p16

Utilitarianism, egalitarianism and absolute prioritarianism are all interested in assessing the overall goodness of a distribution. Utilitarianism and absolute prioritarianism agree that only one attribute intrinsically matters to this evaluation – the moral value of each individual’s well-being – but they disagree about how to assess it: for the utilitarian, how morally valuable it is that a particular individual has a particular level of well-being is identical to how good that level is for her (its utility), and for the absolute prioritarian, these are positively related but not identical.Footnote 15 Thus, utilitarians and absolute prioritarians agree about the attribute question and disagree about the assessment question. (Their disagreement with each other is like that within the Olympic committee.) Egalitarians, by contrast, hold that two attributes intrinsically matter to the moral value of a distribution: each individual’s well-being (or the moral value thereof, which is identical to utility) and (in)equality. Thus, utilitarians and egalitarians agree about the assessment question, and disagree about the attribute question. (Their disagreement with each other is like that between the two deans.)

Interestingly enough, though, all three views agree about the weighting question. They all equate the overall value of an attribute with a simple average or simple sum of that attribute. Prioritarians say that the moral value of an individual’s utility is not identical to utility, and they average or sum moral value to get overall goodness; egalitarians say that individual well-being isn’t the only thing that matters to overall goodness, but overall well-being is the average or sum of individual well-being.

By contrast, relative prioritarianism disagrees with all three positions about the weighting question. Like utilitarianism and absolute prioritarianism, it holds that overall goodness is determined by only one attribute, the moral value of each individual’s well-being; and like utilitarianism and egalitarianism, it holds that the correct measure of this is utility, not some function of utility. But unlike all three theories, relative prioritarianism holds that relatively worse-off individuals get more weight in the evaluation of overall goodness than relatively better-off individuals do: how things go for the former is more important than how things go for the latter. Thus, utilitarians and relative prioritarians agree about the attribute and assessment question, and disagree about the weighting question. (Their disagreement with each other is like that between the two theories of chain strength.)

It is not that the relative prioritarian starts with average utility and then gives additional weight to those who are relatively worse off. To say this would be to imply that ‘overall’ means simple average or simple sum. On the contrary, the claim that ‘overall’ should be analyzed as ‘simple average’ or ‘simple sum’ is a substantive view, not a logical equivalence or even a default assumption. (It is not analytic, for example, that the ‘overall’ strength of a chain is the average or sum of its link strengths.) Utilitarianism and relative prioritarianism both rank distributions according to their overall utility – but they make different substantive commitments about what ‘overall’ means.

6. Vindicating individual good and no distributional good
   Relative prioritarianism gives more weight to those who are relatively worse off than to those who are relatively better off. In order to see what this implies about individual and distributional good, it will be helpful to look at some other examples in which instantiations of an attribute are given more weight because of their relative position. It is the basis for a cliché that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.Footnote 16 It is sometimes said that a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. In many Olympic events (e.g. downhill skiing, long jump, pole vault, shot put), one’s time or distance for an event is equal to one’s best time or distance out of a number of trials. In all of these cases, the members of a set of things (links, children, trials) each possess an attribute (strength, happiness level, time or distance), but certain members are given more weight: the members contribute differently to the attribute of the whole, depending on their relative position (weakest, least happy, fastest time or farthest distance).

These are examples in which only the extremum gets any weight at all, but that is simply a limit case of weight based on relative position.Footnote 17 We could instead define a jumper’s overall score to be two-thirds the distance of his best jump plus one-third the distance of his second-best jump: multiple members of the set of jumps contribute something to the overall score, and the weight of each jump depends on how long the other jumps are.

With these facts in mind, I will now show that relative prioritarianism is compatible with individual good and no distributional good.

Let me start by showing that relative prioritarianism is compatible with holding that individual good is independent of relative position (i.e. with individual good). Consider the examples of chain strength, parental happiness and Olympic event score. In these examples, a relative fact determines how a particular link’s strength, a particular child’s happiness, or a particular jump’s distance affects overall strength, happiness and score: how strong, happy or far that entity is relative to other children, jumps or links. But that does not mean that one link’s strength is partially constituted by another link’s strength, one child’s happiness is partially constituted by her sibling’s happiness, or one jump distance is partially constituted by another’s distance. In other words: one can give more weight to an instantiation of an attribute, based on its relative position, without changing the assessment of that attribute.

Similarly, relative prioritarianism holds that the good of the worse-off counts more heavily in the overall good than that of the better-off counts, without holding that the good of each individual is partially constituted by whether she is worse-off or better-off than her fellows. A particular level of well-being has a fixed value no matter whether the person who obtains it is the worst-off person or the best-off person: one’s utility doesn’t go down if someone else enjoys a higher utility level. Rather, how much that person’s utility counts towards the total depends on which relative position he occupies: his utility matters more to the overall value of the distribution when someone else enjoys a higher utility level.

Next I will show that the relative prioritarian thought – that the good of the relatively worse-off counts more – is compatible with holding that distributional or relational facts do not provide an intrinsic source of value (i.e. is compatible with no distributional good).

There are two ways in which an aggregation rule might be sensitive to spread. First, spread can be a separate consideration, to be thought of alongside, and weighed against, facts about the good of individuals. Second, spread can fail to be a separate consideration, but nevertheless it may follow from the way utility is aggregated that of two distributions with the same overall utility, the one that is less spread out in terms of utility is better – it may follow merely as an epiphenomenon of the aggregation rule. Relative prioritarianism takes the latter to be true. (So does absolute prioritarianism: both are ways of saying that less-spread-out utility distributions are better, but not because utility spread is bad in itself.) To return to our analogies: if the cliché is true, then holding fixed the average strength of a chain’s links, the chain whose strengths are less spread-out will be stronger, but not because spread of link strengths is a consideration in overall chain strength; instead, because for a given average, less-spread-out means that the minimum is higher. And similarly for spread in happiness of children or event scores – a mother doesn’t care about how spread out her children’s happiness levels are, and an Olympic committee doesn’t care about how spread out a jumper’s distances are, but averages being equal, less-spread-out happiness levels will be better and more-spread-out distances will be better.Footnote 18

The fact that the utility of the worse-off contributes more to the overall value of the distribution than the utility of the better-off also does not mean that the relative standing of an individual is a separate attribute to be valued, like (in)equality is for the egalitarian. Again, even for a fixed view of which attributes matter and how to assess them, there is a substantive question of how to weight each location of the attribute in determining the whole. In telling us how much weight to give to each person’s utility, relational considerations tell us how locations of intrinsic value should be combined – they do not have intrinsic value.

Thus, relational considerations can partially explain the value of a distribution without either affecting an individual’s well-being or constituting a separate source of value. Instead, they determine how much each individual’s well-being contributes to overall goodness.

To summarize. Relative prioritarianism holds that in terms of individual utility, it does not matter how one ranks relative to others (individual good holds). How individuals rank relative to each other does matter to the overall goodness of a distribution, but not because distributional or relational facts are themselves valuable; instead, relational facts determine how much each individual’s utility contributes to overall good (no distributional good holdsFootnote 19 ). And since relatively worse-off individuals count more heavily in the overall good, less-spread-out distributions are better, when their simple averages are equal (spread aversion holds).

The reader might wonder: is the distinction between valuing distributional facts in themselves and holding that they determine how the actual sources of value combine an important distinction? There are two objections here. First, one might hold that rankings of social distributions are all there is, and so two views which produce the same rankings are ‘the same’ view. Second, and relatedly, one might object to the particular way I’ve been characterizing egalitarianism (as the rejection of no distributional good), and prefer to instead define it by a particular formal principle that I will mention shortly.

One motivation for both of these objections is the realization that both the absolute prioritarian formalism P and relative prioritarianism formalism W can be rewritten as special cases of the egalitarian formalism E: they can be separated into a simple utility average and a remainder (‘penalty for inequality’).Footnote 20 (Simply define the remainder as the difference between the output of a utilitarian aggregation function and the output of the aggregation function in question.) More generally: any two aggregation views can be made to have the same assessment and weighing of a particular attribute, by holding that one of the views cares about an additional attribution as well, as long as that attribute is allowed to be defined in a non-natural way.

Since a ranking of social distributions can result from multiple different formalisms, it appears that rankings are the only ‘real’ thing – the first objection. Furthermore – the second objection – given that P can be seen as a special case of E, some philosophers have been interested in distinguishing prioritarian rankings (rather than prioritarian aggregation rules) from egalitarian rankings. These philosophers have settled on holding that prioritarian rankings are those that are spread averse and obey a principle called strong separability, whereas egalitarian rankings are those that are spread averse and violate strong separability.Footnote 21 Strong separability says that to figure out whether it is better (increases the good more) to increase Ann’s utility by some amount or increase Bob’s utility by some amount, we do not need to look at what Cecil has – or, put another way, whether it is better for Ann and Bob to have some utility amounts or for them to have some different utility amounts has the same answer regardless of what Cecil has.Footnote 22

Let us begin with the first objection: that only rankings, not aggregation rules, are real. Since the relative prioritarian ranking can be derived from a rule that is a combination of a simple average and a penalty for inequality, the objection goes, the distinction between the view that inequality is in itself bad (egalitarianism) and the view that the good in a society is more sensitive to the good of the relatively worse-off (relative prioritarianism) is a distinction without difference.

In reply, it’s true that these views have the same upshots about which social distributions are better than which other social distributions. However, they have different motivations for these upshots, which is important. Arguments in favour of one or another view in distributive ethics do not simply consist in lists of rankings that are self-evidently better or worse than other lists of rankings. They also (and in my opinion more centrally) involve giving a compelling view about what sorts of things are valuable. To say that equality is valuable is to say something different – something that requires different arguments and gives rise to different objections – than to say that overall good is determined more by how good things are for the worse-off than for the better-off.Footnote 23 Those who have been moved to dismiss egalitarianism – and thus the ranking it gives rise to – because they hold that inequality is not intrinsically bad may be willing to accept relative prioritarianism – and thus accept the (identical) ranking it gives rise to.

Let us turn to the second objection: that egalitarianism is (or should be defined as) simply spread aversion plus a denial of strong separability, and so I haven’t introduced a view distinct from egalitarianism. Call the definition of egalitarianism in terms of holding that there is distributional good philosophical egalitarianism, and the definition in terms of denying strong separability formal egalitarianism. My main argument will still be of interest to those who prefer the formal definition. For it shows that it is possible to be a formal egalitarian without being a philosophical egalitarian. In particular, it shows us that there are two different reasons one might reject strong separability, i.e. two different reasons one might hold that what Cecil has matters to whether it is better for Ann and Bob to have some utility amounts or for them to have some different utility amounts. The first reason is the ‘philosophical egalitarian’ reason: what Cecil has partially determines the contribution of Ann’s and Bob’s utility to overall inequality, and inequality is bad. But the second, newly noticed, reason is the relative prioritarian reason: what Cecil has partially determines where Ann and Bob are in the relative ordering, and thus how much weight Ann’s and Bob’s good each get in determining the total good. For example, if Ann is the worst-off and Bob is the best-off, then Ann’s good matters a lot more than Bob’s, but if Ann and Bob are the two worst-off, then while Ann’s good still matters more than Bob’s, it does not matter quite as much more.

We have seen that relative prioritarianism is a coherent option available to those motivated by the prioritarian commitments. In the next section, we will see what there is to recommend relative prioritarianism over absolute prioritarianism.

7. Relative priority vs. absolute priority
   If one is motivated by the prioritarian commitments, what is there to distinguish between absolute and relative prioritarianism? The main reason to choose one of these options is what we think constitutes overall good.

It will be helpful to keep in mind four distinct concepts, which follow from distinctions made above. The prudential value to an individual of being at a certain utility level is just that utility level. The moral value of an individual being at a certain utility level is the value of that individual being at that utility level, from a moral point of view, for example, from the point of view of a morally motivated individual who needs to decide how to divide goods among strangers. The prudential weight of the prudential value associated with an individual’s consequence is how much weight that value gets in determining which distribution is prudentially better for her; under certainty, the prudential weight of the individual’s actual consequence is always 1 (under uncertainty, for an expected utility maximizer, the prudential weight of a consequence is equal to the probability of that consequence). The moral weight of the moral or prudential value associated with an individual’s consequence is how much weight that value gets in determining which distribution is morally better. Using terms from section 5: prudential value is the attribute we aggregate to determine what’s good for an individual, and prudential weight is the weight we give to each instantiation of prudential value; moral value is the attribute we aggregate to determine what’s morally good, and moral weight is the weight we give to each instantiation of moral value.

Aggregative axiology asks: if two distributions differ only in their utility for a single individual (say, Ann gets 110 utils rather than 100), how morally better is the one than the other, and how is this determined? In answering this question, there are two things to be assessed.

First, how morally valuable is it that Ann has 110 rather than 100? Relative prioritarianism, like utilitarianism, says that it is as morally valuable as it is prudentially valuable for Ann (10 units of value). By contrast, absolute prioritarianism says that how morally valuable it is depends on how much prudential good Ann already has (the more prudential good Ann already has, the less morally valuable it is).

Second, how much moral weight do we give to this fact – the fact about how morally valuable it is that Ann has one consequence rather than another – compared with the facts about how morally valuable it is that other individuals have what they have? Absolute prioritarianism, like utilitarianism, says that the moral value of Ann having what she has gets identical moral weight to the moral value of others having what they have. By contrast, relative prioritarianism says that the moral value of Ann having what she has gets less moral weight, the better off she is compared with everyone else. (To stress the point made earlier: this is different from saying that differences in Ann’s utility level have less moral value – getting less weight and having less value are both ways for changes in Ann’s utility to matter less to the overall value of a distribution, but they are different.Footnote 24 )

If we are motivated by the prioritarian commitments and think that incremental increases in Ann’s prudential good become less morally valuable the more she has of it, then we should be absolute prioritarians; but if we are motivated by the prioritarian commitments and think that the value of what Ann has gets less moral weight in the overall distribution the more she has relative to others – that Ann’s well-being is less important to the overall good than the well-being of worse-off individuals – then we should be relative prioritarians.

Why does the relative prioritarian think that the well-being of worse-off individuals is more important (counts more) to the overall good than the well-being of better-off individuals? She thinks that the good of the worse-off better reflects the overall good than the good of the better-off.

For certain Olympic events, we hold that an athlete’s prowess is reflected better by his best distance or time than by his average distance or time; we could instead have decided that his prowess is reflected by an average of his times, but presumably we think that there is some conceptual link between athletic prowess and the best one can achieve, at least in these events. (In the modified example, in which an athlete’s score is two-thirds his best distance plus one-third his second-best distance, we would think there is some conceptual link between athletic prowess and the best one can achieve, and also some conceptual link between athletic prowess and the second-best one can achieve – but that the former link is stronger.) For a chain, there is (assumed to be) a physical link between the strength of the weakest link and the overall integrity of the chain. For a parent’s happiness, we might think there is a causal link between the happiness of the least happy child and the parent’s happiness.

The relative prioritarian holds that there is a conceptual link between the goodness of a society and how its worse-off members fare; there is also a conceptual link between societal goodness and how its better-off members fare, but the conceptual link to the worse-off is stronger. (There is not, or at least not directly, a conceptual link between societal goodness and the average of how its members fare.)

So, the main reason to choose relative prioritarianism over absolute prioritarianism is that one thinks that the former correctly tracks the facts about the overall good and captures the sense in which we should give priority to the worse off. The relative prioritarian makes two separate claims: that moral value should be prudential value, and that the worse-off should get more moral weight than the better-off. And she justifies the latter claim by holding that there is a strong conceptual link between the goodness of a society and the well-being of its worse-off members, stronger than the conceptual link between the goodness of a society and the well-being of its best-off members.

7.1. Problems with absolute prioritarianism
The absolute prioritarian’s claim that moral and prudential value come apart gives rise to three concerns, that do not arise from the relative prioritarian’s claim that moral and prudential weight come apart. (None of these worries is unique to me, but there is some point to gathering them together in the same place and showing that relative prioritarianism doesn’t face them.) The first concern arises in evaluating a single-person case. If moral and prudential value come apart, then it looks like a morally motivated stranger should choose differently on a subject’s behalf than the subject herself would choose, even if the morally motivated stranger is motivated only by concerns involving her well-being.

To make this concrete, assume Ann is the only person in the world, and she has (by definition) equally strong prudential reasons for going from utility 100 to utility 200 as she does for going from utility 200 to 300. Surely a morally motivated stranger – motivated only by what’s good for Ann – should have equally strong moral reasons to help her go from 100 to 200 as he does to help her go from 200 to 300; but absolute prioritarianism says that he has stronger moral reasons in the former case.

This is a worry about conceptual machinery of absolute prioritarianism: we must accept something counterintuitive about the strength of our reasons for helping others, versus the strength of their reasons for them helping themselves. But it also gives rise to a potential inconsistency, if we hold that when evaluating distributions under risk, we should first determine the prioritarian value of each distribution and then take risk into account (the ex post view).Footnote 25

According to a common view of rationality, a person’s prudential value under risk is given by the expectation of his utility function; so if, for example, Ann is choosing between 200 utils and the fair-coin flip {HEADS, 100; TAILS, 300}, she should be indifferent; and if a very small amount of utility is added to the coin-flip, she should choose it. But now consider the case in which I am making the choice for Ann, and I am concerned with maximizing moral value. Ex post absolute prioritarians apply the moral value function to utilities of consequences (rather than risky prospects) and thus hold that the moral value of a distribution is its expected moral value. As long as the value function is concave enough, I should choose the sure-thing, even with the ‘sweetener’ added to the coin-flip.Footnote 26 So I should choose against Ann’s self-interest, even when she is the only person affected. (The same point holds if one opts for a different view of rational prudence than expected utility maximization, as long the view doesn’t itself adopt a prioritarian transformation of utilities.)

This problem does not plague ex ante absolute prioritarianism, which applies the moral value function to expected utilities; nor does it plague factualist prioritarianism, which applies the moral value function to the utilities that in fact result from a prospect.Footnote 27 The ex ante view will order Ann’s options as she does, and the factualist view will order Ann’s consequences given what in fact happens as she does. However, they will not assign the same numbers to Ann’s options or consequences as she does: these numbers will be a concave transformation of hers. Thus, while these views won’t posit inconsistent evaluations, they still face the conceptual problem of explaining how prudential and moral value are meaningfully different in the single-person case.

A second worry stems from a technical problem. Versions of this point have been raised by both Broome (Reference Broome1991) and McCarthy (Reference McCarthy2013, Reference McCarthy2015). The basic worry is that in a risk-free framework, the absolute prioritarian can’t distinguish, on the basis of an ordering of distributions, whether a particular distribution is better because of the shape of the utility function or the shape of the moral value function. For example, if we think that the distribution in which both Ann and Bob have a moderately happy life is better than the one in which Ann has a very happy life and Bob has an unhappy life, is this because the utility difference between having a very happy life and having a moderately happy life is smaller than the utility difference between having a moderately happy life and having an unhappy life, or is this because the moral value difference in utility between the former is smaller than that between the latter? Mathematically, the problem is that when goodness is determined by the average or total of v composed with u, we have no way to separately determine v and u from the overall values of distributions or from their ranking – many pairs of v and u will yield the same averages. Thus, without having an independent way to determine utility (independent of which distributions we think are better), there is no way to separate utility and moral value.

I mentioned earlier that we are not just concerned with orderings, but also with the reasons behind them. So simply saying that the utilitarian could reproduce any prioritarian ordering (and vice versa) does not constitute an objection. However, the point goes deeper than this. If we have two explanations for a given ordering, one which holds that moral good and prudential good are the same, and the other which holds that they are different, then we had better have some independent access to prudential good in order to argue for the latter. Without this independent access, one cannot argue against utilitarianism on the grounds that utilitarianism fails to account for inequality-aversion. (Another way to put the point: if one is looking to explain the intuition that utilitarianism fails to account for inequality-aversion, then one must either claim we have independent knowledge of prudential good, or explain the intuition using a theory other than absolute prioritarianism.)

The third worry is related. We need some idea of how prudentially good a consequence is in an absolute sense not only to distinguish between utilitarianism and absolute prioritarianism, but to apply absolute prioritarianism. To apply absolute prioritarianism we need there to be a meaningful zero-utility point.Footnote 28 But, first, it is unclear that such a thing has meaning. Second, even if it does and there is a meaningful point, it seems difficult to determine. Third, even if we could determine it, we already seem to have access to the relevant moral facts that help us intuit which distributions are better than which other ones without doing so – so facts about the zero point do not appear to be the relevant facts in our ordinary moral judgement. Finally, this cuts off one possible response to the second worry, which is to hold that our independent knowledge of prudential good arises via a von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function, since a nVM utility function does not give rise to a meaningful zero-point.

It might be that these worries can be overcome; but ways of overcoming them bring their own costs.Footnote 29 And, importantly, relative prioritarianism does not suffer from any of these worries. It is conceptually easy to distinguish between the relative size of a group and that group’s relative weight in assessing the overall good. Moral value always coincides with prudential value; and in the single-person case, the person’s prudential weight of her own interests will be the same as the moral weight of those interests (i.e. 1). So a morally motivated stranger has just as strong reasons to help an individual person as this person has to help herself, in the single-person case. Furthermore, both ex ante and ex post views will produce an ordering that coincides with the individual’s prudential ordering, and moral values that coincide with prudential values. We can distinguish, from a given ordering of distributions, between the group size, the weight of each group, and the utility of each consequence.Footnote 30 Finally, we only need to know facts about the relative value of consequences.Footnote 31 And it seems that we do know these facts; indeed, these are the facts that appear to drive our intuitions about what to do. As Larry Temkin points out, we are moved by the plight of a typical poor person in the United States because of how she fares relative to others in her society, not because of how well-off she is in an absolute sense, because by historical standards she is actually very well-off (Temkin: Reference Temkin2003 b: 70–71).