On Inequality: A Critical Review (original) (raw)

Egalitarian arguments have been conquering the central focus of many social sciences related theories and works in recent decades. Different theories or practices propose or practice different egalitarian methods or approaches in varying degrees based on dissimilar ways of understanding the socioeconomic and political causes for inequalities among individuals or groups. Harry G. Frankfurt's book On Inequality is one such attempt to understand the arguments and issues that are intricate in egalitarianism, especially economic egalitarianism. This paper is an attempt to critically review the arguments presented in this work. While justification for egalitarian arguments are found in all most all works, it is difficult to find a reasonable work that justifies the existing inequalities. The work cannot be said to be justifying inequalities in a blatant manner, but it more or less ends up defending the prevalence of inequalities as an issue that is not of morally concerning, and refutes economic egalitarianism by meticulously pointing to the shortcomings in egalitarian arguments. This paper tries to critically evaluate the arguments presented by Frankfurt by looking at a few central points that try to convince us that egalitarian arguments do not have any inherent moral grounds, especially economic egalitarianism, and that redistribution attempts in any degree, should be restricted to addressing economic-sufficiency of the poorer sections, but not to give them a free ride on the labor of the well-off/working sections. Endeavors to draw a line between what is economically-sufficient for a poor person to survive and what constitutes the extra advantages that is a result of egalitarian distribution of income and wealth at the cost of labor of others or general society at large, forms the core arguments of this paper.