A common ground for resource and welfare egalitarianism

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an interpersonally comparable outcome) and starting points may differ. Both conceptions of egalitarianism are naturally modeled in this context as two allocation rules. The two rules are jointly characterized by the combination of three appealing axioms: priority, solidarity, and composition.