Working Paper Group--Pierre Cloarec's "The Case Against Equality and Priority: a Reply to Huemer"

Pierre Cloarec has asked me to post his paper, "The Case Against Equality and Priority: A Reply to Huemer", for discussion in our Working Paper Group. Since we havent' had one of these in a while, here are the group groundrules:

• The paper is posted over at Dropbox.com. 
• In order to access it, you must email me at [email protected] for the login and password.  Once you have these, just login into dropbox and download the paper.
• Barring unforseen and unfortunate circumstances, our dropbox login and password will be the same for all future working papers.
• The login, password, and working papers themselves are in no circumstance to be distributed to anyone. In order to maintain the integrity of our forum, I alone am authorized to distribute them.
• In order to maintain the safe and supportive integrity of the paper discussion, I will only distribute the login and password to registered members of The Philosophers' Cocoon. 
• As always, any professional philosopher who wants to become a member of the Cocoon is welcome to email me to join. However, you must become a member to participate in the working paper group.
• Finally, here are some ground-rules for the paper discussion (which should simply proceed in the comments section below): 

1. You must have access to -- and presumably have read! -- the paper in order to comment.
2. Comments should aim to be helpful in nature. If you raise an objection, try to suggest potential way(s) of resolving it.  The purpose of this group is to help our friends here at the Cocoon improve their papers, not to show off one's awesome refutation skills.
3. Be a good dude/dude-ette.  Do everything you can to make this a positive experience for the paper presenters.

Here is the abstract to Pierre's paper:

In his “Against Equality and Priority”, Michael Huemer attacks both
egalitarianism and the priority view, on the ground of what he calls his “Pareto
argument”. The outline of the argument is that (1) equality is rejected by the “weak
Pareto principle”, and (2) priority is rejected by the “urepugnant premise”. Yet, the
argument is internally flawed for four distinct reasons: (1) the “weak Pareto
principle” goes beyond what the Pareto criterion actually demands; (2) the
“urepugnant premise” has dubious implications; (3) while Huemer claims to be
comparing three possible “worlds”, his argument actually rests on four such
worlds; and (4) the “better than” relation Huemer builds is not adequately defined,
and cannot be said to be either transitive or intransitive, so that the whole argument
fails to make its point. In conclusion, I argue that Huemer’s argument is externally
flawed as well, for it ignores the actual egalitarian literature and focuses on too
narrow a conception of egalitarianism.

Finally, Pierre has asked that I upload a copy of Huemer's paper to dropbox as well. Let's all help Pierre out! One of our former working group papers ended up being published in Philosophical Quarterly.

Comments

[Pierre Cloarec]

Thanks a lot for making the discussion possible :-)

I hope this piece will be worth the readers’ time.