Plato is commonly credited with a much more enlightened view concerning the equality of women and their political rights than Aristotle. This is due to the fact that he acknowledges, in the Republic, the possibility that women possess abilities that are equal to those of men and therefore assigns to them the same functions in the state. Plato’s principle of equality is, however, limited to the women of the upper classes in the Republic, and it is, at least in (...) part, a consequence of the separation of the classes. Because these conditions no longer obtain in the “second-best state” designed in the Laws, women are assigned, there, a much inferior role. In the Timaeus, women are treated not only as the weaker but also as the decadent form of humankind in the cycle of births and rebirths. Plato’s views on the worth of women change, if not with time, then with context.Aristotle throughout supports the traditional view on the exclusion of women from politics and public life. He does so because he ascribes to women only a limited form of practical rationality. Though he ascribes to women the status of citizens, he regards them as citizens that stand in need of a permanent rule by their male superiors, in public as well as in the family. Aristotle never questions whether the same kind education would lead to the intellectual equality of men and women. The rigidity of Aristotle’s position in that respect seems to be based on a kind of “conservative naturalism.” He accepts as constituted by nature the social conditions that are observable throughout the world as he knew it. This not only explains his view on the natural inferiority of women, but also his justification of slavery as a natural institution. (shrink)

In Why Not Socialism? G.A. Cohen articulates a version of socialism characterized by two values—equality and community—but, being a value pluralist, Cohen is not sanguine about the practical consistency of those values. This paper deals with the relationship between Cohen's formulations of the values of community and equality. I argue that Cohen faces a dilemma: either community and equality are not even in principle consistent, or else they are conceptually compatible. I argue, moreover, that despite the cost to Cohen's value (...) pluralism of accepting the dilemma's second horn, it carries the felicitous consequence of obviating the contingent conflicts between community and equality about which Cohen is concerned. Finally, I suggest that accepting the second horn—that is, the grounds of compatibility between community and equality—is helpful in resolving a puzzle recently raised by John Roemer about Cohen's picture of socialism. (shrink)

When offering constructions of political values, it is common to generally strive for unity, i.e., to aim at principled definitions and the reduction of normative conflict. In this article, by contrast, I argue that we should aim to construct broad and conflicting concepts of the central liberal democratic values of liberty and equality. Taking my cue from an under-appreciated debate between Ronald Dworkin and Bernard Williams, I suggest that the demand for unity derives its appeal from a juridical model of (...) political value construction, which assumes the unified perspective of public decision-making. But while this model may be apt for constructing institutional rights, the construction of the political values liberty and equality had better operate according to a political model, which focuses on the perspective of citizens that live in a relationship of political opposition. Not only is there no demand for unity from that perspective, but there is a positive demand for political plurality: we need to draw on broad and conflicting concepts of liberty and equality if we are to respect the claims of fellow citizens with whom we have value-based political disagreements. (shrink)

Drawing on 38 in-depth, qualitative interviews, this article explores how people working in the equality sector in England and Wales view and use the current law around sex and gender, and how they imagine law’s future, particularly potential decertification, where the state would withdraw from certifying and regulating a person’s sex/gender. Whilst situated in the bureaucratic strand of the literature, the paper also contributes to wider legal consciousness studies. This literature has generally focused on people’s relationships to law in terms (...) of domination, alienation and game-playing. Drawing on idioms and the language of touch, the paper unpacks the way in which equality actors talked about law not as remote or alienating, but as close and familiar; not as oppressive, but as “precious” and hard-won. Some also regarded law as a place of safety in unsafe times. These proposed ‘attached to law’ and ‘protective of law’ strands of consciousness enrich and extend Ewick and Silbey’s classic ‘before the law’ narrative. The findings are also useful for critical legal and feminist scholarship. Combined with the equality sector’s pragmatic and tactical use of law to problem-solve, this close and protective orientation towards law reproduces its hegemony. The paper concludes by exploring a recurrent refrain that, in relation to decertification, “we’re not there yet” and that gender equality would need to be achieved before decertification would “fly”. (shrink)

In the context of nonstandard analysis, the somewhat vague equality relation of near-equality allows us to relate objects that are indistinguishable but not necessarily equal. This relation appears to enable us to better understand certain paradoxes, such as the paradox of Theseus’s ship, by identifying identity at a time with identity over a short period of time. With this view in mind, I propose and discuss two mathematical models for this paradox.

(2001). Justice and Healthcare: The Right to a Decent Minimum, Not Equality of Opportunity. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 1a-3a.

The benefits of full ectogenesis, that is, the gestation of human fetuses outside the maternal womb, for women ground many contemporary authors’ arguments on the ethical desirability of this practice. In this paper, I present and assess two sets of arguments advanced in favour of ectogenesis: arguments stressing ectogenesis’ equality-promoting potential and arguments stressing its freedom-promoting potential. I argue that although successfully grounding a positive case for ectogenesis, these arguments have limitations in terms of their reach and scope. Concerning their (...) limited reach, I contend that ectogenesis will likely benefit a small subset of women and, arguably, not the group who most need to achieve equality and freedom. Concerning their limited scope, I contend that these defences do not pay sufficient attention to the context in which ectogenesis would be developed and that, as a result, they risk leaving the status quo unchanged. After providing examples of these limitations, I move to my proposal concerning the role of ectogenesis in promoting women’s equality and freedom. This proposal builds on Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s and Selma James’ readings of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’. It maintains that the political perspective and provocation that ectogenesis can advance should be considered and defended. (shrink)

This essay seeks to provide a justification for the ‘egalitarian authority claim’, according to which citizens of democratic states have a moral duty to obey (at least some) democratically made laws because they are the outcome of an egalitarian procedure. It begins by considering two prominent arguments that link democratic authority to a concern for equality. Both are ultimately unsuccessful; but their failures are instructive, and help identify the conditions that a plausible defense of the egalitarian authority claim must meet. (...) The first argument (discussed in Section II, after Section I clarifies what authority and democracy are taken to consist in) appeals to the simple idea that fairness disallows granting ourselves special privileges that we deny to others; and it suggests that fairness thus requires obeying democratic decisions rather than acting on our own judgment of the right policy. I show that this argument fails; and its failure indicates that we must invoke a less formal, more substantive understanding of equality to justify democratic authority. The second argument, recently suggested by Thomas Christiano, does just that. Democratic authority is, on this account, not justified by the formal demand for equal treatment but by the distinctive value of showing public equal respect to our fellow citizens. Such public equal respect requires treating as authoritative the democratic decisions in which citizens had an equal say. This argument does not, however, succeed in its goal either. While it plausibly establishes the value of democratic institutions, it does not provide grounds for a duty to obey democratic decisions (Section III). This essay thus develops an alternative argument, according to which egalitarian procedures have authority because, by obeying them, we can avoid acting on certain considerations that must be excluded from our intrinsically valuable egalitarian relationships. The authority of democratic decisions rests on the egalitarian fact that none of us has more of a say than any other, not on the further fact (crucial to the previous argument) that each of us has a positive say (Sections IV and V). The argument in turn helps us understand the limits of democratic authority: it is constrained not only by a demand for equality, and by considerations of justice, but also by a requirement of mutual concern without which our egalitarian relationships lack their distinctive value (Section VI). (shrink)

Access to education for undocumented migrant children in South Africa remains a significant challenge. While the difficulties related to their inability to access education within the country have been highlighted elsewhere, there remains a lack of clarity on an approach to how this basic human right can be achieved. In this conceptual paper, we draw on the distinction between equality and equity, and describe the various ways in which education has been conceptualised in the South African Constitution – which in (...) part contributes to the existing confusion on education for various groups, including undocumented migrant children. In this paper, we critically reflects on the need to develop an integrated approach for creating a platform that allows all undocumented migrant children access to education in South Africa. We argue that an integrated approach – which entails ways through which access to education can be delivered through the lens of equity – will enhance the right to education for undocumented migrant children in South Africa. We conclude that the South African government must urgently consider this integrated approach to enable access to education for undocumented migrant children, so that they can achieve their full educational potential. (shrink)

This essay explores the relation between democracy and social equality. It critically evaluates the relational egalitarian view that democracy is necessary for full social equality and that democracy is an important constituent of social equality. On such a view, inequalities in power an de facto authority are taken, in certain circumstances, to constitute a form of social inequality. On the basis of a series of cases, I argue that such a view is mistaken, and that political inequalities are, at best, (...) empirically and contingently related to social inequality. I argue that what is primarily wrong with inequalities in power and de facto authority is not that, in certain circumstances, they constitute a form of social inequality, but rather that they can be used to extract greater consideration for those with greater power. (shrink)

“What must be thought,” Jacques Derrida writes in the closing pages of Rogues, “is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision.”1 To certain readers of Derrida, this passage, coming near the end of Rogues, written some two years before he passed away, would mark the fundamental failure of his thought. “What must be thought …”: an (...) exhortation, an ethical injunction, but seemingly also a final plea at the end of a long career that, many…. (shrink)

The thesis of this essay is that equal opportunity (EO) "strictly dominates" (in the game-theoretic sense) reparations. That is, (1) all the ways reparations would make our world more just would also be achieved under EO; (2) EO would make our world more just in ways reparations cannot; and (3) reparations would create injustices which EO would avoid. Further, (4) EO has important practical advantages over reparations. These include economic efficiency, feasibility, and long-term impact. Supporters of reparations should abandon (...) that ideal to support equal opportunity instead. (shrink)

Equality and identity. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 19 (2013) 255-6. (Coauthor: Anthony Ramnauth) Also see https://www.academia.edu/s/a6bf02aaab This article uses ‘equals’ [‘is equal to’] and ‘is’ [‘is identical to’, ‘is one and the same as’] as they are used in ordinary exact English. In a logically perfect language the oxymoron ‘the numbers 3 and 2+1 are the same number’ could not be said. Likewise, ‘the number 3 and the number 2+1 are one number’ is just as bad from a logical (...) point of view. In normal English these two sentences are idiomatically taken to express the true proposition that ‘the number 3 is the number 2+1’. Another idiomatic convention that interferes with clarity about equality and identity occurs in discussion of numbers: it is usual to write ‘3 equals 2+1’ when “3 is 2+1” is meant. When ‘3 equals 2+1’ is written there is a suggestion that 3 is not exactly the same number as 2+1 but that they merely have the same value. This becomes clear when we say that two of the sides of a triangle are equal if the two angles they subtend are equal or have the same measure. -/- Acknowledgements: Robert Barnes, Mark Brown, Jack Foran, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Forest Hansen, David Hitchcock, Spaulding Hoffman, Calvin Jongsma, Justin Legault, Joaquin Miller, Tania Miller, and Wyman Park. -/- ► JOHN CORCORAN AND ANTHONY RAMNAUTH, Equality and identity. Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150, USA E-mail: [email protected] The two halves of one line are equal but not identical [one and the same]. Otherwise the line would have only one half! Every line equals infinitely many other lines, but no line is [identical to] any other line—taking ‘identical’ strictly here and below. Knowing that two lines equaling a third are equal is useful; the condition “two lines equaling a third” often holds. In fact any two sides of an equilateral triangle is equal to the remaining side! But could knowing that two lines being [identical to] a third are identical be useful? The antecedent condition “two things identical to a third” never holds, nor does the consequent condition “two things being identical”. If two things were identical to a third, they would be the third and thus not be two things but only one. The plural predicate ‘are equal’ as in ‘All diameters of a given circle are equal’ is useful and natural. ‘Are identical’ as in ‘All centers of a given circle are identical’ is awkward or worse; it suggests that a circle has multiple centers. Substituting equals for equals [replacing one of two equals by the other] makes sense. Substituting identicals for identicals is empty—a thing is identical only to itself; substituting one thing for itself leaves that thing alone, does nothing. There are as many types of equality as magnitudes: angles, lines, planes, solids, times, etc. Each admits unit magnitudes. And each such equality analyzes as identity of magnitude: two lines are equal [in length] if the one’s length is identical to the other’s. Tarski [1] hardly mentioned equality-identity distinctions (pp. 54-63). His discussion begins: -/- Among the logical concepts […], the concept of IDENTITY or EQUALITY […] has the greatest importance. -/- Not until page 62 is there an equality-identity distinction. His only “notion of equality”, if such it is, is geometrical congruence—having the same size and shape—an equivalence relation not admitting any unit. Does anyone but Tarski ever say ‘this triangle is equal to that’ to mean that the first is congruent to that? What would motivate him to say such a thing? This lecture treats the history and philosophy of equality-identity distinctions. [1] ALFRED TARSKI, Introduction to Logic, Dover, New York, 1995. [This is expanded from the printed abstract.] . (shrink)

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health is the first book to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. It is also the first book to take contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology to task for deeply flawed thinking when they accept the diagnostic system propounded by the DSM, which reifies syndromes into alleged “mental disorders.” Where Thomas Szasz argued that “mental disorders” are myths, Bartlett makes the much (...) more damaging charge that reifying mental disorders involves a provable form of fallacious thinking, producing a variety of epistemological nonsense. /// -/- -/- The author weighs the evidence, and with strict logic, compelling evidence, and careful analysis, challenges the current paradigm of mental health theorists and practitioners. Never has the case against the standard of psychological normality and against the non-scientific creation of “mental disorders” been made with such boldness, multidisciplinary knowledge, solid scholarship, and clarity of language. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental HealthAlthough the need to question psychological normality as a satisfactory standard of good mental health has been staring us in the face for a long time, no one, clinical professional or scholar, has had the courage or the intellectual willingness to face with unflinching honesty the shortcomings and disappointments of psychological normality and to propose that we should look elsewhere for standards of good psychological health. /// -/- -/- Contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology, on the contrary, base their conception of mental health on the standard of psychological normality. This supposition has come to be accepted uncritically and without question, and yet it has become fundamental to current clinical theory and practice, and forms the core of the psychiatric classification system of the DSM, which has become today’s diagnostic authority. /// -/- -/- While touting today’s scientific gold standard of “evidence-based” research, DSM’s authoritative classification of “mental disorders” is itself hardly “evidence-based,” for it is recognized, but seldom emphasized, that the majority of DSM’s “mental disorders” have no known empirical, organic basis. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health takes DSM to task not only for its failure to adhere to today’s evidence-based standard, but for its failure to rein in its highly speculative diagnostic labeling, in accordance with the modern paradigm of rigorous science, which repudiates metaphorical reifications whose alleged validity rests only on the voting preferences of a professional membership. /// -/- -/- The book is a carefully argued critique of the dominant assumption in current psychiatry and clinical psychology that psychological normality is fundamental to mental health and therefore good. In place of this unsatisfactory presumption, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health proposes a positive and constructive revision in our understanding of mental health and of our conception of mental disorders. (shrink)

I argue that the often-heard claim that all serious present-day political philosophers subscribe to the principle of equal respect and concern or to the doctrine of equal moral status or are in some other fundamental sense egalitarians is wrong. Also wrong is the further claim that the usual methods currently used in political philosophy presuppose basic equality. I further argue that liberal egalitarianism itself is wrong. There is no universal duty “of equal respect and concern” towards every (...) person, for one does not owe one’s nice sister and a serial rapist equal respect and concern. There is also no duty of the state to respect all citizens equally, for a state need not be equally concerned about murderous criminals on the one hand and their innocent victims on the other. The potential maneuver of saving liberal egalitarianism by claiming that people have equal rights is unsuccessful. Human beings clearly do not have equal rights, nor are they born with equal rights; and merely having an equality of some rights, for example of “basic” or human ones, would not suffice for egalitarianism. Appeals to “recognition respect” and related concepts are also to no avail. Trying to go back still a step further and to claim that certain rights inequalities or justified discriminatory rules are themselves “grounded” in equal respect and concern at some deeper, norm-generating level (like, for example, the original position or a discourse-ethical principle of justification) is also futile. Finally, I argue that the “This is not what we mean”-strategy of escaping the above arguments reduces egalitarianism to triviality and empty rhetoric. Liberal egalitarianism should be abandoned. (shrink)

In present-day political and moral philosophy the idea that all persons are in some way moral equals is an almost universal premise, with its defenders often claiming that philosophical positions that reject the principle of equal respect and concern do not deserve to be taken seriously. This has led to relatively few attempts to clarify, or indeed justify, 'basic equality' and the principle of equal respect and concern. Such clarification and justification, however, would be direly needed. After all, (...) the ideas, for instance, that Adolf Hitler and Nelson Mandela have equal moral worth, or that a rape victim owes equal respect and concern to both her rapist and to her own caring brother, seem to be utterly implausible. Thus, if someone insists on the truth of such ideas, he or she owes his or her audience an explanation. The authors in this volume - which breaks new ground by engaging egalitarians and anti-egalitarians in a genuine dialogue - attempt to shed light into the dark. They try to clarify the concepts of "basic equality", "equal moral worth","equal respect and concern", "dignity," etc; and they try to justify-or to refute-the resulting clarified doctrines. The volume thus demonstrates that the claim that all persons have equal moral worth, are owed equal concern and respect, or have the same rights is anything but obvious. This finding has not only significant philosophical but also political implications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the theorization of (in)visibility in Honneth, Ranciere, Cavell and Tully. It situates the work of Honneth and Ranciere against the background of Wittgenstein's account of continuous aspect perception and aspect change in order to draw out their accounts of invisibility and the aesthetic character of transitions to visibility. In order to develop a critical standpoint on these theoretical positions, it turns to Cavell's concept of soul-blindness and investigates the form of invisibility through the example of racism (...) as addressed by Gaita, Fanon and Memmi. This analysis provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of Ranciere's and Honneth's approaches and leads to the proposal that Tully's public philosophy provides a more adequate way of addressing the issues of struggle and uptake that are central to the transition from invisibility to visibility. (shrink)

The distinction between ‘relational' and ‘distributive’ equality has come to play an important role in discussions of equality and justice. But the nature of the distinction is not as clear as we might hope. In this regard, Juliana Bidadanure makes an interesting and important proposal: the two views involve differing kinds of temporal concern. The distributive approach, she suggests, is concerned with equality over people’s complete lives (diachronic equality), whereas the relational approach is concerned with egalitarian social relations at each (...) moment in time (synchronic equality). I argue that this suggestion, while insightful, is not entirely satisfactory. Both relational and distributive equality, I demonstrate, have diachronic and synchronic aspects. Nonetheless, they do so in distinctive ways. So, while the diachronic/synchronic distinction does not provide a clean cut between relational and distributive equality, examining the temporal aspects of each approach helps to illuminate their distinctiveness. (shrink)

This thesis is an evaluation of the badness of disability and equality. It argues that disability poses a problem for equality and that, given the new advances in reproductive and gene technologies, egalitarians should strive to give an answer to how we should best reduce the inequality between disabled and non-disabled individuals of future generations. To support the claim that disabilities pose a problem for equality, I argue against the recently proposed Mere Difference View of disability. Firstly, the view is (...) not successful in responding to why, if disabilities are neutral, inflicting disability is still impermissible. Secondly, some intellectual disabilities, for example, do not bring about positive features capable of compensating for the negative features that they also bring about. If some disabilities are bad states of being, some disabled individuals will be worse off than non-disabled individuals other things being equal. Given that disabled individuals are subject to inequality due to their disability, I analyse how able traditional compensatory accounts of egalitarian justice are when it comes to improving this inequality. I conclude that given the existence of intellectual disabilities, traditional compensatory accounts are not fully satisfactory and that egalitarians should look at whether other means, like enhancements and preventive techniques, would do this job better. Paradoxically, techniques that lead to the reduction in the incidence of disabilities make things worse with respect to one new aspect of inequality, namely the concentration of inequality. In scenarios of disability reduction, where there are only a few remaining disabled individuals and a great number of non-disabled individuals, disabled individuals would be worse off than a great number of non-disabled individuals. This situation can potentially also have a negative impact in the wellbeing of the few remaining disabled individuals if the fact that disabled individuals become a very small minority puts less pressure in society to accommodate them. I conclude that reducing the incidence of disabilities can make things worse for inequality in at least one respect. This conclusion has crucial consequences for policy making. I recognise that the question remains about how this aspect should be weighed against the fact that scenarios of disability reduction promote utility - they contain more individuals with higher wellbeing - and against the fact that, under views that ascribe positive value to relations of equality, scenarios of disability reduction would also be, in one way, promoters of equality. (shrink)

Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently used for decision-making are opaque, i.e., the internal factors that determine their decisions are not fully known to people due to the systems’ computational complexity. In response to this problem, several researchers have argued that human decision-making is equally opaque and since simplifying, reason-giving explanations (rather than exhaustive causal accounts) of a decision are typically viewed as sufficient in the human case, the same should hold for algorithmic decision-making. Here, I contend that this argument (...) overlooks that human decision-making is sometimes significantly more transparent and trustworthy than algorithmic decision-making. This is because when people explain their decisions by giving reasons for them, this frequently prompts those giving the reasons to govern or regulate themselves so as to think and act in ways that confirm their reason reports. AI explanation systems lack this self-regulative feature. Overlooking it when comparing algorithmic and human decision-making can result in underestimations of the transparency of human decision-making and in the development of explainable AI that may mislead people by activating generally warranted beliefs about the regulative dimension of reason-giving. (shrink)

As part of recent epistemic challenges to democracy, some have endorsed the implementation of epistemic constraints on voting, institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent voters from participating in public decision-making procedures. This proposal is often considered incompatible with a commitment to political equality. In this paper, I aim to dispute the strength of this latter claim by offering a theoretical justification for epistemic constraints on voting that does not rest on antiegalitarian commitments. Call this the civic accountability justification for epistemic constraints (...) on voting. On this view, voters stand to one another in a normative relation of reciprocal accountability that requires them to uphold an epistemically responsible conduct. Modest epistemic constraints on voting are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting is conforming to this normative requirement. Thanks to its distinctive features, the civic accountability justification can overcome two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with the idea of epistemic constraints on voting: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem. (shrink)

In climate ethics, there is a debate about how the carbon budget, in terms of emissions permits, should be divided between people. One popular proposal, sometimes called The Equal per Capita View, says that everyone should have an equal share of the available emissions permits. Several authors have objected to this view, arguing that: (i) the equal per capita view implies isolationism since it treats emissions permits in isolation from other considerations of justice such as development, poverty (...) and trade; and (ii) isolationism is implausible since it yields a number of problematic implications; therefore (iii) the equal per capita view is implausible. I examine this argument against the equal per capita view by scrutinizing the presumed problematic implications of isolationism. I show that they are either mistakenly inferred from isolationism or irrelevant as to whether isolationism is plausible or not. I conclude that the equal per capita view should not be discarded for being an isolationist approach. Rather, both isolationism and the equal per capita view should be considered as potential action guides. This result is of relevance to the climate political debate, since it could promote progress in the climate negotiations that are needed for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set by the Paris Agreement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines Olympe de Gouges’ demands for the rights of woman in her famous but still understudied work Les droits de la femme. A La Reine [1791]. Particular emphasis is put on analysing how she combines her demand for equality with her conception of sexual difference. The article consists of three parts. The first part gives a brief overview of the demands for the equality of the sexes as they were presented in seventeenth-century France and critically reacted upon (...) in eighteenth-century France, not least by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his defence of sexual difference. The second and third parts focus on Gouges’ argumentation. First, by analysing how she argues for women’s active citizenship by criticising the exclusion of women from the public sphere, but without questioning sexual difference as such; and second, by discussing how she redefines the famous slogan of the French Revolution; liberty, equality, fraternity. The conclusion argues that rather than being caught in a paradox of equality and difference, as has been claimed by Joan W. Scott, Gouges did successfully combine the two concepts, even if her interpretation of their relation was excluded from the canon of political theory. (shrink)

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient (...) for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly. (shrink)

People with disabilities suffer from pervasive inequalities in employment, education, transportation, housing, and health care compared to those who are not disabled. Moreover, people with disabilities are often subject to unjustified stigma and pity. In this paper, I will explain why these disadvantages violate relational egalitarian principles of justice. As I will show, my argument can account for both kinds of inequality that disabled people face.

According to Corey Brettschneider, we can protect freedom of religion and promote equality, by distinguishing religious groups’ claims to freedom of expression and association from their claims to financial and verbal support from the state. I am very sympathetic to this position, which fits well with my own views of democratic rights and duties, and with the importance of recognizing the scope for political choice which democratic politics offers to governments and to citizens. This room for political choice, I believe, (...) is necessary if people are to have any chance of reconciling the conflicting moral and political obligations they are likely to face, however idealized our conception of democracy or morality. Granted that no amount of personal and political choice will ever guarantee that we do not encounter tragic choices, and painfully conflicting moral demands, it is an important feature of democracy – or so I believe – that its rights reflect the importance of mitigating these conflicts so that people are able, as a rule, to act as they ought, so that they do not experience their moral sentiments, beliefs and capacities simply as grounds for recrimination, alienation and despair. I therefore believe that democracies have good reason not to force the consciences of the undemocratic and the intolerant, where it is possible to accommodate such people without threatening the rights of others. However, the fact that I share many of Brettschneider’s intuitions and beliefs does not mean that I share them all. In particular, I find his conception of democracy unduly narrow, and unduly based on a rather idealized conception of the American constitution which is unlikely to appeal to those whose conceptions of democracy are more republican, more socialist, more pragmatic and more international than his. I have explained these worries elsewhere and drawn out some of their implications for his arguments about privacy and judicial review. There is no need to repeat them here. I will also set to one side my worries about his uninflected, overly abstract and rather reified characterization of the State, in the hope that others will discuss this and that, in the end, a more nuanced conception of the State and a more lively appreciation of the conflicting people, institutions, histories and norms which make up most states, will prove consistent with his arguments. Finally, I do not propose to enter into a detailed discussion of the difficulties of Brettschneider’s overly abstract and reified conception of State ‘speech’ and ‘expression’ which, while motivated by the language of American constitutionalism, appears to cover pretty much anything a government might do, from raising and spending taxes, to accepting judicial interpretations of contested constitutional provisions, or to affirmatively pronouncing on the goals that will animate its legislative agenda and its aspirations for citizen’s lives. Again, while I would have wished for a more nuanced and analytical discussion of so central a concept as ‘expression’ and, in particular, expression by ‘the State’, I am uncertain that anything fundamental in Brettschneider’s account of citizen rights and duties would be altered in the process. Instead, then, I want to focus on points in Brettschneider’s argument that intrigue, and sometimes puzzle, me the most and where issues of nuance and clarification might make a substantial difference to our views of equality and religious freedom. (shrink)

How should we choose between uncertain prospects in which different possible people might exist at different levels of wellbeing? Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey offer an egalitarian answer to this question. I give some reasons to reject their answer and then sketch an alternative, which I call person-affecting prioritarianism.

In public reason liberalism, equal respect requires that conceptions of justice be publicly justifiable to relevant people in a manner that allocates to each an equal say. But all liberal public justification also excludes: e.g., it accords no say, or a lesser say, to people it deems unreasonable. Can liberal public justification be aligned with the equal respect that allegedly grounds it, if the latter calls for discursive equality? The chapter explores this challenge with a focus on (...) Rawls-type political liberalism. I suggest that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect can cohere with the standing of the unreasonable in public justification if that standing is not impermissibly unequal in discursive purchase. I then consider one candidate view of the permissibility of purchase inequality. On this broadly sufficientarian view, purchase inequality is permissible provided relevant people have standing of enough purchase to be able to avoid relevant bads. A plausible variant of this view suggests that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect does not cohere with the discursive standing of the unreasonable. It emerges that where liberal public justification accords actual people discursive respect but relevantly idealizes at least around its fringes, the permissibility of purchase inequality must be a central concern. (shrink)

If ever there were a time in which concerns about equality as a primary issue for social policy disappeared from public view, now is not that time. Recent work in economics on inequality has climbed to the top of best-sellers lists, and the issue was a major talking point in American midterm elections in 2014. The sheer bewildering volume of scholarship and discussion of equality makes it difficult to distinguish signal from noise. What, of all that we know about ways (...) in which we are equal and ways in which we are unequal, matters? If, as seems plausible, we neither are nor should desire to be equal in every respect that we could in theory be equal, in which ways ought we to care about being equal? Does the kind of equality of outcome — perhaps equality of income or wealth — that is frequently the focus of discussion matter most? Does opportunity matter more? What about less material forms of equality such as equality of status, or power, or authority? How do these various forms of equality interact with each other? The essays in this volume represent the work of a number of leading scholars from different disciplines on these questions. Drawing on sources in philosophical analysis, empirical science, and history, they sort through competing claims and counterclaims about the intuitions that drive our concern for equality. Their conclusions are not in unison, but nonetheless represent important advances in our attempts to grapple with this crucial social value. (shrink)

The distinction between equality and sufficiency, much discussed in the distributive justice literature, is here applied to democratic theory. Overlooking this distinction can have significant normative implications, undermining some defences and criticisms of political equality, as I show by discussing the work of three prominent democratic theorists: Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, and Mark Warren. Most importantly, Christiano sometimes defends egalitarian conclusions using sufficientarian premises, or worries about inequality in situations where insufficiency is also part of the problem; inequality above the (...) level of sufficiency is not always as troubling. Estlund makes the reverse error. He attacks rather than defends political egalitarianism, but insufficiency seems to explain some of his concerns. Nonetheless, I show that political egalitarians may need to specify a sufficientarian threshold, to avoid levelling-down objections. Democratic theorists should thus take seriously the distinction between political equality and political sufficiency. More generally, political theorists and philosophers should be aware of omitted variable bias and interaction effects due to conceptual stretching arising from under-theorised distinctions in their thought experiments. (shrink)

This essay reads John Locke’s Two Treatises through its nonhuman animal presences, especially the emblematic figures of cattle and “noxious creatures” like “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves. It argues that the real ground of Lockean human equality is an ongoing practice of subjugating nonhuman animals, and not any attribute of the human species as such. More specifically, the Lockean social compact founded on this equality relies on a “dominion covenant,” an existential “agreement” in which God lends the power of dominion to (...) man and any threats to this order require punishment. This dynamic enables violence toward humans, in the name of their humanity, if they do not properly exert their power of dominion. Critics have connected Locke’s theory of property to indigenous dispossession and his theory of punishment to carceral systems; both processes, I argue, intimately rely on the dominion covenant. Lockean racism is the fulfillment of, and not a deviation from, his account of human equality. (shrink)

Taking equality seriously means that we ought to consider the ways in which persons are not only unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged from the start – e.g., through genetic inheritance, wealth, or a parent’s educational background – but also how opportunities and rewards that result from these basic inequalities are later exacerbated in the distribution of goods and opportunities. The basic point of equality as a normative principle is not that everyone have similar things or achieve similar outcomes, that would be (...) undesirable both for reasons having to do with individual liberty as well as social need. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical commentary on the claim advanced by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift in their book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships that there is an ineliminable conflict between relationship goods and fair equality of opportunity. I argue there need be no conflict between family values and equality of opportunity in a suitably non-hierarchical society. I also argue that the idea that equality of opportunity might be served by abolishing the family is mistaken. Egalitarian justice does (...) not provide an obstacle to the realization of family values. (shrink)

Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive theories (...) fail to account for the importance of how institutions cause good shortfalls and, second, that they fail to account for the normative attitude of social and political institutions expressed in different ways of treating people. The article argues that the causal variant of the objection has only very limited reach, and endorses the expressive variant: the attitudes expressed by institutions in their treatment of persons, such as contempt or neglect, generate potentially unjust social relationships and hierarchies. This should be the focus of a relational egalitarian approach to social justice. The article proceeds to explain how it is possible that artificial agents such as institutions have attitudes and how these attitudes are not reducible to those of the individuals that sustain them, and argues that distributive theories cannot be so modified as to account for such attitudes. It concludes by indicating several directions for the development of more worked-out conceptions of relational equality on this basis. (shrink)

& Behavioral and brain imaging research indicates that human infants, humans adults, and many nonhuman animals represent large nonsymbolic numbers approximately, discriminating between sets with a ratio limit on accuracy. Some behavioral evidence, especially with human infants, suggests that these representations differ from representations of small numbers of objects. To investigate neural signatures of this distinction, event-related potentials were recorded as adult humans passively viewed the sequential presentation of dot arrays in an adaptation paradigm. In two studies, subjects viewed successive (...) arrays of a single number of dots interspersed with test arrays presenting the same or a different number; numerical range (small numerical quantities 1–3 vs. large numerical.. (shrink)

"The terms do not have to be spelled out, because they have been set not by a meeting of minds of the parties, but by a default baseline defined by corporate, property, and employment law that establishes the legal parameters for the constitution of capitalist firms." p. 2.

In this paper, I attempt to clarify the ideas of equality underlying section 15 claims for benefits such as welfare and health care; I use the name ‘economic rights claims’ for these types of claims. I adopt Joseph Raz’s division of equality claims into rhetorical egalitarian claims, which are based in a failure to equally respect a universal claim , and strict egalitarian claims, which are based on an actually existing unequal distribution of resources . I show how the dignity-based (...) approach to equality stemming from Law v. Canada is an example of a rhetorical egalitarian claim. With this groundwork set, I turn my attention to the economic rights claims. I survey three reasons for thinking that an unequal distribution of some benefit might, even absent any failure to respect or recognize the dignity of those at the losing end, be thought of as wrong or unjust. The first two reasons – an appeal to an idea of sufficiency, and the fear that some stigma might be associated with the inequality – I reject in favour of the third, which is that in a situation in which all the participants have some equal claim to a benefit, a fair procedure will result in their benefiting equally. Following John Rawls, I suggest that our society, as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, creates in its members at least a prima facie equal claim to share in the society’s benefits. The economic rights claims, then, are claims that this prima facie equal claim has not been respected. But the benefits being claimed for, as benefits created by the society, are not benefits automatically due to everyone just in virtue of their humanity, instead they are due to the worst-off once the best off have come to be able to benefit from them. Thus they take a strict egalitarian form – once some members of our society benefit in a certain way, then the equality of all members as contributors to the cooperative venture for mutual advantage implies that the other members of our society gain a claim to that benefit. The fact that these economic rights claims are strict egalitarian claims means they cannot be grounded in arguments about dignity, as dignity-based claims are rhetorical egalitarian claims for benefits due to all in virtue of their universal human dignity. I conclude by returning to Law to highlight a passage which I believe provides a grounding for a recognition of economic rights in line with my argument; I also make some brief comments on the need for a stricter division of labour between section 15 and section 1 in the context of economic rights claims and on the effect of this argument on Canadian federal law more generally. (shrink)

When we want to justify claims against one another, we discover that conceptual thought alone is not sufficient to legitimize property and income in the relative and proper proportions among members of a productive group. Instead, the basis for justification should also be seen in motivational states, validated less by rational thought than by an effective behaviour. To circumnavigate otherwise dangerously utopian claims to justice, the social sciences, and especially behavioural economics, are the most reliable basis for normative distributive justice. (...) This article builds on recent findings of experiments, first of all in order to give proof of the extent to which a general behavioural tendency towards equality is widespread among people, and second of all in order to highlight ‘desert’ and ‘need’ as the crucial criteria of just distribution, which will then sum up to justified inequality in the economic sphere. (shrink)

Does the democratic provenance of the law ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law? According to the social-egalitarian argument, it does, because individuals have a pro tanto duty to uphold relations of social equality, and because, by obeying a democratically made law, they uphold relations of social equality. In this paper, I argue, however, that even if we grant the premisses of the argument, the conclusion still does not follow.

ABSTRACTAt least during his critical period, all of Kant’s philosophical works have a secret political dimension. Among other things, following the analysis of Hannah Arendt, the Critique of Judgment – paragraph 40 in particular – became a main text of political philosophy. In looking at the Critique of Judgement from a political perspective, I shall refer not to paragraph 40 but to the Kantian discussion of pure aesthetic judgement. In my opinion, one can understand Kant’s remarks on aesthetic judgement, and (...) especially transcendental anthropology, as meaning that Kant philosophically attributes the three political ideas of the French Revolution to the whole human being as such, and not just to the intelligible man. (shrink)

We live with the legacy of injustice, political as well as personal. Even if our governments are now democratically elected and governed, our societies are scarred by forms of power and privilege accrued from a time in which people’s race, sex, class and religion were grounds for denying them a role in government, or in the selection of those who governed them. What does that past imply for the treatment of religion in democratic states? The problem is particularly pressing once (...) one accepts that religious freedom is not just a matter of individuals’ freedom of conscience and worship, but of people’s claims to associate with others through institutions whose powers, status and commitment to equality are very different (Laborde, 2015). If this means that churches pose some of the same philosophical and practical problems as families, from a democratic perspective, the fact that churches have no obvious point or justification, beyond being the repository of the claims to conscience of their members, appears to distinguish them from the former. In principle, this should make it easier to think about the claims of government, as compared to those of churches. In practice, however, it may simply bring into sharper focus philosophical and political challenges to equality that contemporary democracies now face. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs defends liberal political morality on the basis of a rich account of dignity as constitutive of living well. This article raises the Rawlsian concern that making political morality dependent on ethics threatens citizens’ political autonomy. Thereafter, it addresses whether the abandonment of ethical foundations signals the demise of Dworkin’s liberalism and explores the possibility of laundering his conception so as to facilitate a marriage between the political philosophies of Rawls and Dworkin. The article finishes by (...) rebutting some objections Dworkin raises against Rawls’s account of public reason. (shrink)

Appiah distinguishes between people who are racist because they are motivated by strong ideological convictions, and those who are racist because they believe certain facts to be true. I explore to what extent this distinction might apply to those who believe in racial equality. I show that it may be risky to ignore race-related factors in the health context, while acknowledging that what constitutes race may be open to question. I discuss the idea that there are no morally relevant differences (...) between races, however construed. I show that to base one's belief in moral equality on empirical claims, is not only inherently problematic, but in most cases, is a false account of what really motivates such beliefs. Instead, I argue that we should embrace the ideological element of a belief in moral equality. Thus, instead of arguing about whether race exists, or whether there are morally relevant differences between races, (however construed), we may open a pathway to a more honest and challenging debate. That is, how can one moral ideology demonstrate its superiority over another?. (shrink)

Social or relational egalitarians try to defend democracy non-instrumentally as a constitutive element of a society where no one stands as inferior or superior to anyone else. However, they face an instrumentalist challenge from within: Why not uphold a non-democratic regime if it outperforms democracy in protecting or promoting egalitarian social relations, for example, by stably producing substantive political decisions that guard against social hierarchies? This article explores the best response to this challenge from the social egalitarian non-instrumentalist standpoint. It (...) argues that the instrumentalist challenge can be accommodated without abandoning the essential non-instrumentalist commitment to democracy; while a nondemocratic regime may be justified under less-than-ideal circumstances as a contingently effective means to realize more social equality, democracy can nevertheless be viewed as a necessary condition for the realization of full social equality. (shrink)

Inequalities that arise because of the influence of arbitrary factors of social or natural contingency, as opposed to choices, are unjust. But whilst liberals wish to preserve and protect the affective family, parental partiality to their own children can result in an inequality that is unjust on account of it being attributable to arbitrary factors. Children's access to resources and opportunities should not be significantly determined by parental entitlement to resources. Justice requires not the abandonment of the family, but it (...) does impose constraints on the ways in which parents can permissibly express their partiality for their children. (shrink)

In recent years, democrats both inside and outside the academy have begun to reconsider the merits of the age-old practice of sortition, the random selection of political officials. Despite this fact, however, the comparative assessment of the merits of voting and sortition remains in its infancy. This paper will advance this project by treating the problem of assigning public responsibilities as a problem of allocative justice. To treat the problem in this manner is to treat public office as a type (...) of good to which citizens might have various claims. Random selection is the appropriate method for distributing public office when all citizens have equal claims to that office and there is not enough to go around. Universal distribution is more appropriate when all claimants have equal claims to the office and there is enough to go around (as with universal suffrage, for example). Election (or possibly other procedures, such as appointment) makes sense when citizens do not enjoy equal claims to the office and that office is in scarce supply. This approach captures a crucial component of democratic equality. Different understandings of democratic equality lay behind sortition and election. Each might be appropriate under different circumstances, but both place rights-based constraints on the design of a democratic political system. (shrink)

According to John Rawls’s famous Liberal Principle of Legitimacy, the exercise of political power is legitimate only if it is justifiable to all citizens. The currently dominant interpretation of what is justifiable to persons in this sense is an internalist one. On this view, what is justifiable to persons depends on their beliefs and commitments. In this paper I challenge this reading of Rawls’s principle, and instead suggest that it is most plausibly interpreted in externalist terms. On this alternative view, (...) what is justifiable to persons is not in any way dependent on, or relativized to, their beliefs and commitments. Instead, what is justifiable to all in the relevant sense is what all could accept as free and equal. I defend this reinterpretation of the view by showing how it is supported by Rawls’s account of the freedom and equality of persons. In addition, a considerable advantage of this suggestion is that it allows for an inclusive account of to whom the exercise of political power must be made justifiable. (shrink)