I’m not looking for the obvious moral explanation, but the philosophical basis behind that line of thinking. Thanks!
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Rawls Theory of Justice comes to mind as being somewhat relevant. Apologies if i misrepresent anything , it’s a long time since I studied it. I’m not sure my explanation is eli5 though?
Rawls started with a kind of thought experiment – imagine you were going to be born into a society but didn’t know who you would be …. Whether you would be rich or poor, disabled, clever , black or whatever. How would you like that society to be organised in a way that gave you the best chance to fulfil your potential and have a happy life whoever you turned out to be?
I’ve always found that a pretty powerful idea. He thought it meant that the principles you came up with would be fair because you wouldn’t want to be biased towards any particular group.
He claimed that in that position you would want to improve the prospects of the worse off if possible. Because that could be you.
He went on to develop certain principles.
Everyone should have as much liberty as possible as long as it doesn’t infringe on the liberty of others.
Social and economic inequalities should only be accepted if those who are worse off are still better off than they would have been without those inequalities.
And lastly if such ‘beneficial’ inequalities do exist they should not be such that they restrict the worse offs access to political power , to political office.
Now one might ask to what extent in a society like the USA these rules are achieved of broken?
Does the amount of inequality mean that those with the most in some ways impinge on other peoples liberties?
Does the amount of inequality actually still benefit the worse off – they still do better than they would if they were less inequality?
Does the amount of inequality restrict political positions and power to those who are better off?
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