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Reply to Lippert-Rasmussen On the Paradox of the Baseline

Choice-egalitarianism (CE) is, broadly, a version of egalitarianism that gives to free choice a pivotal role in justifying any inequality. In CE, we assume that everyone should receive the baseline of equality unless not receiving it is justifi ed through his or her free choice. Unlike previous egalitarian positions, CE seemed to take proper account of the role of choice and responsibility in moral justifi cation so that, for example, if a person requires more social resources because he freely makes himself dependent upon an unequal share of such resources, others are not required to fi nance them. CE also seemed more or less compatible with a market economy and a society enabling individual self-development through open and diverse choices, as long as inequalities that could not have been avoided through choice are compensated for. In my ‘Choice-egalitarianism and the Paradox of the Baseline’ (Smilansky 2003) I argued that once we (a) view the conceptual structure of CE through the prism of the useful concept of the moral baseline, and (b) notice the position of those who have in certain central respects no effective choice in a CE order, we would see that choice-egalitarianism is morally dubious and pragmatically impossible. In outline, in a CE order those who could not effectively produce that which others would be willing to pay for, the non-effectives (or NEs), would be indexed to the person earning the highest income in the society (let us call him “Bill Gates”). For otherwise he would be earning a higher income than they were, at no fault of their own. The NEs would be automatically indexed to him irrespective of what they did, while productive people would be almost certain to fall well below this top-baseline even after a lifetime of effort and hard work; moreover, they would be the ones fi nancing those NEs. It turns out that, according to CE, NEs ought to get such a high baseline that giving this to them would be implausible in itself, and grossly problematic concerning the relative condition of the effectives.