  There is another route to the conclusion that equality per se is not morally valuable. Consider again the scenario in which the poorest inhabitants of the earth face grim and miserable conditions of existence and the richest enjoy an enormously better quality of life. The sufficientarian's diagnosis of this situation is that what is bad about this scenario is not the inequality, the gap between rich and poor, but the fact that the poor do not have enough. An alternative diagnosis can most easily be explained by supposing that we have a cardinal interpersonal measure of welfare or well-being. An individual's level of well-being registers how well her life is going as it would be assessed from the standpoint of rational prudence. An individual's level of well-being is the level of benefits or advantages for herself that her life contains. From this perspective, when one speaks of “better off” and “worse off” persons, one is speaking of persons whose lifetime level of well-being is high or low.