Jamie Whyte asks:

A rich man finds it easier to buy a car than a poor man does; a witty man finds it easier to seduce a woman than a dull man does. If the former is an unfair inequality of power, why isn't the latter?

Part of the answer to this question arises from a distinction (pdf) made by Derek Parfit, between telic and deontic egalitarians. A telic egalitarian believes inequality is bad in itself. A deontic egalitarian, on the other hand, believes inequalities are bad for other reasons - say, because they arise from injustices or have undesirable effects.

This distinction, of course, isn't confined to egalitarians. It's also true of libertarians; you can favour libertarianism for consequentialist reasons or because you think liberty a good in itself.

The deontic egalitarian has obvious answers to Jamie. One is that inequalities of wit have, overall, no adverse consequences. In fact, the opposite: the witty man is good company (Jamie calls him a friend). Inequalities of wealth, on the other hand, are not so benign. They undermine the democratic ideal of equality of respect and perhaps even democracy (pdf) itself. They weaken trust (pdf) and social capital. And they are quite possibly bad for the economy.

Of course, I'd expect Jamie to disagree with these empirical claims. My point is that they provide a big difference between inequalities of wealth and of wit.

Also, deontic egalitarians object to wealth inequalities because, in some (many?) cases they arise through unjust processes such as exploitation and domination or through the capture of the state by the rich. As Joe Stiglitz said, inequality is a policy choice; evidence for this is that different countries have had different trends in it*.

This cannot be said of inequalities of wit. Justice, said Rawls, is a virtue of social institutions, not of nature. Here's Parfit:

Consider, for example, the inequality in our natural endowments. Some of us are born more talented or healthier than others, or arc more fortunate in other ways. If we are deontic egalitarians, we shall not believe that such inequality is in itself bad. We might agree that, if we could distribute talents, it would he unjust or unfair to distribute them unequally. But, except when there are bad effects, we shall see nothing to regret in the inequalities produced by the random shuffling of our genes**.

And injustices of talents often don't have bad effects: it's a good thing that some people are beautiful, intelligent and witty. (I know; I met one once).

Sure, if we lived in a society like Iain M. Banks' Culture in which we could easily change people's appearances we might consider it an injustice that some men look like Olivier Giroud whilst others look like Michael Gove because such an inequality would be remediable. But we don't.

To deontic egalitarians, then, there is no equivalence between the rich man and the witty one. Jamie's analogy fails.

But even telic egalitarians have a reply to him. Here's Larry Temkin:

Equality is not all that matters. Nor is equality the only ideal that would, if exclusively pursued, have terrible implications. The same is true of justice, freedom, utility and virtually every other ideal. (Inequality, p282).

Handicapping the witty man, as in Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, or demanding that his sexual partners pay a fine as Jamie suggests, would be too invasive of liberty. And liberty is also a value. (Egalitarians contend, reasonably I think, that taxation is less a restriction upon freedom than are Vonnegut's interventions).

I am, therefore, unconvinced by Jamie's question.

In this sense, I don't know what to make of his argument. One the one hand, I'm grateful to him for posing the question of why inequality matters thereby making us think. But on the other, as a former professional philosopher he must know all these arguments and that he wouldn't persuade egalitarians. I fear, then, that he was writing not for his opponents but merely preaching to his own side; who does he hope to persuade by saying that "socialists have always proved willing to translate their theoretical absurdities into practical atrocities"? In doing so, he's given us another example of how politics is becoming increasing tribal and polarized, with neither side wishing to properly engage with the other.

* A different form of this argument is that some inequalities are unjust because we would not have consented to them has we had a chance to do so behind a veil of ignorance.

** In fact, UK institutions go further than the deontic egalitarian here. We give free education to all to increase their wit, and the NHS tries to ameliorate inequalities in health and even appearances.