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528 SEIDEL
held responsible) is intrinsically valuable – and conversely that there is something
intrinsically bad about some forms of inequalities. This means that the luck-egalitarian will
subscribe to the following thesis:
(T2 L*) The fact that a distribution D is unequal in those Cs (resources, advantages, wellbeing,…)
which derive from features for which persons cannot be held responsible
is, in itself, a reason (of type T and weight W) that counts against D.
Hence in the proposed framework, luck-egalitarianism turns out to be a version of
distributive egalitarianism with a special currency.
Suppose that some version of (T2 L*) indeed solves the problem of accounting for the proper
place of individual responsibility in our intuitions about distributive justice. Now proponents
of the socio-relational critique argue that luck-egalitarianism is still bound to fail. 4 The
critique’s strategy is, first, to direct attention to the idea of equality as a social value (ESV) as
something utterly different from distributive equality (of either the luck-egalitarian or some
other type), and, second, to argue that this idea of ESV, rather than DE, is the “true” point of
equality. As Jonathan Wolff puts it:
[T]he basic idea is [that] an equal society is one that has the right quality of relations
between individuals, rather than one which distributes the ‘currency’ of justice, the
right way. (Wolff 2007: 135)
If this critique was successful, it would be an attack on (T1), since it implies that what –
ultimately – accounts for distributive justice is ESV rather than DE. 5 In this respect (in
attacking (T1)), the socio-relational critique is an extension of or a follow-up to the
aforementioned criticism that distributive egalitarianism fails to account for the proper role
of responsibility in our judgements about distributive justice.
A very forceful and instructive instance of the socio-relational critique has been put forward
by Samuel Scheffler in his pair of articles “What Is Egalitarianism?” and “Choice,
Circumstance, and the Value of Equality”. If I understand this critique correctly, it consists of
three parts:
(C1)
There is some ideal of equality as a social value (ESV) which is distinct from the
ideal of distributive equality (DE). 6
(C2) Any vindication of DE has to be based on ESV. 7
(C3) Luck-egalitarianism cannot be rooted in ESV. 8
It is important to see that the the socio-relational critique needs the first premise (C1) to get
off the ground; indeed, the very idea of the critique is to argue for a re-orientation in the
distributive egalitarian’s project: Any vindication of DE should begin from and do justice to a
quite different idea, namely ESV. But if ESV was not a distinct idea but just a variation of DE,
4
In “What Is Egalitarianism?”, Scheffler entangles this critique with the claim that luck-egalitarianism
cannot be regarded as an extension of Rawls’s arguments in A Theory of Justice (Scheffler 2010b).
5
So although the primary target of the socio-relational critique is luck-egalitarianism, the critique easily
generalises to other types of distributive egalitarianism.
6
Cp. “Equality, as it is more commonly understood, is not, in the first instance, a distributive ideal”
(Scheffler 2010b: 191); “Equality as a social and political value expresses an ideal of how human
relationships should be conducted. That ideal has distributive implications, and the task for an
egalitarian conception of distributive justice is to draw out those implications” (Scheffler 2010a: 232).
7
Cp. “any form of distributive egalitarianism, if it is to be persuasive, must be rooted in a more general
conception of equality as a moral value or normative ideal” (Scheffler 2010b: 178).
8
Cp. “the luck-egalitarian conception of equality diverges from a more familiar way of understanding
that value [i.e. ESV]” (Scheffler 2010b: 191); “the most serious reason for declining to ground
egalitarianism in the principle of responsibility [as luck-egalitarians do] is that to do so is to lose touch
with the value of equality itself [i.e. ESV]” (Scheffler 2010a: 225).