This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at W.

That's W. philosophy Bites.com. What should we do, what should governments do to help the most disadvantaged in society?

Well that's obviously a good question and the subject of intense political debate,

but it presumes the answer to a prior question, who are the most disadvantaged?

Professor Jonathan Wolf from University College London has co-written a book about Dis advantage.

Joe, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Very nice to be here.

The topic I want to ask you about is Dis advantage.

Could you give us a bit of a background to how you got interested in disadvantage?

The interest for me, I suppose, goes back to really my very beginnings as a fledgling

undergraduate coming into philosophy with a great sense of excitement.

I'd always been interested in the questions of political philosophy, but after a few years of

reading the academic philosophy that I was being peddled, I sort of had a feeling that somehow I had never quite managed to study the things that I was interested in.

Particularly thinking about issues of equality.

Before I went to university, if someone had asked me whether I was left

wing, I would have said yes of course of course. If they'd said do I believe in equality of income I would

have said well you know what's that got to do with anything?

The type of romantic Marxist anarchist literature I was reading, tried to argue against materialism.

Equal society was one where people went off and did some watercolors and spoke to their friends and turned their back on material life.

Whereas I came into political philosophy and it all seemed to be about distributing goods.

That is there are these material goods and we've got to make sure everyone has an equal amount.

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