Carlos Soto

Michael Otsuka, Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have proposed competing claims egalitarianism and hybrid egalitarianism in their attempts to justify giving priority to the worse off, especially in cases involving risk. However, neither view adequately explains why it matters that some are worse off than others. And combining these accounts within a broader egalitarian theory or modular principle is problematic. I sketch an alternative version of egalitarianism and compare it with competing claims egalitarianism, hybrid egalitarianism and restricted prioritarianism.

In the philosophical literature, prioritarianism is generally given either a teleological or contractualist rendering. Both forms of prioritarianism, I argue, are unsatisfactory, which creates a need for an alternative conception of prioritarianism. I develop a noncontractualist version of deontic prioritarianism that is superior to both teleological and contractualist prioritarianism with respect to grounding the normativity of absolute levels of well-being and explaining our moral thinking about priority to the worse off. Some objections to this view are addressed, and the possibility of a mixed or hybrid view is briefly considered. Noncontractualist deontic prioritarianism might apply to both whole lives and parts of lives, a position that is consistent with a person-centered approach to distributive ethics, I contend. Finally, noncontractualist deontic prioritarianism seems to apply to one-person cases in which there are not competing claims to our aid, but I argue that this result is not an embarrassment for the view.

Some authors view the veil of ignorance as a preferred method for allocating resources because it imposes impartiality by stripping deliberators of knowledge of their personal identity. Using some prominent examples of such reasoning in the health care sector, I will argue for the following claims. First, choice behind a veil of ignorance often fails to provide clear guidance regarding resource allocation. Second, regardless of whether definite results could be derived from the veil, these results do not in themselves have important moral standing. This is partly because the veil does not determine which features are morally relevant for a given distributive problem. Third, even when we have settled the question of what features to count, choice behind a veil of ignorance arguably fails to take persons seriously. Ultimately, we do not need the veil to solve distributive problems, and we have good reason to appeal to some other distributive model