Does Making the Better-Off Worse Improve Equality?

Suppose the average wait for medical care is one week in one district and four weeks in another. If services in the first district are reduced until everyone waits four weeks, the gap disappears, but nobody receives care sooner. This is the levelling-down objection to some views of equality: if only the better-off are made worse off and no one benefits, has greater equality really made the outcome better?

Derek Parfit used questions of this kind to distinguish equality from priority. Equality attends to gaps between people. The priority view holds that an equal benefit matters more when it goes to someone who is worse off. It therefore supports shortening the second district’s wait, but not slowing the first merely to tidy the numbers.

The objection does not show that every removal of an advantage is wrong. If some citizens have two votes while others have one, withdrawing the extra votes costs the advantaged group power but also removes an unequal political relationship. That is not pure levelling down in which nobody benefits. Goods, social standing and domination cannot be collapsed into one metric.

My judgement is that a smaller gap alone does not prove that justice has improved. We must still ask whether welfare, opportunity, power or status is being equalised, whether those worse off actually benefit, and whether a relation of domination has been removed. Where possible, we should level up or give priority to those worse off, rather than using losses to make an indicator look better.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism/
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9329.00041