Dworkin on Equality of Resources

Ronald Dworkin developed his theory of distributive justice in two long articles published in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1981, "What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare" and "Part 2: Equality of Resources," later collected together with related essays in Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000, Harvard University Press). Dworkin began by rejecting equality of welfare as an adequate egalitarian ideal, arguing that it generates the notorious "expensive tastes" problem: a person who has deliberately cultivated costly preferences, for instance for rare wines or luxury travel, would on a welfare-based metric be entitled to more resources than an otherwise similar person with modest tastes, simply in order to reach an equal level of satisfaction — a result Dworkin considered a fundamental distortion of what equality should require.