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This essay considers the role of impartiality in theories of distributive justice. Impartiality is modelled by Rawls in his famous thought experiment of a veil of ignorance, where individuals reason about principles of justice without knowing fundamental aspects of themselves — such as talent or family background. It is argued that the veil of ignorance delivers recommendations that are inconsistent with prioritarianism, that is, the view that priority should be given to ameliorating the disadvantage of the worst off. Hence, prioritarianism, which is after all far weaker than strict egalitarianism, cannot be justified by appeal to a veil of ignorance. The veil of ignorance achieves impartiality, but impartiality needs to be conjoined with a principle of solidarity in order to justify the redistribution of wealth. The resource allocation rules that jointly satisfy impartiality, priority, and solidarity are described.

This chapter argues that particular versions of the mitigation approach may also incorporate ‘quasi-egalitarian principles’ — principles which hold that certain kinds or degrees of inequality are objectionable. It is also maintained here that a defensible version of the mitigation approach might incorporate more than one kind of principle — it need not consist entirely of quasi-egalitarian principles, nor need it be exhausted by a prioritarian or sufficiency principle — and, furthermore, that different kinds of principles might be appropriate for different goods or different aspects of people's circumstances.

Discusses one principle that has been suggested as a guide to the way we ought to take account of the interests of future generations, namely the principle of intergenerational ‘equity’ and its related claim of intergenerational equality, particularly in spheres such as the way we should share out ‘finite’ resources among generations. This chapter examines the possible arguments in favour of intergenerational egalitarianism and concludes that they are difficult to defend. It is proposed that egalitarianism should be replaced by the principle of ‘threshold prioritarianism’, so that our moral obligation to future generations should be based on a humanitarian concern to avoid policies that may impoverish them.

According to prioritarianism, outcome value is an additive function of weighted individual welfare, where increases in welfare are weighted such that they gain a greater moral value, the worse off the individual is to whom they accrue. This view differs from egalitarianism in that it does not take equality to have intrinsic value. Various objections to prioritarianism are considered, including the claim that (a) the Levelling Down Objection does not serve to distinguish prioritarianism from egalitarianism, (b) prioritarianism is itself vulnerable to the person‐affecting idea that motivates the Levelling Down Objection, (c) prioritarianism fails to account for some firmly held intuitions about relational justice and (d) prioritarianism does not appropriately reflect the virtue on which it is based, namely that of compassion. It is argued that none of these objections is convincing and that prioritarianism remains a plausible theory of justice.

In Chapter 4, the Prudential View, according to which self‐interest is a function not just of welfare but also of Relation M was proposed. This view has implications for our account of justice. For example, according to the ‘Compensation Argument’, it is possible for an individual to be compensated for her low welfare at one time by her high welfare at another time. Therefore, what matters for distributive justice is her welfare over her life taken as a whole. However, if we accept the Prudential View, what the Compensation Argument suggests is not Whole Lives Prioritarianism, but ‘Prudential Prioritarianism’. According to Prudential Prioritarianism, roughly, the moral value of a benefit to an individual at one time depends on both the size of the benefit and on the individual's self‐interest, at that time, in the other benefits that accrue to her at this and other times.

The chapter provides an overview of recent economic and philosophical literature on egalitarianism and prioritarianism. it discusses how a concern for equality promotion can be combined with the principle of personal good, and to what extent prioritarian reasoning provides an alternative justification for the worst‐off.

This chapter explores two major distinctions that are often deemed relevant to fairness: benefits that satisfy some need(s) versus benefits that do not satisfy any need(s), and deserved benefits versus undeserved benefits. In the course of investigating these distinctions, it argues in favour of weighted prioritarianism as one key principle in an overall account of justice.

In this chapter I consider various possible distributive principles, that assess what a fair distribution of welfare would look like. I reject the principle of distributive equality because equality favours levelling down, making the lives of some people go worse while making no one’s life go better. In place I adopt the priority view, which suggests that the concern of justice should be promoting the welfare of the least advantaged children. I then consider the sufficiency principle, which holds that justice is about securing each person ‘enough’ and is unconcerned with advantages above this threshold. I argue that this sufficiency view should be rejected, even in its more plausible moderate forms, but that it does provide a useful intermediary role in working out what are the implications of prioritarianism.

This chapter inquires after the just distribution of health proper (as distinct from health care), arguing against a Rawlsian approach and in favour of a luck egalitarian one. It demonstrates that the Rawlsian approach of ‘fair equality of opportunity for health’ is subject to two objections: first, it does not mandate treatment for genetically caused medical conditions; and second, it is forced to mandate an equalization of health, even when unequal health would be of benefit to everyone's health. Since standard luck egalitarianism is just as vulnerable to this second ‘leveling down’ objection, the luck egalitarian can and ought to revert to a prioritarian pattern of distributing health. Luck prioritarian justice in health thus judges a distribution of health to be just if it promotes the health of those who are not responsible for their low level of health, and among those, gives higher priority to those whose health is (even) worse.

Chapter 10 explores discrimination outside the state and labor market, e.g. in relation to people’s preferences regarding with whom they share their neighborhood, their religious places, or their lives. Generally, discrimination in the private sphere has not received the same amount of attention as, say, labor market discrimination. In part this may reflect the belief that people have a moral right to act wrongly in matters that pertain to their private lives. However, most of the reasons that render discrimination wrong on the labor market apply no less well to private discrimination. While state policies may often be ineffective or even counterproductive in eliminating private discrimination, this does not show that discrimination in the private sphere may not be seriously morally wrong. The chapter shows how this implies that there can be a gap between the morally desirable legal status and the moral status of discriminatory acts.

This chapter offers a working definition of my conception of exploitation, briefly describes its limits, shows how it can be an expression of both commutative and distributive justice, and places this conception in its proper context by comparing it to the conceptions of exploitation employed by Karl Marx, A. C. Pigou, Hillel Steiner, and various other exploitation theorists both past and present. The chapter also compares this working definition of exploitation to some of the broader conceptions of economic justice that are influential in the liberal egalitarian world today, including Rawlsian prioritarianism and luck egalitarianism, and shows how this new theory of exploitation can work as either a supplement to or a replacement for either of these currently popular approaches to economic justice.

Compared with resource egalitarians, who cannot incorporate utilitarianism into their distributive theories without some modifications, welfare egalitarians make compromises with utilitarianism in two ways. Some are ethical pluralists, who simultaneously abide by a number of different distributive principles, including welfare egalitarianism and utilitarianism. Other welfare egalitarians propose a kind of weighted welfarism known as prioritarianism; they argue that society should seek to increase the welfare of everyone, but should give more importance to the welfare of those who are worse off. This chapter explores prioritarianism, focusing on the views of Amartya Sen, G. A. Cohen, Norman Daniels, and Martha Nussbaum. It presents examples that highlight the conflict between utilitarianism and prioritarianism.

This chapter explains the background to debates about sufficiency. It explains how the field of distributive justice relates to politics and it situates sufficiency within the field of distributive justice alongside rival ideals such as equality and priority to the worse off. It also summarises the structure of the rest of the book.

Chapter 6 presents the harm-based account, which is the most promising and yet not without problems of its own. According to this account, discriminatory acts are wrong by virtue of the harm they involve. Since there can be harmless acts of discrimination, the harm-based account implies that discrimination is not always wrong. Some might see this as an objection to the harm-based account even if they keep firmly in mind the relevant concept of discrimination. If so, however, it is an objection that with equal right can be directed against mental-states and objective-meaning accounts. In the second half of the chapter, a specific, consequentialist version of the harm-based account is proposed, i.e. the desert-prioritarian account. This account gives greater moral weight to avoiding harms to the worse off and gives greater moral weight to benefiting the more deserving.

The social welfare function (SWF) framework is a core methodology of welfare economics. This chapter describes the approach, discusses its application to health priority-setting, and illustrates this application with a concrete example. The SWF framework conceptualizes any given policy as a probability distribution over outcomes, with each outcome in turn a pattern of well-being among the population of concern. The well-being measure can be derived from utility functions representing individual preferences with respect to the attributes that determine well-being (e.g., health, longevity, income). Different rules for ranking well-being patterns are possible, including both “utilitarian” and “prioritarian” rules. Unlike cost-effectiveness analysis, the SWF framework is sensitive to the way in which a given individual’s income, health, and longevity interact to determine her lifetime well-being. Unlike cost-benefit analysis, the utilitarian and prioritarian SWFs take account of the declining marginal utility of income. Health scholars’ traditional concerns about considering income in allocating health care are mitigated by this feature of both SWFs and, even more so, by the extra concern for the well-being of the worse off that is characteristic of prioritarianism.

This chapter explains what it means for a view of morality to be “pluralist” and “Humean.” It also describes Berys Gaut’s distinction between prioritarianism and pluralism, and shows how Gaut elucidates a crucially important difference between two ways of conceiving of moral justification from the first-personal, deliberative perspective.

Like many of his English and Scottish predecessors, Adam Smith resolutely rejects moral monism, resoundingly affirming the existence of a multiplicity of different ultimate moral ends. Smith is less clear, however, about the possibility of those ends coming into conflict in ways that do not admit of principled adjudication. Sometimes, Smith makes comments that could be taken to suggest that justice always has moral priority over all other moral ends; other times, he makes comments that could be taken to suggest that ultimately all moral ends serve the single purpose of promoting the happiness of humanity. This chapter argues, however, that Smith’s position on the limitations of moral rules and the deepest aspects of his account of moral judgment leads him to a pluralist position, according to which different ultimate ends can come into conflict with each other and there exist no invariable ordering principles for adjudicating that conflict.

In this chapter, the chapter defends a social obligation to develop and provide access to biopredictive technologies through an appeal to prioritarian and egalitarian concern for the worse off. The chapter highlights theories of justice that argue that society gains more moral value from benefiting the worse off. The chapter suggests that biomarkers reveal a way of being worse off; that benefiting the worse off requires having accurate information on who is worse off; that there is some obligation on the part of institutions that gather that information in order to morally distribute resources; that the types of information institutions currently gather and weigh to determine who is worse off are not sufficiently different from bioprediction to justify the exclusion of biomarkers in this determination; and that there is therefore some obligation on the part of institutions to develop and/or use biomarkers.