112 Yale L.J. 2291 (2003)
Egalitarianism ties people's fortunes together. It takes the good and bad things in people's lives--their blessings and their afflictions--and shares them out, or redistributes them, among their fellows. Where egalitarianism operates, each person's fortunes and misfortunes cease to be just her own and become, to the extent egalitarianism recommends, a part of communal fortunes and misfortunes, shared in by all those who come under egalitarianism's purview. Egalitarian political theories are not the only ones to tie people's fortunes together; feudal theories, for example, do so as well. But egalitarianism differs from these and other political theories in the manner of its tying. Egalitarianism insists that all people's lives are equally important and, accordingly, that no person's fortune may be subordinated to anyone else's.
Egalitarian intuitions call for redistribution that takes from the better-off--the rich, the healthy, and the fulfilled--and gives to the worse-off--the poor, the sick, and the desolate. But these intuitions stand in need of elaboration, and an egalitarian theory answers this need by presenting an articulate account of nonsubordination among persons.
A fully developed conception of nonsubordination must address many practical or applied problems, including many problems that are familiar in the law, and egalitarian political theory has indeed been brought to bear on such problems in legal scholarship. Thus lawyers have, for example, considered egalitarianism's implications for the choice of the tax base, the legal treatment of disabilities, health-care policy, and even the role that cost-benefit analysis should play in administrative practice. But before these and other more specific issues can be approached with any measure of confidence or clarity, an egalitarian theory must address two more general, theoretical questions, and efforts to answer these questions must proceed in a more broadly philosophical vein.
The first question was made famous by Amartya Sen in the title of his 1979 Tanner Lecture Equality of What? This question asks, in G.A. Cohen's words, "What aspect(s) of a person's condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians . . . ?" It suggests that egalitarians search, as Cohen put it, for an equalisandum, a thing whose equal distribution secures nonsubordination. Here it is critical that egalitarianism calls for the nonsubordination of persons, and the equalisandum must be chosen bearing this in mind. The proposal, for example, that everyone should be given an equally long name fails as a conception of egalitarianism because the length of someone's name does not capture what is important about her person, so that equality among name lengths is entirely consistent with subordination among persons.
An egalitarian theory must also answer a second question, the question posed in my title, namely "How Much Redistribution Should There Be?" To do this, an egalitarian theory must develop a conception of nonsubordination that explains how the equalisandum, whatever it is, must be distributed in order for no person's fortune to be subordinated to any other's. Put slightly differently, an egalitarian theory must develop a view of what counts as an equal distribution of the equalisandum. Because the equal distribution will almost certainly not be the distribution produced in the ordinary course of economic and social activity, this means that an egalitarian theory must develop an account of redistribution.
This second question (the question concerning how much redistribution there should be) has been less intensively investigated than the first question (concerning the proper equalisandum). However, the second question is not any less central to egalitarianism (or any less important generally) than the first, and, as my title indicates, it is the question I explore here. I shall develop a view that is implicitly accepted by most egalitarians, namely that nonsubordination requires redistribution to follow moral responsibility, specifically by eliminating luck's differential effects on persons' fortunes while leaving persons fully to bear the consequences of their (morally responsible) choices. I shall consider certain central features of this responsibility-tracking egalitarianism more carefully and completely than others have done, and this will lead me to conclude that the view's dual ambitions are unattainable, so that much of the most prominent philosophical discussion of egalitarianism involves a fundamental mistake. Finally, I shall introduce a new account of egalitarianism based on a new conception of nonsubordination that avoids some of the errors of the responsibility-tracking view.
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