Thesis: One can be egalitarian without being humanitarian, but historically the two went together in the liberal tradition, which is why liberal egalitarianism had a point.

EQUALITY AND HUMANITY

Humanitarianism is, roughly, a view that we should care for those who suffer, not only or even mainly as a way of making us more equal but simply because suffering is bad. Humanitarianism concerns how people fare, whereas egalitarianism concerns how people fare relative to each other. As Larry Temkin describes them, humanitarians “favor equality solely as a means to helping the worse off, and given the choice between redistribution from the better off to the worse off, and identical gains for the worse off with equal, or even greater, gains for the better off, they would see no reason to favor the former over the latter.… But such people are not egalitarians in my sense.…” True egalitarians want to equalize us even when no one would be better off. Temkin does not mean this as a criticism; he endorses egalitarianism in this form. Temkin's objection to humanitarianism is that it is unconcerned with equality per se. “As a plausible analysis of what the egalitarian really cares about, … humanitarianism is a nonstarter.”

Elizabeth Anderson says, “Those on the left have no less reason than conservatives and libertarians to be disturbed by recent trends in academic egalitarian thought.” Academic egalitarians, she thinks, have lost sight of why equality matters.