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Utilitarian Equality And Equality

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What is equality? If one man in a room has five dollars and another man in the same room has fifty dollars are we supposed to hold a gun to the temple of the man with fifty dollars in order to force him into giving the man with five dollars some of his wealth? This is type of consequentialist or utilitarian equality of outcome that was supported by some Socialist political economists of the nineteenth and twentieth century such as Marx and Engels who would dare to go even farther in advocating for the abolition and confiscation of property on top of a heavy graduated income tax (Marx 18). Other theorists from the Enlightenment that were more liberally inclined such as Adam Smith and John Locke advocated for a more deontologist framework where some would consider equal opportunity takes precedent. This can most notably be seen through Smith when he called for an exact administration of justice, and the creation and maintenance of public institutions that would be advantageous for society as a whole (Smith Lecture). In other words, a just infrastructure that would be just for all men, (women still did not possess the same rights as men at this time) in which they hoped gave citizens an equal shot at the market and life. Bakunin, on the other hand, had similar views as Smith in regards to equality but still maintained collectivist undertones in his writings. Bakunin believed that freedom should be the basis of equality and that “freedom of each is therefore realizable only in

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