Shlomi Segall

What's so Bad about Discrimination?

The article argues that discrimination is bad as such when and because it undermines equality of opportunity. It shows, first, that other accounts, such as those concerning intent, efficiency, false representation, prejudice, respect and desert cannot account for the badness of discrimination as such. The inequality of opportunity account, in contrast, captures everything that is bad about discrimination. The article then addresses some counter-examples of practices that are discriminatory without arguably entailing inequality of opportunity, where the notable case is that of segregation. It is further demonstrated that the ‘equality of opportunity’ account successfully handles some of the tricky aspects associated with discrimination, such as those concerning the confinement of discrimination to salient groups, ‘buying off’ discriminatees by means of financial compensation, ‘discrimination’ in the selection of life partners, and the duties of employers.

Unconditional welfare benefits and the principle of reciprocity

Stuart White and others claim that providing welfare benefits to citizens who do not, and are not willing to, work breaches the principle of reciprocity. This, they argue, justifies placing a minimum work requirement on welfare recipients. This article seeks to rebut their claim. It begins by rejecting the attempt to ground the work requirement on a civic obligation to work. The article then explores the principle of reciprocity, and argues that the practice of reciprocity depends on the particular conception of distributive justice adopted. An examination of different interpretations of egalitarian justice and their corresponding patterns of reciprocity demonstrates that unconditional welfare benefits are compatible with, and sometimes even warranted by, the principle of reciprocity. Thus, imposing a work requirement on welfare recipients is by no means a mandate of reciprocity.

If you’re a luck egalitarian, how come you read bedtime stories to your children?

We now know that intimate forms of parental partiality, such as bedtime storytelling, may entrench socio‐economic inequalities. Egalitarians will differ on how it is proper to handle the equality‐upsetting effect of intimate parental partiality. Rawlsians propose mitigating the resulting inequalities in nurtured skills (that is, prevent them from translating into social and political advantages later in life). Luck egalitarians, in contrast, propose neutralizing them, e.g. requiring parents not to read bedtime stories if and when this gives the child an undue advantage later in life. It has been suggested (by Andrew Mason) that this implication shows luck egalitarianism to be counterintuitive. The paper responds to that challenge and shows why, once we differentiate between different motivations underlying parental partiality, the luck egalitarian position on bedtime reading is no less plausible than the Rawlsian mitigation approach.

Should the Best Qualified Be Appointed

The paper examines the view that individuals have a claim to the jobs for which they are the best qualified. It seeks to show this view to be groundless, and to offer, instead, a luck egalitarian account of justice in hiring. That account consists of three components: monism, non-meritocracy, and non-discrimination. To demonstrate the coherence of this view, two particular internal conflicts are addressed. First, luck egalitarian monism (the view that jobs are not special) may end up violating the non-discrimination requirement. Second, non-discrimination, it is often suggested, cannot be defined without reference to qualifications, thus violating the non-meritocracy requirement. The paper seeks to address these, as well as other, potential objections, and show that whereas meritocratic accounts are without basis, luck egalitarianism provides a coherent and attractive account of justice in hiring.

Incas And Aliens: The Truth In Telic Egalitarianism

The paper seeks to defend Telic Egalitarianism (TE) by distinguishing two distinct categories into which typical objections to it fall. According to one category of objections (for example, levelling down) TE is groundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad. The other type of objections to TE focuses on its counterintuitive implications: it is forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants, or between us and worse-off aliens from other planets. The paper shows that once we unpack these two types of objections to TE they become much less persuasive.

How Devolution Upsets Distributive Justice

Philippe Van Parijs suggests that in culturally divided societies health care systems (and perhaps other welfare services) should be divided along regional lines. He argues that since members of homogenous societies have relatively similar needs and tastes, it is easier for them to agree on a rather comprehensive distributive scheme. This proposed reform of health care, Van Parijs argues, would be consistent with distributive justice rather than undermine it. Against Van Parijs, the paper demonstrates that this policy of devolution upsets distributive justice. Devolution does so by shifting the pattern of distribution (across communities) from distribution according to need, to distribution of equal shares. The paper also argues that devolution is likely to weaken solidarity across the polity as a whole, which further undermines the attainment of distributive justice. The paper concludes that far from catering to culturally driven differences in medical preferences, distributive justice (in fact) permits disregard of such differences, and warrants enforcing a unitary pattern of consumption of medical goods (and other welfare services) across the citizenry, thus retaining a unified health care (and correspondingly, welfare) system.

In defense of priority (and equality)

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve argue that prioritarianism fails to account for the shift in moral significance in gains to individuals in interpersonal as compared to intrapersonal cases. In this article, I show that the priority view escapes this objection but in a way that deprives it of (some of) its anti-egalitarian stance. Despite Otsuka and Voorhoeve, prioritarianism, rightly understood, provides consistent and attractive recommendations in both single- and multi-person cases. Yet prioritarians, the article goes on to show, cannot do so while availing themselves of the leveling down objection (LDO) to egalitarianism. They may not do so because similarly to egalitarianism, prioritarianism also must reject the principle of personal good. That is, egalitarians and prioritarians may sometime recommend certain actions and outcomes even when these are better for no one. Prioritarians may survive the Otsuka–Voorhoeve critique, but to do so they must abandon their anti-egalitarian stance (or at the very least, the LDO).

Affirmative Action in Health

The ideal of equality of opportunity has long been considered central to health equity. Rawlsians, such as Norman Daniels, speak of health care as a means to (fair) equality of opportunity (Daniels 1985), whereas luck egalitarians have suggested the (diametrically opposed) ideal of equality of opportunity for health (LeGrande 1987, 1991, ch 7; Roemer 1998, ch 8; Segall 2010, ch 7). What unites both egalitarian camps, however, is the view that to achieve substantive (rather than merely formal) equality of opportunity we must often practice affirmative action. And yet, health equity and affirmative action have not (to my knowledge) been linked. My purpose in this paper, then, is to try and elucidate what ‘affirmative action in health’ might mean. I want to do so, in particular, by constructing and evaluating Rawlsian and luck egalitarian accounts of affirmative action. The former I glean from Daniels’s most recent work. He says there that we have a good reason to prioritize the medical needs of those whose ill health is the product of unjust social circumstances. The alternative account of affirmative action in health, with which I want to contrast Daniels’s, speaks of prioritizing the needs of members of groups who ex-ante face worse health prospects (African-Americans, say, and, somewhat more controversially, men).