarians to reconsider their argumentative strategies, if not their conclusions.
On the other hand, though, Frankfurt’s text remains deeply unsatisfactory as an account of the core political contexts within which concern for equality is traditionally thought to play a role: in particular, the context of developing a theory justice. Indeed, I think Frankfurt doesn’t seem to understand that problem of justice at all. To voice my criticism of the text more strongly: Frankfurt’s text can and should be seen as part of a larger ideological project of hollowing out the content of equality. This project is not a morally neutral one, and ought not to be treated as such. Accordingly, my treatment of the text will include more critical commentary than is usual for the blog.
For all that, though the criticisms Frankfurt makes of egalitarianism and his arguments for the doctrine of sufficiency as both worth taking serious. So let’s turn to the text.
Overview
Frankfurt will argue for two core claims: a negative claim and a positive claim. Negaltively, Frankfurt’s text is directed against a view he calls economic egalitarianism, which holds
Economic Egalitarianism (EE): it is desirable for everyone to have the same amount of income and wealth (for short, “money”).
A qualification about EE. Those who hold EE do not generally hold that no economic inequality is ever tolerable. Rather, they instead hold that: (a) economic equality has considerable value in itself, (b) and thus ought to be accorded “significant priority” in many contexts, but (c) other goods also matter as well, and so full equality may not, in most cases, be justified all things considered.
Despite this qualifications, Frankfurt aims to argue that EE is wrong because “economic equality is not, as such, of particular moral importance” (21).
Before turning to the positive part of the text, a word about Frankfurt’s target. The choice of EE is something of an odd target, given that most egalitarians do not hold EE. That is, most egalitarians hold, not that it would be intrinsically good (or just) if everyone had the same amount of money, but rather it would be good (or just) if everyone had the same amount of something esle. The traditional options are: welfare, capabilities, or resources.
On the basis of that claim, egalitarians sometimes hold that it would be better if distributions of money more closely approached equality because this would help to equalize some other good. But, often, they admit that there are cases in which equality of (say) capabilities requires money to be distributed unequally. One consequence of this view is that many of the arguments Frankfurt makes against EE thus do not apply to these other positions. Or at least not obviously so.
To return to the text, though, Frankfurt will also argue, positively, for an alternative to EE: what he calls “the doctrine of sufficiency” (22). This view holds that what matters is “not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough” One implication of the view is that “if everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others” (Ibid).
This, of course, does not imply that “equality is to be avoided” (22). It may in fact even turn out that “a commitment to an egalitarian social policy may…turn out to be the most feasable approach to the achievement of sufficiency” (Ibid). But that would be a very different justification for equality than is common.
Initial Arguments against Equality
Even if equality and sufficiency do turn out to coincide, Frankfurt thinks that “the error of believing that there are powerful moral reasons for caring about equality is far from innocuous” (22). He begins by noting several of them:
1. Equality can sometimes conflict with liberty (22).
2. Equality is alienating because it keeps people from pursuing their own ends (23).
3. Equality is a shallow value that encourages facile comparisons of one’s status with others (23).
4. Equality distracts from important questions about sufficiency and what is enough (24)
It is worth responding, in brief, to each:
1.Not necessarily: see Rawls.
2. It depends what the agents projects are. It also depends whether equality applies to agents or to the basic structure.
3. Equality is not shallow, but deep: it concerns how we are to relate to one another.
4. Perhaps. But that depends on their being prior arguments for caring about sufficiency.
Justifications for Egalitarianism
Frankfurt then moves to consider — and reject — some possible justifications for equality.
1. Instrumental arguments – (A) equality promotes fratenity and (B) inequality creates undesirable discrepencies in social status. Frankfurt does not refute these arguments. He rather only suggests that “both construe equality as valuable derivatively, in virtue of its contingent connections to other things. In neither argument is there an attribution to equality of any unequivocally inherent moral value” (25).
2. Utilitarian arguments: economic equality maximizes aggregate utility. Frankfurt notes this argument depends on two false presuppositions: (a) for each individual the utility of money invariably diminishes at the margin and (b) utility functions of all individuals with respect to money are the same (25). (b) is false because different people have different utility functions – people with certain disabilities and those who are easily satisfied are examples here. (a) is false because of the special nature of money, which can buy many goods. In some cases, people might derive more utility from goods after sustained consumption; others need a warming up process before their enjoyment (26).
Frankfurt builds on this basic argument. He suggests that what corresponds to “warming up” to a good is, in the case of money, saving: accumulating money entails…generating a capacity to derive at some subsequent point in a sequence, gratifications that cannot be derrived earlier. When a person undertakes a program of saving up, he may be able to purchase something – or some combination of things – that allows him to cross a “utility threshold” (roughly, a higher level of enjoyment not available before). He then counters arguments by Lerner to the effect that this is not possible.
Thus, an egalitarian distribution may fail to maximize aggregate utility (30). Frankfurt is certainly correct here.
The Scarcity Argument Against Egalitarianism
Frankfurt then proceeds to make a further (more developed) argument against equality.
Scarcity argument 1 – Suppose we are operating under conditions of extreme scarcity.There is enough of some resource to enable some but not all members of a population to survive. An equal distribution would mean that everyone died because no one would have enough. In this case, it would be morally grotesque to inist upon equality (31).
In contrast, under such conditions, Frankfurt thinks, we should maximize ” the incidence of sufficiency”. This is especially compelling when doing so averts a catastrophic harm (e.g., death).
Scarcity argument 2 – But suppose, after doing so, we have one unit left over to allocate. It is a mistake to suppose here that “where some people have less than enough, no one should have more than enough” (31). That is, we ought not necessarily give thee unit to one of the worse off people. If those people will still not have enough with the extra unit, and will thus die anyway (suppose he needs five units to survive), we ought to give the unit to someone who is better off.
The plausiblity of the claim that we should allocate the unit to the worst off, comes from the false presupposition that “giving resources to people who have less than enough necessarily means giving resources to people who need them and, therefore, making those people better off” (32). But, in some cases, Frankfurt argues, giving resources to the worst off may not make them better off. Rather, “what is crucial for them is to attain the threshold” (32). Where this is not possible, the resources ought to go to someone else.
Can the defender of equality respond to these claims? I think she can, and fairly easily, as follows:
First, the most persausive case for Frankfurt’s argument – a case of extreme scarcity, where not all achieving a threshold means death- is highly restrictive. Once we move past bear subsistence, it is not clear that Frankfurt’s argument has nearly the same appeal.
Second, most defenders of equality are pluralists: they think equality matters, but it is not all that matters. It is not clear that Frankfurt’s example shows otherwise: it simply shows that equality is not all that matters.
The Underlying Justification For Egalitarianism
In the next part of the article, Frankfurt tries to explain away the appeal of equality and explain the appeal of sufficiency. He does, first, by arguing that those who feel inuitively moved towards equality as an intuitive response to many cases are actually responding to “another feature of the situations they are confronting”: namely, that “those with less have too little” (32).
In many cases, it seems that what really matters is that people are “so poor”, not that people are unequal. This is why we tend to be quite unmoved by “inequalities between the well-to-do and the rich” (32). But these two justifications are independent of other another: to show that poverty is undesireable does nothing whatsoever to show the same of inequality” (33).
(Note that there are actually three things that people might be responding to: (1) to inequality, (2) to insufficiency (not having enough relative to some threshold), and (3) to poverty (having a certain absolute level of resources). Frankfurt only distinguishes (1) and (2), but the discussed of poverty naturally suggests (3)).
Frankfurt accuesses both Dworkin and Nagel of making this mistake. This is most obvious in the case of Nagel (Derek Parfit has pointed this out as well, in his Equality or Priority?). In Nagel’s famous case of the two childern, what matters is not that one child is worse off than the other, but that “his condition is bad” — period.
Again, I think Frankfurt is right here. But this doesn’t show we ought to give up equality, only that we ought to argue for it differently.
What is Enough?
What does it mean for someone to having enough? For Frankfurt, it means not that the person wants no more but that “a certain requirement or standard has been met” (37).
But what is the relevant standard here? For Frankfurt, it is that a person is “satisfied with his life” (39) in the sense that he does not have an active interest in acquiring more. He thinks his life, in other words, contains enough satisfaction (40).
These remarks, it should be noted, seem to presuppose a certain psychological metric of what it is to have enough. It is contestable whether that is the right view of what “enough” should be.
Fetishizing Money
At the end of his article, in a brief appendix, Frankfurt engages with Rawls’s justification for the difference principle. He accuses Rawls of “fetishizing wealth” in his stipulative assumption that the parties in the OP seek to maximize their share of primary goods. This is, is should be noted, a substantial challenge to Rawls’ view. But I will not consider it here.
Frankurt’s article, in short, contains a mix of arguments — some good, some poor– against egalitarianism and and some suggestions for an alternative “sufficientarian” paradigm. On balance, I think it ought to prompt egalitarians not to give up their views, but to look for deeper justifications for equality.
Political Not Metaphysical 