ABSTRACT
The lifetime equality view has recently been met with the objection that it does not rule out simultaneous inequality: two persons may lead equally good lives on the whole and yet there may at any time be great differences in their level of well-being. This chapter suggests that the examples produced by Dennis McKerlie and Larry Temkin which are intended to persuade us that simultaneous inequality as such is bad really trade on other features. It comments on the revisions of the lifetime equality view, and the additions to this view that McKerlie and Temkin propose, and suggests that they do not work. The chapter suggests that what the examples offered by McKerlie and Temkin point to is that we should abandon equality as our basic way of accounting for egalitarian concern. It discusses problems in the priority view which are similar to the problems of the equality view that initiates the discussion of the lifetime equality view.
