  As stated, the leveling down objection invites the reply by the egalitarian that the situation after leveling down is indeed in one respect better than the situation previously obtaining: after all, we now have greater equality or a closer approximation to a condition of equality. We may have a standoff of conflicting moral intuitions. Those who doubt that equality is non-instrumentally valuable offer this diagnosis. When we envisage a more equal world, we tend to think of changes that make some people better off—those who before got the short end of the stick now are made better off so that equality across persons is approached. We also tend to envisage situations in which those who are worse off than others are badly off in non-comparative terms. In this way we tend to run together (1) people being more equal and (2) the worse off (who are likely badly off) becoming better off. By a halo effect, the goodness of 2 appears to shine on 1. Once we see clearly that having equality and making gains toward equality need have nothing to do with 2, we see that we had all along we had been misjudging the value of 1, and so our considered judgment should be that it is not the case that equality of any sort is non-instrumentally valuable (Parfit 1991, Temkin 1993, and Holtug 2010, chapter 7).