Abstract
The need to go beyond the standard welfarist framework of consequentialist evaluative judgements is widely felt in social ethics and normative economics. However, there is much disagreement about the choice of a way out. The relationships between a welfarist perspective on well-being and consequentialism are under investigation. In view of the conceptual difficulties which surround the notion of an intrinsic value of freedom of choice, as well as the need to take into account both the choice dimension and pieces of information about the consequences of action (or organization), an enlarged consequentialist viewpoint on matters of inequality is advocated. It is argued that this should lead to a perspective on poverty problems that is able to combine welfare and choice information.
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Notes
- 1.
I thank Peter Koller, Michael Schefczyk and Véronique Munoz-Dardé for their very helpful remarks and discussion on the first version of the article in the context of European project “Applied Global Justice”, and Antoinette Baujard for drawing my attention to a relevant reference. The final version has benefited from ongoing work in research projects CEEI (Bourgogne/Franche Comté inter-regional initiative for higher education [PRES]) and CONREP (Franche-Comté regional council & Université de Franche-Comté).
- 2.
“Consequentialism” will be defined here as a property of judgments, evaluation procedures or arguments, namely, that of being based exclusively on properties of the outcomes (the so-called “consequences”) of social interactions. It will not be presupposed (as is sometimes the case in moral philosophy) that the dependence on consequences reflects impartiality.
- 3.
A Pareto improvement is a shift from one social state of affairs to another one, which benefits some and leaves nobody worse off (“weak Pareto criterion”) or, in a less widely used version, benefits all (“strong Pareto criterion”). When a Pareto improvement is no longer available, Pareto efficiency is reached.
- 4.
Standard critiques of these doctrines include, respectively, the following: utilitarianism offers an excuse for the illegitimate sacrifice of the welfare of some individuals; full welfare egalitarianism presupposes unreasonable political control for assessment and implementation, and it cancels the potential benefits associated with ethically unproblematic inequalities. In addition, both views rely on unwarranted interpersonal welfare comparisons.
- 5.
See Guibet Lafaye 2009.
- 6.
Correspondingly, one attractive interpretation of the Pareto principle is the following: if a judgment is such that nobody in the considered society is in a position to express it sincerely, there is nothing about that judgment to be taken into account for ethical judgment. See Kolm 1996. I have examined the force of the reasons behind the Pareto principle in my 1999a, b, 2005.
- 7.
To keep the argument simple, I set aside the problems associated with Pareto improvements that appear to be inferior to other Pareto improvements, which would not remain easily reachable if the former were to be approved and implemented. Surely there are plenty of reasons, from an egalitarian perspective, to operate distinctions between good and less good Pareto improvement. However, here I concentrate on a more limited (and easier) question: does the egalitarian have good reason to reject a Pareto improvements on grounds of equality even when the considered improvement involves no blocking of superior improvements in the future?
- 8.
One plausible such correlated structural change, which may affect the fairness of opportunities in life, is social segregation in the school system, with increasingly well-funded and prestigious private schools developing in response to the demand for above-the-average education among the new privileged sections of society.
- 9.
These estimations were actually the basis for the Arrow—Robinson debate on poverty. See Robinson 1997.
- 10.
Equality-motivated social movements among the rich are no exception and are often successful. Consider the following example. The figures given by the Health Ministry in France indicate that in 2004, the net average annual income of sector-one surgeons is 70,000 euros, while that of sector-two surgeons is 120,000 euros. In the newspapers (e.g., Ouest France August 6, 2004), we learn that there is a social movement among surgeons. In response to this social unrest, the Health minister elaborates a complex scheme to “save French surgery,” which is designed to raise the standard of living of both categories, while helping to bridge the gap between the two income categories. The scheme is based on higher payment for acts and some new insurance subventions. Unexpectedly enough, the scheme becomes a source of additional social unrest: some surgeons claim it sums up to mere “compensation subventions” and go on strike to gain more.
- 11.
Attention should be paid here to relevant aspects of social life, such as the quality of public services, the level of development of associative and cultural life, and the quality of social relationships across groups in the population.
- 12.
See, for example, Kenneth J. Arrow 1982. He writes: “What has become clear is that hunger and ultimately famine are basically questions of the distribution of income and the entitlements to food. […] At higher levels of consumption, hunger fades away as a basic problem but is replaced by other needs, including medicine, shelter, and the like.”
- 13.
According to this interpretation, the relative importance of the consumption of the last unit of a good is less than that of the consumption of the first units because real needs are most likely to have been already satisfied to some extent. It seems quite obvious to me that the plausibility of such an interpretation depends on the nature of the good and also on the structure of subjective preferences. Although it may be quite plausible in some contexts, the general plausibility of the interpretation is quite dubious. On economic approaches to egalitarianism, see Fleurbaey 1996.
- 14.
More choice, however, is not always better. See Lu et al. 2005.
- 15.
QALYs—quality adjusted life years—are sometimes proposed as an operational tool for implementing utilitarian—or, more broadly conceived, consequentialist—prioritization in health care.
- 16.
One of the best available methodological syntheses is found in Leplège and Coste 2001.
- 17.
Roughly speaking, this means that, if the best element in set A (for an individual) is preferred or equivalent to that in set B, then choosing in A is preferred or equivalent to choosing in B; and if B is strictly included in A, choosing in A is preferred to choosing in B.
- 18.
Sen (1987: 75–76) insists that “seeing consequences in very broad terms, including the value of actions performed or the disvalue of violated rights” is helpful and essential, although he also argues that this cannot be seen as bridging the gap between consequentialist evaluation and what he describes as consequence-sensitive deontology.
- 19.
Research on which inequalities matter is further exemplified by Anne Phillips 1999, among others.
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Picavet, E. (2013). Consequentialist and Nonconsequentialist Dimensions in the Ethical Evaluation of Inequality. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_39
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