This "classic (marginal) utilitarian defence of equality" is precisely
the invideous "comparison" that the mathematically obsessed wunderkinder
of the 1930s (e.g. Bergson, Samuelson) banished from the social welfare
function and replaced with Pareto optimality as the "ethical test".
There is a comic "Mr. and Mrs. Vinegar" aspect to the series of
substitutions that lead from an aversion to class analysis to the idea
of "distributional justice" then to the notion that economic expansion
will help the poor without taking from the rich and ultimately back to
the social Darwinist apologetics of blaming the victim. Mr. and Mrs.
Vinegar is a nursery tale about a foolish man who buys a cow but then
trades his cow for a bagpipe, then trades the bagpipe for a pair of
gloves, trades the gloves for a stick and finally throws the stick at a
bird who is laughing at him for his foolishness.
Michael Perelman quoted,
> http://www.qut.edu.au/arts/human/ethics/conf/flat.htm
>
> A relatively large number of references to distributional issues can be found
> in Wicksteed’s
> ‘non-economic’ works in this later period. It is of some interest to record,
> for example, Wicksteed’s
> views of the distribution of income at about the time of the publication of An
> essay on the co-ordination
> of the laws of distribution in 1894. In the following year, Wicksteed in his
> short paper ‘The advent of the
> people’ provides support for a more equal distribution of wealth. In so doing
> he presents the classic
> (marginal) utilitarian defence of greater equality:
