David Estlund

Economic equality can easily seem to depend on participants caring more for impartial values such as distributive justice than they are morally required to do. A liberal morality in which partial concerns for the interests of oneself or loved ones are given some scope might seem to permit people to refrain from doing what is impartially best unless they are compensated. The compensation would cancel the prerogative, but would often produce inequality, since the compensated costs are not just the agent's but often others she is close to or cares about. If, instead of reducing the agent's burden with compensation, society enhances the impartial value of the proposed work, her option to refrain might still be cancelled, but this time without producing any inequality. This idea of ‘leveraged enhancement’ has important normative consequences both for personal morality and for the design of social institutions with an eye to distributive justice.

Political equality is in tension with political quality, and quality has recently been neglected. My thesis is that proper attention to the quality of democratic procedures and their outcomes requires that we accept substantive inequalities of political input in the interest of increasing input overall. Mainly, I hope to refute political egalitarianism, the view that justice or legitimacy requires substantive political equality, specifically equal availability of power or influence over collective choices that have legal force. I hope to show that political egalitarianism exaggerates individual rights in the conduct of political procedures, and neglects the substantive justice of the decisions made through those procedures. Some unequal distributions of influence may better promote just decisions, and without reliance on any invidious comparisons such as the relative wisdom of the wealthy or the educated

Gerald MacCallum taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin from 1961 until 1977. The stroke he suffered in that year prevented him from further teaching. He continued to write, even through the crippling effects of a second stroke, until his death in 1987. His final project was the Prentice Hall Foundations in Philosophy book, Political Philosophy. The present collection brings together papers, published and unpublished, spanning his writing career. I hope in this short space to convey some bigger, largely tacit themes underlying MacCallum’s penetrating but humble attention to detail and distinctions.