It is natural to wonder what reasons Rawls and Dworkin have offered in defense of these absurd egalitarian claims. The scarcely believable answer is that they have offered none. Dworkin says that “my arguments are constructed against the background of assumptions about what equality requires in principle. . . . My arguments enforce rather than construct a basic design of justice, and that design must find support, if at all, elsewhere than in these arguments.” And Rawls concludes his discussion of the section of his book called “The Basis of Equality” by saying that “of course none of this is literally an argument. I have not set out the premises from which this conclusion follows.” Their very long books certainly present the appearance of giving arguments in defense of their views, but the appearance is deceptive. What they do in great and tedious detail is to work out some of the consequences of assumptions for which they offer no reasons, while they ignore the consequences whose absurdity I have been pointing out.

Dworkin, for instance, offers what he himself calls an egalitarian fantasy concerning the ideal distribution of resources. Such distribution must meet “the envy test,” which asks whether people are satisfied with the resources they have and do not prefer someone else’s resources instead of their own. It should not escape notice how extraordinary it is to make envy the test of ideal distribution. Envy is the vice of resenting the advantages of another person. It is a vice because it tends to lead to action that deprives people of advantages they have earned by legal and moral means. The envy test does not ask whether people are entitled to their advantages; it asks whether those who lack them would like to have them. And of course the answer will be, given the human propensity for envy, that they would like to have them, that they are not satisfied with what they have. Dworkin, counting on this, claims that the ideal distribution would be one that removes this dissatisfaction. It would distribute advantages so evenly that no one could be envious of anyone else’s. Instead of recognizing that envy is wrong, Dworkin elevates it into a moral standard.

(John Kekes, “Assault on a Fine Ideal,” The New Criterion 26 [February 2008]: 25-31, at 27 [ellipsis in original])