Abstract
This paper revisits the equality of what-debate and asks whether previous conclusions hold if we analyze the arguments from the perspective of children. It makes three claims. First, that even if welfare cannot be justified as an equalisandum for adults, it remains a reasonable position for the case of children. This claim is argued for by showing that Dworkin’s rejection of equality of welfare relies on an idea of responsible agency that is inappropriate for the case of children. Equality of welfare cannot, by this route, be rejected with regards to children. Second, we owe children welfare rather than opportunity for welfare. Here it is argued that Richard Arneson’s move from equality of welfare to equality of opportunity for relies on the same kind of problematic assumption about responsible agency as Dworkin’s argument for resources. However, the assumption about responsible agency still holds for adults, and for them we need an equalisandum that takes responsibility into account. Moreover, since children will grow up to be adults, they will need preparation for this stage in life. Therefore, both welfare and the appropriate responsibility-sensitive equalisandum will be relevant for children. The third claim is that a general theory of the equalisandum of justice should have a structure like Cohen’s (99:906–944, 1989) equality of access to advantage. Advantage is understood as consisting of both welfare and resources, and access is comprised of both actually having something that is an advantage and having the opportunity to achieve a good.
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Notes
- 1.
The man has one further child who is blind. Arguably, it would be unfair if the blind child was not in any way compensated for his or her blindness. This complicates the formulation of equality of resources, but in the course of developing his theory, Dworkin shows how his theory can handle such issues and give compensation. This is an important aspect of equality of resources, but, arguably, not essential to discuss for the purposes of this paper.
- 2.
The term children could refer to descendants or to persons in childhood, it is children in the latter sense of the word that is the focus of this paper.
- 3.
For an overview of the issues raised in that debate, and a perspective on justice from those starting points, see Gheaus 2015.
- 4.
Cf. Bagattini and Macleod (2015).
- 5.
I have chosen five-year olds as the example case, because they are not still toddlers in that they have some capacity for choice, but still too young to be held responsible for how they choose.
- 6.
Indeed, given the very demanding criteria for having preferences, it could be claimed that the same argument goes for adults, which would make the reasons to focus on hedonism even stronger. Since I do not need this stronger claim, I will not investigate this alternative argument here.
- 7.
There is, of course, much more that could be said about the concept of welfare, but for reasons of scope and space, I must set that a side for another time. For a good overview of the question of children and welfare, with an interesting argument for thinking about welfare in terms of the objective list conception, see Skelton 2015.
- 8.
None of the philosophers in the equality of what-debate makes use of Nozick’s pleasure machine-argument (Nozick 1974, pp. 42–45), but it may have occurred to the reader that this problem presents itself here. Let me, therefore, say a few words about this problem with regards to the argument for hedonism that is being advanced. The problem is the following. If pleasurable experience is a good, would it not be better to load children into machines that stimulates their brains to experience happiness? Can this implication be avoided? The position that I argue for in this paper does not consist of only welfare, but combines welfare and preparation for adulthood for children, as well as resourcism for adults. Being put into a pleasure machine seems in conflict with preparation and is inconsistent with resourisism. This means that as a practical matter, putting children in the pleasure machine is inconsistent with the theory in its entirety. There is, of course, much more to say about the theoretical issue, but that will have to wait for another time.
- 9.
It might, as in the case with preferences above, be the case that not all adults have developed these characteristics either. In that case, Dworkin’s theory might also fail for adults. Since my focus is on children, I will not investigate that question here, but rather rely on the notion that there is a difference generally between children and adults.
- 10.
Arneson has a very similar argument for his position, equality of opportunity for welfare. For the same reasons that are presented above concerning Dworkin’s expensive tastes argument that argument does not succeed for the case of children. For reasons of space, and in the interest of avoiding repetition, I shall not discuss Arneson’s version of the argument individually.
- 11.
It might be asked if this does not mean that the theory becomes very costly. What about children who are very difficult to make happy, perhaps from being used to an unjustly high standard of living? First, notice the structure of the argument here. What I try to do is to show why Dworkin’s argument does not go through for children. My counterargument at this specific point can be correct, even if this implies a costly theory. Secondly, Dworkin’s expensive taste argument is an argument about responsibility, it is not about cost. Moreover, Dworkin denies that equality can be too costly. He is in favor of strict equality of resources unconditionally. Thirdly, this is an argument in ideal theory. It takes place under the assumption that the parents of the children have just allocations of resources. The problem of unjustly high standards of living is a problem for non-ideal theory. Related to this point is also that other aspects of the account of the equalisandum developed in this paper will also be relevant to the question of what we owe children, which means that the implications of welfarism will be counteracted by the resourcist parts of the theory.
- 12.
As I say below, this is an area in which there are trade-offs. I am not claiming that all parents would make the same decisions in this situation, and if the inequality is very small it might not even be worthwhile to rectify it, all I claim is that there is a tendency in the indicated direction.
- 13.
There are, perhaps, further complications that need to be discussed; it might be the case that Cohen’s Tiny Tim argument shows that welfare is important for adults as well, but for reasons of focus and space, I will leaves this matter to another time.
References
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the participants of the MANCEPT workshop on Children and Political Philosophy and the audience at a presentation of this paper at Umeå University. Special thanks to Sara Belfrage, Anca Gheaus, Kalle Grill and Niklas Möller. This work was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.
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Lindblom, L. (2016). Equality of What for Children. In: Drerup, J., Graf, G., Schickhardt, C., Schweiger, G. (eds) Justice, Education and the Politics of Childhood. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27389-1_6
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