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Whatsapp Impoverished families live living in disused airplanes in Thailand.

Inequality might just be the defining challenge of our time. However, is it a moral challenge? Veteran philosopher Harry Frankfurt says we're looking in the wrong place, as Joe Gelonesi writes.

US President Barack Obama declared it the defining issue of our times. Economic inequality is back on the social agenda as the gulf appears to be widening between those who have a lot, and those who don't have much.

One of the unfortunate aspects with the concern for inequality is that it diverts people's attention from what it means to have enough.

Social mobility is stuck on the first rung as a new meritocratic aristocracy kicks away the ladder. Economist Thomas Piketty illustrates the full horror in Capital in the Twenty-First Century; his 696-page door-stopper on the rise of the new elite and an economic return to ancient regime conditions. Meanwhile on our screens the mega-rich flaunt their lifestyles, and sport the direct and insidious connection between wealth and power.

So, it's a problem. But what sort of problem is it?

If you believe that growing inequality endangers social cohesion, then clearly it's a social issue. However, could it be more fundamental than that? Is it a moral challenge first and foremost?

Renowned moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt certainly doesn't think so. Frankfurt has been on the case of all the big dilemmas—from free will to love. His last dissertation focussed on the concept of bullshit—a condition of misinformation common to the modern world. His work on the topic earned him a hilarious spot on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

The issue of inequality has been on his radar for three decades, and now in a new slim but to-the-point volume to be published this month, Frankfurt's argument is fully pronounced. At 86 his analytic powers remain forensic.

So, what lifts an issue from being a garden-variety technocratic problem to one suffused with moral content?

Frankfurt sees it this way: 'What makes something morally important is if it has a serious beneficial or harmful effect on human life. If it has a beneficial effect it is morally desirable, if it is harmful then it's seriously undesirable. If it has no particular effect then it's morally neutral and of no particular moral concern.'

Measured against these criteria, Frankfurt feels that the framing of the question is skewiff. The emphasis on inequality in itself is misleading, and the path it takes us on should not end up at morality's door.

'Inequality as such strikes me as morally indifferent; after all you could achieve perfect equality by making everybody poor. That would satisfy the requirements of equality and avoid inequality but it's not a very desirable outcome.'

The argument is one of subtleties. It's not inequality per se that's at the moral heart, but something close by.

'President Obama said at a State of the Union address that the greatest challenge of our time is inequality. He's mistaken. I think the much more challenging issue is poverty,' says Frankfurt. 'What's important is not that people are unequal, but that some are poor and can't lead decent lives.'

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Frankfurt buys into the long-running dispute between the resource absolutists and the resource relativists: poverty versus disparity.

He's fond of an old quip that sums up his position.

'At the beginning of my book I quote a little joke about two men meeting on the street and one says to the other, "How are your children?" and the other man says, "Compared to what?". That's the mistaken use of comparative criteria for an absolute one.'

What does Frankfurt make of the argument that some are very rich because some are very poor?

'It may be so that the rich exploit the poor in the sense that they prevent the poor from improving their positions, but the aspect of inequality that attracts moral attention is that there is a general sense that we are all in favour of equality—liberty, equality, fraternity, all men are created equal and so on—but it really strikes me very vividly that equality is not an important parameter. What is really important is that everybody should have enough.'

For Frankfurt, the harm doesn't stop at it being a simple case of mistaken identity . As he sees it, this pursuit of equality as morally right weakens the seriousness of the actual issue, creating a moral shallowness where there should be moral gravity.

'One of the unfortunate aspects with the concern for inequality is that it diverts people's attention from what it means to have enough. It's easy to see what it means to be unequal, that's merely an arithmetic calculation. What it means to have enough is much more delicate and subtle question— and our failure to pay attention to that question is partly because we're so concerned with equality as if that's what we're after.'

The superficiality that Frankfurt identifies operates at both the personal and political level. In the public arena this automatic thinking truncates development of effective policy, and at the individual level it stops us from considering what we need for our own lives to go well. In short, we shouldn't be looking so hard over into our neighbour's yard.

'It's a question of each person deciding on the basis of his own sense of himself—his own talents, his own ambitions, his own qualities and characteristics—what is necessary given that he is that kind of a person in the circumstances in which he lives. What does it take for him to have enough to pursue a satisfying life under those conditions?'

But as John Donne wrote, no man is an island entire of itself. Nor woman for that matter.

Living to your standards might necessarily mean meeting the standards around you. It might not mean that you have to have the latest smart 32-metre wrap-around TV. However, it might mean those things that grant esteem to the better-off will inevitably affect what you think you need.

Frankfurt is not deaf to that argument.

'I'm happy to admit that to have enough is to have enough to satisfy your sense of equity ... if having less than others in this society means that you do not get the respect necessary for self-respect, then I agree that that is an important consideration. I have no quarrel with the claim that what other people have is important to me. But it's not a matter of more or less, it's more of a matter of a qualitative comparison than a quantitative one.'

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Frankfurt attacks the issue from a number of angles, including via the classic economic law of diminishing marginal utility. One of the arguments put forward for redistribution is that the rich will reach a point of consumption after which a new shiny thing will have less utility, and create less happiness. If redistributed, that good or services will be welcomed by the less well-off. It's the old ice-cream argument: after a certain point consuming the next one will you give you less satisfaction.

Frankfurt sees a fault line in the theory: it might apply to goods and services, but it does not apply to money, for money itself is a special good with properties that can defeat the wearing effect of overconsumption.

'Money is different from many other valuable things in that it's generic in its capacity—it can buy anything, so it isn't limited to any particular item. If you've lost your taste for some kind of item, there is always something else that is valuable and can satisfy you. This generic quality money has gives it a unique status among the things that we value.'

So, don't be so presumptuous to think that that extra dollar a millionaire earns will not satisfy her in a new and undiminished way. Or at the least, don't think you can use it as an argument for redistribution.

Frankfurt isn't shy of taking on the ideas of John Rawls, perhaps the leading thinker of the role of redistributive justice in the liberal capitalist economy. Rawls famously developed the idea of the veil of ignorance: if we know nothing about the status and background of anyone else how would we distribute rights, positions, and resources in our society? Self-interest, Rawls surmised, would be trumped by a more moral outlook. A tendency to equality must surely develop.

For Frankfurt the veil of ignorance is just that—an obfuscation of what people actually need.

'You give them an equal amount if you don't know anything about them. If you do know something about them that enables you to discriminate amongst their needs, their desires, their interests and capacities, then an equal distribution would be inappropriate.'

It is the case, as Frankfurt sees it, that we do know something about those around us, and that is a good thing because we can properly assess what people need. Taking the veil off becomes paramount in the case of absolute poverty.

Yet, Frankfurt is not blind to the insidious down-stream effects of disparate allocation.

'Inequality has several objectionable characteristics. One is if people have excessive affluence and others are impoverished then there is something ugly about that. But also, inequality gives people competitive advantages so that the rich have greater social and political influence than the poor.'

Frankfurt acknowledges that these effects need to be attenuated through appropriate regulatory, legislative, and judicial means, otherwise democracy itself is undermined.

'The emphasis on inequality has a certain rhetorical power; it may facilitate efforts to relieve poverty ... we may motivate people to eliminate poverty by talking about the ugliness of inequality, but that's not a moral consideration. If everyone had enough then the fact that some people had more than others would be of very little interest.'

In a culture where ratcheting up consumer desires is a key driver of economic growth, this end-of-poverty thought experiment presents a most interesting challenge.

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

