Classical liberalism champions individual freedom and considers a free-market system based on private property rights and a limited government to be paramount for fostering self-determination, human flourishing, and progress. Individual freedom, however, can lead to extensive disparities in wealth, health, education, and opportunities. For this reason, it is opposed by those who favour redistributive measures to achieve and maintain greater material equality.
Drawing on an integrative PPE-approach, a diverse team of researchers will shed new light on the conflicts between liberty and material equality, as well as between individual well-being and material equality. It will do so by examining the price of equality, assessing whether and in what ways it can be traded off against liberty and well-being. By drawing on formal methods and results from economics, especially from social choice theory and decision theory, the project aims to identify the precise ways in which individual freedom is incompatible with a commitment to material equality. Moreover, it develops dynamic models and calibration arguments that examine the conflicts between material equality and well-being. In this way, it advances the long-standing debate in political philosophy and political discourse concerning the role and value of material equality and strengthens the case for a society based on individual freedom and moral equality, understood as the equal moral status of all individuals.
By producing original research in the form of peer-reviewed articles as well as a textbook on liberty, equality and utility, by organising workshops and a summer school, as well as by training graduate students and early career researchers, it seeks to reshape the scholarly debate and highlight the importance of an integrative PPE-approach in understanding the philosophical foundations of individual freedom and free-market societies.
