Aliens, Incas and the Shifting Grounds of Equality

In this paper, I consider some objections to telic egalitarianism, which I will refer to as the scope and the groundlessness objections. The first claims that telic egalitarianism has implausibly wide scope, while the second that it is groundless. I first examine a defence of telic egalitarianism from these two objections and then offer alternative responses to them. In his article, ‘Incas and Aliens: the truth in telic egalitarianism’, Shlomi Segall purports to defend telic egalitarianism from these two objections, which he thinks should be treated separately. My response to Segall is motivated by sympathy with his aims as well as concern that the replies don’t fully succeed. In brief, I am going to make two points: first, although I agree with Segall’s conclusion that the wide scope of telic egalitarianism is not counter-intuitive, I think this kind of objection needs to be taken more seriously than he takes it and cannot be separated from the groundlessness objection in the way he proposes to. At the same time, I would suggest that the objection is not an objection against telic egalitarianism specifically and in that sense, it is unfair. Second, I don’t think that Segall succeeds in grounding telic egalitarianism; the most that he does is to offer a justification for deontic egalitarianism and one that restricts the scope of egalitarianism in a way that is in tension with his first set of conclusions. My suggestion is that egalitarians should bite the bullet on both these objections. In other words, they should first accept that egalitarianism has very wide scope and this is a strength rather than a weakness. Second, telic egalitarians must embrace equality as a foundational value for which no further ground can be offered. The groundlessness objection has no real force against telic egalitarianism but it may present a challenge to deontic egalitarianism, which is indeed what egalitarians must focus on. I suggest that an appropriate ground for deontic egalitarianism must be one that supports its wide scope and thus should appeal to some notion of basic equality.