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Priority and Desert Matthew Rendall

Accepted: 14 March 2013 / Published online: 2 April 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Michael Otsuka, Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have challenged the priority view in favour of a theory based on competing claims. The present paper shows how their argument can be used to recast the priority view. All desert claims in distributive justice are comparative. The stronger a party’s claims to a given benefit, the greater is the value of her receiving it. Ceteris paribus, the worse-off have stronger claims on welfare, and benefits to them matter more. This can account for intuitions that at first appear egalitarian, as the analysis of an example of Larry Temkin’s shows. The priority view, properly understood, is desert-adjusted utilitarianism under the assumption that no other claims pertain. Keywords Priority view . Egalitarianism . Desert-adjusted utilitarianism . Risk

1 Introduction: A New Challenge to the Priority View Recently the priority view has given egalitarians a run for their money. In Derek Parfit’s (2002) seminal statement, benefits matter more, the worse off their recipients. Equality may be instrumentally valuable, but is of no intrinsic importance. Prioritarians give priority to the worse-off because their absolute position is worse. It is as important to help them whether or not there are other people who are better off. Prioritarians favour a more equal distribution of resources, but this is because those with fewer resources are usually worse-off. Not only does this reasoning seem to capture many people’s true concerns, but it avoids a key objection to teleological egalitarianism: that the latter implies there would be something good about dragging the fortunate down to the level of the unfortunate. Prioritarians favour redistribution only when it does help the worse-off (McKerlie 1996: 288). Prioritarianism has caught on rapidly, to the point that Brad Hooker (2008) describes it as ‘the dominant form of consequentialism’. This lends great importance to Michael Otsuka’s, M. Rendall (*) School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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M. Rendall

Alex Voorhoeve’s and Marc Fleurbaey’s recent critique of the priority view. In a series of papers, they have presented arguments and cases which I restate here in simplified and schematized form, modifying some of the terminology. None of my changes, I believe, affects anything of substantive importance. Suppose we have two small boys, Ernie and Bert, both with severely restricted vision that is getting worse. We have recently discovered an operation that has an equal chance of completely restoring their vision—raising their overall welfare to 1.0—or failing and allowing a continued decline to blindness at 0.65. Alternatively, we have a tried-and-true operation which will, with certainty, stabilize their vision, leaving both at 0.8. Choosing the new-fangled operation means balanci