Equality of What? In contemporary political philosophy, a lot of discussion surrounds the ‘equality of what?’ debate. Any attempt to apply the principle of equality between individuals must first come to terms with what exactly we must be concerned to equalize. In addition, the ‘what’ of equality has a distributional aspect to it i.e., distributional equality. Although the final word on the debate on ‘equality of what?’ is yet to be said, scholars generally identify three metrics of equality: welfare, resources, and capabilities. Equality of Welfare Utilitarians generally argue that the project of distributional equality amounts to the distribution of welfare. ‘Welfare’ here is primarily understood in two ways. According to the classical utilitarian thinking, as espoused by Jeremy Bentham, welfare refers to the happiness which is understood as the net balance of pleasure over pain that the individual experiences. According to this view, in assessing how well-off someone is in life, we should look at how happy he/she is, that is, at the net balance of pleasure over pain in his/her life. In more recent writings, however, welfare is identified with desire or preference-satisfaction; people have more or less welfare, and so have better or worse lives in a fundamental sense, depending on how far they satisfy their desires or their preferences. A society that believes in distributing welfare equally will not worry much about how much resources individuals get, but whether or not these resources are instrumental in securing for each individual a level of satisfaction or happiness (whether in terms of pleasure or preference-fulfillment) equal to everyone else. Under such a scheme, it is imperative that we fulfill everyone’s welfare equally irrespective of the inequality entailed in the distribution of resources. Someone who has a taste for an expensive car or jewellery is to be treated at par with someone who is happy riding a bicycle or owning a lantern. There is a moral issue here, however, that is bound to engage our intuitive notions of fairness. Should our society subsidize people’s expensive tastes? Why should those who are unhappy without expensive cars have more of a claim on social resources than those who are content with bicycles? Or, for that matter, why should a society underwrite a gambler’s professional risks and treat it at par with someone who needs much fewer resources to be trained as a car mechanic? Demands to treat preferences equally can at times be morally worrisome and unsustainable. The ideal of equality of welfare, certainly does not promote the cause of fairness, self- respect, or fraternity. In many ways, the ideal is considered morally objectionable by most liberals and is held to be unattractive as a yardstick for social policy. Equality of Resources The resourcist view of equality or ‘resource egalitarianism’ is most expressly identified with the views of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Eric Rakowski. Equality of resources, Dworkin maintains, holds that a distributional scheme treats people as equals ‘when it distributes or transfers so that no further transfer would leave their shares of the total resources more equal’. But one needs to know when precisely equality of resources is likely to be achieved. Dworkin suggests a two stage process: (i) the ambition-sensitive auction, and (ii) the insurance scheme. Example- Some shipwrecked immigrants washed ashore on a deserted island and everyone has the same natural talents. Huddled together in an island with abundant resources and no native population, they set upon the task of equally dividing the available resources. They elect one amongst them to effect an equal division of resources. The division will follow the auction procedure. In view of the fact that their goals in life may differ, they need to exercise their choices on which resources they need, and hence bid for. To that extent, they are each given 100 clamshells to bid for all the available resources in the island that is up for sale under the aegis of a perfectly competitive market. Each one of them is likely to have different preferences and their preferences will determine what they wish to spend their clamshells on. Someone who wishes to engage in farming will spend a major part of the clamshells on agricultural land, and those others who wish to spend time near the sea will bid for the beaches. And a person, who wishes to set up a dairy farm, will bid for the cattle and some grazing land. In this manner each one will bid for different resources in accordance with one’s ambitions and each will end up with a bundle of resources that he/she would not wish to trade away with someone else’s. The division, so effected by the purchase of a different but equal bundle of resources in the auction, meets the ‘envy test’, which implies that ‘no division of resources is an equal division if, once the division is complete, any immigrant would prefer someone else’s bundle of resources to his own bundle.’ It can be said that if the ‘envy test’ is met, then people have been treated with equal consideration and differences between them owing to different bundles of resources are a reflection of their different ambitions. We have just met the requirement of choice in the resource egalitarian conception. However, in the real world it is difficult to imagine that everyone would be similarly endowed in natural assets. We are re-opening an issue that we had assumed to be nonexistent earlier. Will the envy test succeed if it is assumed that people were differently endowed? Suppose some of them are physically challenged and are born with natural handicaps, say, without eyesight. Now, in the auction scheme where all of them enjoy equal ability to bid for equal bundles of resources, no two persons with different natural endowments will find themselves under conditions of equal circumstances. A woman, who is physically challenged, for instance, will have special needs and the resources that she purchases with her 100 clamshells will leave her less well-off than others. She shares the burden of unequal circumstances. Where the more fortunate than her make more meaningful choices with their resources, a disproportionate amount of her resources will be spent in meeting her special needs. This is not fair considering that her handicap was involuntarily acquired. How do we then meet the envy test? One way out would be to compensate for her natural disadvantage from the common pool of resources before they start the auction process. In order to be fair to her, they may be required to design a distributional plan that offsets her brute luck before giving her a fair go at the auction. The plan is simple: we need to be both endowment insensitive and ambition-sensitive. This is another way of acknowledging, as Dworkin suggests, that people’s fates in any distributional scheme is as much determined by their choices as by their circumstances. Hence, although the auction takes care of people’s choices, compensating people—or, better still, securing insurance for them against brute luck—are morally required. However, the matter is not as simple as it may first seem. One cannot simply concede that we compensate all natural disadvantages of the unlucky. Some disadvantages cannot just be compensated, and some need not be a cause of great concern. And in cases where compensation is due we can only partially equalize unequal circumstances—not wholly—no matter how much we compensate. We need to strike a balance somewhere between being fair to people’s choices and taking moral responsibility for their disadvantages. An ambition-sensitive auction needs to be balanced by an insurance scheme that takes care of natural, undeserved inequalities. Before the auction can take place, all of them may be required to put aside say, 25 or 30 clamshells to meet the obligations towards the disadvantaged and then bid for the available resources. A central objective of Dworkin’s proposal is to invite us to see the parallels between what we commit ourselves to in an ideal setting and what the transposed implications are to the non-ideal, real world. A rough parallel of the insurance scheme in the real world is the practice of progressive taxation. Taxing the rich, proportionately more than the poor enables the state to secure welfare for the disadvantaged. Therefore a resourcist conception of equality lays emphasis on the centrality of state responsibility towards remedying unequal circumstances among people. Equality of Capabilities The economist Amartya Sen pioneers the idea that distributional equality should concern itself with equalizing people’s capabilities, instead of emphasizing on resources or incomes. We should be able to, Sen argues, focus on the real freedoms that people enjoy such as being able to read, being healthy, having self-respect, being politically active, being able to take part in the life of the community, and so on. The proper focus should be on what people are able to be and do, that is on their functions, and not on how much resource is allocated to them. Resources only secure for us what makes us happy, lead valuable lives, and are therefore, to be considered as means of well-being. In contrast to the resource approach, Sen proposes the notion of well-being understood in terms of function. Reading is a function vital to leading a valuable life. However, Sen does not argue that social policy should be concerned with function. Social policy, according to Sen, should instead focus on capabilities. A capability is the ability to achieve a certain sort of function. For example, literacy is a capability, while reading is a function. In a society where people are illiterate, a state should actively promote people’s ability to read, i.e. literacy. Whereas a resource egalitarian may insist that resources such as books and educational services may be provided for in regions that are deficient in literacy, the capability advocate would argue that more than a provision of external means what matters is the capability—an internal ability—of the target population to read and write. This way of addressing the problem of inequality is indeed a novel one. The novelty of the capability approach is further brought home by Sen’s observation that a proper analysis of inequality needs to go hand-in-hand with facts of human diversity. We are, Sen argues, ‘deeply diverse in our internal characteristics (such as age, gender, general abilities, particular talents, proneness to illnesses and so on) as well as in external circumstances (such as ownership of assets, social backgrounds, environmental predicaments, and so on).’ To take one example of internal characteristics (gender) made worse in the presence of some adverse external factors (discrimination and patriarchal institutions), Sen points to the mortality differential between males and females, especially among rural families in Asia and Africa. If other social characteristics, such as identity and social disadvantage are factored in, our understanding of inequality deepens. Hence, it will be plausible to maintain, for instance, that beyond the simplistic account of gender inequality, most Dalit women are worse off than other women in terms of high mortality. However, the buck may not stop here. It will be a real test to determine further whether Dalit women of Delhi, for example, fare as badly as say, widows from upper-caste rural Rajasthan. Some would argue, and with good reasons, that the latter—due to rigid external constraints—are probably worse off than the former. We need to be sensitive to such differences, and not be misled by appearances. Since many characteristics can impinge on people’s functioning, it is essential that policy makers must amass as much information as possible before they design suitable policies to equalize people’s capabilities. Social policy must be attuned to facts of human diversity. A simple minded approach (for example, of equalizing incomes) towards correcting complex modes of inequality will simply not do.