Abstract
Why do we condemn inequality? Inequality is a social ill because of the damage it does to human flourishing. Unequal distribution of wealth can have the effect that some people are poorly housed, badly nourished, ill-educated, unhappy or uncultured, among other things. In other words, inequality leaves some less ‘well off’ than others. When we seek to make people more equal our concern is not just resources or property but how people fare under one distribution or another. We care about inequality because of its effect on people, and we lose interest in problems of inequality if the putatively unequal are doing equally well in their quality of life.2 Ultimately, the answer to the question, ‘equality of what?’ is some conception of flourishing, since whatever policies or principles we adopt, it is flourishing, or wellbeing, that we hope will be more equal as a result of our endeavors.
For help improving on previous versions of this paper, I am grateful to the lively discussions of the Equality of Opportunity Workshop at the European Consortium for Political Research, Granada, April, 2005, the colloquium on Liberal Neutrality: A Re-evaluation, at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique de l’Université de Montréal (CREUM), May 1–2, 2008, the Queen’s Philosophy Colloquium, Nov. 2005, and the students in my equality seminar over the years. Thank you also to Anrash Abizadeh, David Bakhurst, Harry Brighouse, Andrew Lister, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and to my formers doctoral student, Christopher Lowry, for his enlightening conversations about these issues. Many thanks, too, to the fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who honored me with a Visiting Fellowship that enabled me to begin work on this project.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
There are, as we shall see, some exceptions to this philosophical trend. An interesting recent exception in the field of social policy is J. Baker, K. Lynch, S. Cantillon and J. Walsh, Equality: From Theory to Action (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), which considers inequality in terms of resources, but also human interests, for example, in love or learning.
Arneson, ‘Perfectionism and Politics,’ Ethics, 111(1) (October 2000), 39. Steven Leece accuses egalitarian perfectionism of inevitably giving priority to perfection over equality, but I think this charge is answered with my account which starts with the principle of equality and then considers flourishing as a metric.
See Leece, ‘Should Egalitarians be Perfectionists?’ Politics, 25(3) (2005), 133–4.
Raz is critical of the idea of equality; see Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), chapter 9. But see George Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
‘The herd is a means, no more!’ Friederich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), s. 766.
William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 192.
Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 189.
Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, 281. The inhabitants of Nowhere also lament that ‘the once-poor had such a feeble conception of the real pleasure of life’. Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. Asa Briggs (Penguin, 1984), p. 121.
For Marx, capitalist inequality means that work, what should distinguish human beings from other species and be the source of human fulfillment, becomes an alien activity, a mere means to satisfy external needs. Marx’s concept of exploitation centered on the unfairness of some people having more wealth than others because of a process whereby owners appropriate the product of workers. But the moral argument of exploitation also focused on the effect of alienation, pointing to what inequality does to people, how it affects their ability to live well. (Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker, New York: Norton, 1978, p. 74.) Compare this with the divide J. Bruce Glasier seeks to make between
Marx and Morris in William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), pp. 142–50.
E. P. Thompson criticizes Glasier in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 747–50.
On Liberty, in John Stuart Mill: A Selection of his Works, John Robson, ed. (Toronto: MacMillan, 1966), p. 82. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 27.
Hobhouse, Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 67.
See B. Webb and B. Hutchins, ‘Socialism and the National Minimum’, Fabian Socialist Series No. 6 (London: Fabian Society, 1909); Ben Jackson, ‘Equality of Nothing: Loose Egalitarianism and Social Justice on the British Left in the 1920s’, unpublished paper delivered to the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop (Oxford, Hilary, 2002), pp. 33–4;
Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
Beveridge, The Pillars of Security (New York: MacMillan, 1943).
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 94.
Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), chapters 1 and 2 and ‘Liberalism’, in S. Hampshire (ed.) Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
See Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 218.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 70–1, 88–9
Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-examined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 39.
James Griffin, Wellbeing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 52–3. G. A. Cohen’s ideal of community, where justice requires individuals being prepared to contribute for the sake of the satisfaction of needs other than their own, suggests individuals care not just about who has what, but how they are doing with their respective shares, whether they are able to derive fulfillment from their share of resources.
See Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality and Community’, in Stephen Darwall, Equal Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Public provision of opportunities for social interaction can be seen therefore as an equalizing policy; indeed, community and participation are much more important than affluence in making a person content, according to happiness experts in psychology and economics: see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2007);
Daniel Nettle, Happiness: the Science Behind Your Smile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin, 2005).
Charles Fourier, HarmonianMan, ed. Mark Poster (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday), chapters 1, 4, and 5. This is an extreme version of what John Roemer, paraphrasing Marx’s idea of ‘communist man’, calls the ‘socialist person’ assumption, where conditions of equality nurture more altruistic, comradely individuals for whom contribution to the community is automatic (Roemer, A Future for Socialism, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
I discuss these issues in greater detail in my manuscript, ‘Equality Renewed’. The requirement that we attend to the worst off should be relaxed, however, if aggregate flourishing threatens to be seriously reduced. Certainly the flourishing approach rejects leveling for its own sake. Though the idea of a threshold suggests a lack of interest in equality above the level of sufficiency and a lack of interest in excellence below the level of sufficiency, in fact both considerations play a role throughout the distributive model. This model draws on elements of Nussbaum’s use of a threshold; see Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings’, in M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (eds) Women, Culture and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 81–2; Arneson, ‘Perfectionism and Politics’, 55–9.
Kymlicka, ‘Left-Liberalism Revisited’, Christine Sypnowich (ed.) The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 13.
Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 97, 162.
Sovereign Virtue, pp. 73–8. See also Dworkin, ‘Sovereign Virtue Re-visited’, Symposium on Ronald Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue, Ethics, 113(1) (October 2002): 106–143. This contrasts with traditional meritocratic views which assume a system of rewards and burdens that distinguishes between less and more valuable contributions. See David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 9.
Elizabeth Anderson coined this term in her provocative critique ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics, 109 (1999). The diversity among egalitarians, however, is such that Dworkin himself eschews the term ‘luck egali-tarianism’ and distances himself from subsequent adherents. See ‘Equality, Luck and Hierarchy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31(2) (2003), a response to Samuel Scheffler’s ‘What is Egalitarianism?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31(1) (2003). Other versions include Richard Arneson, ‘Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare’, in Equality: Selected Readings, ed. Louis Pojman and Robert Westmoreland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); G. A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,’ Ethics, 99 (1989);
John Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Richard Arneson, ‘Egalitarianism and the Undeserving Poor’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 5(4) (1997), 332.
Hurka, Perfectionism, p. 170. See Michael Harrington, The New American Poverty (London: Firethorn, 1985).
Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in John Stuart Mill: A Selection of his Works, John Robson (ed.) (Toronto: MacMillan, 1966).
For a delightful inquiry into this question see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005).
So varied and prodigious was his industrious pursuit of the good that his physician said that Morris died from ‘simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men’. Fiona MacCarthy William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. vii.
William Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, The Collected Works of William Morris, introd. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), XXIII, p. 281.
For a sample of views, see D. Bakhurst and C. Sypnowich (eds), The Social Self (Sage, 1995).
A Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 246–8.
Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Wellbeing in the United States and Britain Since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 74.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Christine Sypnowich
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sypnowich, C. (2014). A New Approach to Equality. In: Merrill, R., Weinstock, D. (eds) Political Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319203_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319203_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33019-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31920-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)