James P. Sterba's From Rationality to Equality summarizes and extends the author's recent work in ethical theory and political philosophy, and also contains responses to critics.1 The book is a continuation of Sterba's abiding aim to put egoism in its place, and its substantive aims are extremely ambitious. It seeks both to rebut egoism in favor of morality and to rebut political libertarianism in favor of egalitarianism, while operating from a putatively neutral argumentative frame. All this is to be accomplished, moreover, in some 220 pages of text.
Sterba's crucial maneuver is to articulate a conception of question-beggingness, to claim that it is a great virtue in an argument to avoid begging the question in this sense, and to present a case against first egoism, and then libertarianism, which is non-question-begging in the relevant sense. He writes, “The principle of non-question-beggingness requires that we do not argue in such...
