ABSTRACT
According to prioritarianism, an influential theory of distributive justice, we have a stronger (non-egalitarian) reason to benefit people the worse off these people are (Parfit 2012PARFIT, D. "Another Defense of the Priority View". Utilitas, Vol. 24, pp. 399-440, 2012.). Many authors have adopted a consequentialist version of prioritarianism. On this account, we have a consequentialist reason to benefit the worse off because the state of affairs where the worse off gains a given amount of utility is more valuable than the state of affairs where the better off gains roughly the same amount of utility. In this paper, we argue that the consequentialist approach to prioritarianism is problematic. However, it doesn't follow that the prioritarian doctrine per se is groundless. We then suggest that we can make sense of prioritarianism by appeal to a contractualist approach.
Keywords
Prioritarianism; Consequentialism; Contractualism; Distributive Justice