Category: society-and-justice
Type: thought experiment
Associated thinker(s): Ronald Dworkin
Original publication or approximate period: “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources” (1981)
Difficulty: Advanced
Themes: resources, equality, responsibility
Related experiments: The Veil of Ignorance and Original Position; Wilt Chamberlain’s Earnings; The Leveling-Down Objection
Imagine people dividing initially unowned resources. Give each person the same purchasing power and let them bid for different bundles. They have different projects, so an equal distribution need not give everyone identical things. The proposed outcome must satisfy an envy test: no one would prefer another person’s bundle of resources to their own.
The auction treats the cost of a bundle partly through what others would give up to obtain it. The idealization begins a larger account of resource equality, including difficult questions about personal capacities, luck, and responsibility. It is not a claim that one auction solves all injustice.
Can equal starting purchasing power and an envy-free allocation represent fair resource shares while respecting diverse ambitions?
The device distinguishes equality of resources from equality of welfare and from identical possessions. It makes opportunity cost relevant: using a scarce resource for one plan prevents its use for another. It also forces a question about what people can fairly be held responsible for when plans succeed or fail.
Resource-egalitarian response: equal bidding power respects different preferences while making the costs of resource choices visible. Different bundles can be equally fair without producing identical satisfaction.
Luck-sensitive criticism: equal external resources may leave people unequally able to use them because of circumstances they did not choose. Dworkin’s broader account introduces further devices, including hypothetical insurance, rather than ignoring this difficulty.
Institutional criticism: an envy test and ideal auction require information and assumptions about preferences, capacities, and market conditions. A critic can accept equal concern while doubting that this mechanism captures all of its requirements.
The envy test is a comparison of bundles, not a recommendation to cultivate jealousy or inspect emotions. Equal money in an actual unequal society is also not the ideal case’s equal starting position. Later unequal results cannot be assessed responsibly without asking which risks were chosen and which disadvantages were imposed.
Hypothetical insurance extends the account to risks and personal circumstances. Comparing the auction with Rawls’s original position highlights different uses of idealization: one models resource allocation under equal means, the other selection of principles without personal bargaining information.
The retrieved SEP equality entry specifically describes Dworkin’s 1981 auction and envy test. The primary article was not independently read in full here. The setting is a simplified explanatory reconstruction, with limitations of the auction stated rather than hidden.
Research check: 2026-10-30. References above were retrieved for the support described; this is an original educational explanation, not a substitute for the primary texts. Additional speculative comparisons are teaching prompts, not established historical variations.