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The Many Evils of Inequality: An Examination of T. M. Scanlon's Pluralist Account
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2019
Abstract
Why Does Inequality Matter? is the long-awaited book-length development of T. M. Scanlon's views on objectionable inequality, and our obligations to eliminate or reduce it. The book presents an impressively nuanced and thoughtful analysis as well as succinct explanations of different objections to various forms of inequality. It is not only set to further cement Scanlon's influence on philosophical debates about equality but also makes a good guide to the problems of inequality for the nonspecialist reader. The book is not without faults, however. Even within a pluralist approach to inequality such as Scanlon's, it is not sufficiently clear what, if anything, his specific objections to status inequality, and to control over other people's lives, have in common with his other egalitarian objections to inequality of political influence, opportunity, and income and wealth—or whether, in the case of control, the objection is egalitarian at all.
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- Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2019
References
NOTES
1 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Miller, David, “Equality and Justice,” in Mason, Andrew, ed., Ideals of Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 21–36Google Scholar.
3 For arbitrary power over interests see, for example, Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shapiro, Ian, Politics Against Domination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For equal control and accountability, or equal shares of collective control see, for example, Pettit, Philip, On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCammon, Christopher, “Domination: A Rethinking,” Ethics 125, no. 4 (2015), pp. 1028–1052CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Forst, Rainer, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
4 For different neo-republican accounts of workplace equality see, for example, Gourevitch, Alex, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and González-Ricoy, Iñigo, “The Republican Case for Workplace Democracy,” Social Theory and Practice 40, no. 2 (2014), pp. 232–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.