Two kinds of priority
II. Broad prioritarianism
We have seen that narrow prioritarianism is a complete view in distributive justice. How-ever, it needs not necessarily be understood as prioritarianism per se. For other views in distributive justice, it is common to find that there is a core idea that can be spelled-out in multiple ways. For instance there are various options to spell out the idea of maximiz-ing utility (utilitarianism), acknowledge the importance of thresholds (sufficientarian-ism), or promote an equal distribution of something (the core of egalitarianism).27 For prioritarianism, it seems much harder to pin down the core idea.
26 The claim in this categorical formulation assumes infinitely divisible goods. For finitely divisi-ble goods, there may be cases in which NP calls to distribute equal benefits to differently well-off individuals.
27 See Hirose 2015 on the core idea of egalitarianism; Shields 2012 for sufficientarianism, and Driver 2014 for utilitarianism.
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To start with, it may be helpful to go back to Parfit's original Lindley Lectures, where the view was introduced to distributive justice. Parfit's initial idea is that benefit-ting people matters more, the worse off these people are. Parfit uses a case brought up by Thomas Nagel to illustrate the basic idea.28 Imagine a family with two children. The first child is healthy and happy, while the second child suffers from a painful handicap.
Now, the family faces the choice between moving to the city or a suburb. This has dif-ferent effects on the overall well-being of the family’s two children. In the city, the sec-ond child receives better medical treatment. In the suburb, the first child flourishes more. The children's overall well-being may thus be illustrated as follows.29
The first child The second child
Move to the city: 20 10
Move to the suburb: 25 9
Both Nagel and Parfit emphasize that we have the intuition that the second child should have priority under these circumstance, even though this may not maximize total well-being. To determine the moral value of benefits or burdens, we should not only look at their size. The overall well-being of a person also matters in a sense that those with lower well-being matter more.
With the help of some considerations from the last section, it may thus be possi-ble to pin down the core idea more precisely. Prioritarianism in a broader sense (BP) takes a stance on the weighting aspect in distributive justice. It rejects the claim that benefits to everyone weigh the same. Rather, whatever the currency and whatever the
28 Nagel 1979, pp. 123–124.
29 Parfit 2000, p. 83. Nagel does not use any figures but makes the same point narratively.
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mode is, BP argues that those who are worse off need have some kind of priority vis-à-vis the better off.
Broad Prioritarianism (BP): A distribution is just only if it benefits people
more the worse off these people are.
As Parfit himself observes, this is by itself not a complete view of justice, but explicates an intuition.30 As argued by Roger Crisp and much in line with the discussion in the pre-vious section, the intuition may be either spelled out in weighted or absolute priority:31
The Absolute Priority View: when benefiting others, the worst-off individual (or individuals) is (or are) to be given absolute priority over the better off.
[…] The Weighted Priority View: benefiting people matters more the worse off those people are, the more of those people there are, and the greater the benefits in question.
On absolute priority, the second child has priority simply because it is worse off. Even if the benefits at stake for the first child were much higher, the second child would continue to enjoy priority, as long as it remains worse off. Under weighted priority benefitting the worse off child need not be decisive—rather, it is a question of weighting. The burdens of the worse off child are given larger weight but this weight may not be great enough to outweigh the greater benefits by the better off child. It depends on the numbers at stake.
The prioritarian intuition does not commit BP to either the weighted or absolute understanding. What BP must be minimally saying, however, is that there are some cir-cumstances in which a worse-off person receives greater weight than a better off person.
If there is a view that does not give greater weight to a worse-off individual under any
30 Parfit 2000, pp. 86;101.
31 Crisp 2003, p. 752.
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circumstances, this view should not be called prioritarian. Further, benefits to a better-off person should never receive larger weights than benefits to worse better-off a person. For instance, it would be strange to call a view prioritarian which allows for such judgment in a case like the two children case (even if, under different circumstances, it gave prior-ity to the worse off). Note, however, that this does not mean that benefits for the better off can never outweigh benefits for the worse off—under weighted priority, this is pos-sible, under absolute priority not.
Thus, we may more precisely characterize broad prioritarianism (BP) as fol-lows:
Broad Prioritarianism (BP): A distribution is just if it (a) puts greater weight
on the well-being of the worse off under some circumstances and (b) puts greater weight on the well-being of the better off under no circumstances.
BP is not a complete view because it only concerns weighting. Unlike NP, it thus only specifies a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for just distributions.