Many people, including myself, have the intuition that inequality is bad. In fact, it is so bad that there are circumstances where increasing equality is good even if people are, on average, worse off. If we accept the premises of this blog post, this intuition simply cannot be correct.
Don’t arguments related to the badness of inequality often rely on the existence of envy such that if I envy you then my utility goes down as yours increases.
Don’t arguments related to the badness of inequality often rely on the existence of envy such that if I envy you then my utility goes down as yours increases.
Yes, one way to rescue this is to value equality instrumentally, instead of intrinsically.
(Similarly, I tentatively am an average utilitarian, but I still value population size instrumentally.)