John Passmore Lecture 2008

Many people are suspicious of egalitarians and the implications of their view. They believe that egalitarians are committed to the 'Levelling Down Objection', which supposedly entails that it would be better to take out the eyes of the sighted, if this were the only way of promoting equality between the sighted and the blind. In this talk, Professor Temkin will distinguish different kinds of egalitarianism, and illuminate one particular version called Equality as Comparative Fairness. He will defend this version of egalitarianism against several rival positions, as well as the Levelling Down Objection. In addition, he will present several examples intended to show that although equality is not all that matters, we cannot simply dispense with the ideal of equality if we want to do full justice to the moral beliefs that many of us hold dear.

Larry S. Temkin is Professor II of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He graduated number one with a B.A.-Honors Degree from the University of Wisconsin/Madison and earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton. He also studied at Oxford University. Specialising in ethics and political philosophy, Temkin is the author of Inequality, (Oxford University Press, 1993), as well as many articles. He has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and been a Visiting Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, All Souls College Oxford University, and the National Institutes of Health. Temkin is currently Visiting Scholar at The Australian National University, where he is working on a book, tentatively titled, Rethinking the Good, Moral Ideals, and the Nature of Practical Reasoning.