No abstract

Many recent political philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that choice and responsibility can be incorporated into the framework of an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. This article argues, however, that the project of developing a responsibility-based conception of egalitarian justice is misconceived. The project represents an attempt to defuse conservative criticism of the welfare state and of egalitarian liberalism more generally. But by mimicking the conservative’s emphasis on choice and responsibility, advocates of responsibility-based egalitarianism unwittingly inherit the conservative’s unsustainable justificatory ambitions, unattractive moralism, and questionable metaphysical commitments. More importantly, they misrepresent the nature of our concern with equality as a value.

The term ‘consequentialism’ refers to a class of moral theories that rank states of affairs from an impersonal standpoint and require agents to produce the best states of affairs they can. Many philosophers have criticized and rejected consequentialist theories, but Scheffler wishes to reconsider the rejection of consequentialism. He begins by discussing two objections to consequentialism, one having to do with the integrity of agents and the other with distributive justice. From there, he outlines a hybrid moral theory that avoids these two objections. Scheffler's hybrid theory agrees with consequentialism in so far as it always permits agents to produce the best states of affairs, but it departs from consequentialism by including an ‘agent‐centred prerogative’, allowing each agent to assign greater weight to his own interests than to those of others. Scheffler argues that this prerogative rests on a principled rationale—namely, that it is a rational strategy for taking into account the independence of the personal point of view. But this rationale does not support ‘agent‐centred restrictions’—norms that sometimes forbid agents from doing what would have the best outcome overall. Scheffler searches for, but does not find, a separate rationale for agent‐centred restrictions.

How do we come to have responsibilities to some people that we do not have to others? In our everyday lives, many different kinds of considerations are invoked to explain these "special" responsibilities. Often we cite some kind of interaction that we have had with the person to whom we bear the responsibility. Perhaps we made this person a promise, or entered into an agreement with him. Or perhaps we feel indebted to him because of something he once did for us. Or, again, perhaps we once harmed him in some way, and as a result we feel a responsibility to make reparation to him. In all of these cases, there is either something we have done or something the "beneficiary" of the responsibility has done that is cited as the source of that responsibility.Not all of our explanations take this form, however. Sometimes we account for special responsibilities not by citing any specific interaction between us and the beneficiary, but rather by citing the nature of our relationship to that person. We have special duties to a person, we may say, because she is our sister, or our friend, or our neighbor. Many different types of relationship are invoked in this way. Perhaps the person is not a relative but a colleague, not a friend but a teammate, not a neighbor but a client. Sometimes the relationship may consist only in the fact that we are both members of a certain kind of group. We may This is a much-revised version of the paper that I delivered at the Eleventh Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter in December 1995. Versions of the paper were also presented to the NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory; the Columbia Legal Theory Workshop; philosophy department colloquia at Arizona State, Stanford, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan; and my fall 1995 graduate seminar at Berkeley. I am very grateful to all of these audiences for extremely helpful discussion. Special thanks also to Yael Tamir, who was my commentator in Jerusalem, and to Christopher Kutz, JeffMcMahan, Daniel Statrnan, Wai-hung Wong, and a reader for Philosophy C Public Affairs for providing me with valuable written comments.

Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a “collective afterlife” in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising—indeed astonishing—role in our lives. In certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so. By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths, despite the terror it inspires, does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. This conclusion complicates widespread assumptions about human egoism and individualism. And it has striking implications for the way we think about climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other urgent threats to humanity’s survival. Scheffler adds that, although we are not unreasonable to fear death, personal immortality, like the imminent extinction of humanity, would also undermine our confidence in the values we hold dear. His arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and that others should live. Scheffler’s position is discussed with insight and imagination by four distinguished commentators—Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf—and Scheffler adds a final reply.