Love, Dignity and Oppression

Abstract

Within a liberal moral culture we learn to think of inequality and injustice in terms of the distribution of goods and services. We think about injustice as the unfairness of some people having more while others have less. Much of the social theory we inherit is concerned with the legitimation of these social inequalities. Within a liberal theory we tend to think of them as the outcome of individual differences. It is because individuals are blessed with different abilities and talents that they can make different lives for themselves. So it is that issues of social inequality tend to be individualised or psychologised as if individuals only have themselves to blame for the position they have within the larger society. Within a liberal democratic state these inequalities of wealth, status and power supposedly do not affect our equality as citizens, which is guaranteed through legal and political rights. As we are equal before God, so we are equal before the law.