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This chapter examines the view that there is something especially bad about creating ‘enhanced’ children. First, it analyses and clarifies different accounts of enhancement. Secondly, it identifies and explains some ethical views about enhancement: notably, the view that enhancement is especially morally problematic. Thirdly, it provides a critical assessment of these views. Finally, it asks what implications (if any) the most defensible of these positions have for reproductive ethics and for questions of law and regulation. The chapter's overall conclusion is that the most important arguments against enhancement-selection fail, with one possible limited exception. The exception concerns positional goods (which are linked, but only indirectly, to the idea of enhancement). It may be that there are reasons to restrict enhancement-selection where the enhancement provides goods that are purely or predominantly positional.

This chapter examines the causal link between absolute deprivation and relative deprivation and defends the role of this link in asserting an account of global egalitarianism focused on the relationship between poverty and inequality. Emphasizing the role of a particular kind of goods, global positional goods, it illustrates their normative role where certain patterns of production and distribution are globally extended. These trigger global relational practices where a sharp distinction between sufficientarian justice (typically associated to statism) and egalitarian justice (typically associated to cosmopolitanism) is hard to justify. A similar egalitarian conception, the chapter concludes, constitutes a more progressive, as well as diagnostically appropriate, account of the function and purpose of global institutional practices.

This chapter proposes a new way of thinking about equal opportunity: opportunity pluralism. The idea is that, instead of literally attempting to equalize opportunities, we ought to work to broaden the ranges of opportunities open to people at all stages in life to pursue paths that lead to human flourishing. To achieve this, the chapter argues that we ought to loosen the bottlenecks in the opportunity structure: the narrow places through which people must pass in order to reach a wide range of paths that open out on the other side. The chapter argues that we ought to build a society with a wide plurality of values, in which many of the goods people value are not positional goods, and where there are many competing sources of authority over both the opportunity structure and questions of value.

This chapter identifies and examines problems posed by positional goods. These are goods that confer relative or “competitive” advantage, and whose supply is therefore limited as a matter of logic. Early theoretical work on positional goods by Fred Hirsch in the 20th century led to some very general worries about the long-term prospects for capitalism. This contrasts with the optimism of figures like Hayek and Smith. Having discussed this general perspective, the chapter then looks at some important specific cases, such as education, before ending with a discussion about some proposals for taking the heat out of current positional competition.

Here we consider twin concerns. First, when a good is a purely positional good, and thus of no particular social value, markets are likely to oversupply it. Second, if education is instead a public good, and indeed a critically valuable public good, then markets are likely to undersupply it. To the extent that it is better to have educated neighbors, education is more or less a public good, and in particular, it is not a zero-sum game. It may be positional in a particular narrow context, but even there education is not, and cannot be, merely positional.

The doctrine of consumer sovereignty held that the wants and needs of people were both insatiable in total and independently determined, analytical givens with which the economist and policy maker must deal. Galbraith dismisses this starting point, arguing that modern capitalism turns on the systematic manufacture of consumer wants by producers utilizing the powerful tools of persuasion provided by advertising – calling this process ‘the dependence effect’. This delivers the final defence of the paramount position of production, since insatiable wants require unlimited production to satisfy them. The chapter argues that Galbraith raised important issues here but that recent developments, both technological and cultural, have in part, reversed the dependence effect; in particular, the rise of social media, internet shopping and the celebrity culture has changed the nature of consumption and the analysis of the ends of economic activity. Recent work by economists and psychologists on the nature and significance of ‘happiness’ take the debate initiated by Galbraith in new and interesting directions.

This chapter sets out the details of John Rawls’s theory of justice and explains why his view includes a concern with regulating the “top end” of any distribution. It is not simply concerned with maximizing the position of the relatively worst-off. Alternative interpretations of Rawls are discussed and the importance of the assumptions of chain-connectedness and close-knittedness is emphasized. In a just society the interests of different classes will be interconnected, which explains why a property-owning democracy is one of Rawls’s preferred social systems. The chapter discusses both why inequality is bad for its own sake and why it is instrumentally undesirable because of its bad effects. These arguments draw on the importance of positional goods. The account of inequality’s bad effects is extended to its impact on social solidarity and the fracturing of American society along class lines. The chapter concludes by considering issues of transitional justice.

This chapter discusses the unavoidability of competition, even among those who renounce the more common forms of competitions for honor, wealth, and so forth. It starts with a discussion of the Garden of Eden and conditions of zero scarcity therein, with but one scarce item: the forbidden fruit. Then the chapter goes on to positional goods, rank-ordering people, which leads to a discussion of seating arrangements, musical chairs, and the failure of King Arthur to resolve the matter with a round table. It then provides a treatment of Christian attempts to avoid honor competitions by elevating humility to the status of one of the chief virtues. But that ends in humility contests and we are back to square one. The chapter ends with a sublime text from Gregory of Tours about a truly humble miracle-working young monk and the efforts to keep him humble despite his miracle-working powers.