Philosophy of Equality Research Paper

1. Lockean Equality: Equality As Nondomination

Locke (1690) affirms that all men are ‘naturally in’ a ‘state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit.’ Locke adds that this natural state is ‘also one of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.’ Being of the same ‘species and rank,’ men should be ‘equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.’ Call this equality as nondomination. According to this Lockean ideal, all adult humans have equal natural rights to live as they choose so long as they do not wrongfully harm others. This implies that no person ought to find herself placed without her consent in a relationship in which she is subject to the will of another and forced to obey the other’s commands. Much ink has been spilled puzzling over what might be meant by stating as Locke does that men are ‘naturally in’ a state of equal freedom. The puzzles dissolve if one construes the natural right to equal freedom as a moral right that each person possesses independently of institutional arrangements or customary beliefs in the society the person inhabits. The institutional arrangements in a particular society may include slavery, and customary beliefs may presume that slavery is perfectly justified, but nonetheless one may hold that each person has a moral right to equal freedom which implies that others are duty bound not to enslave her.

The Lockean claim of human equality conflicts with views that people may legitimately be born to a state of subjection to others as occurs in a feudal or caste society. This claim also seems to conflict with the view that at least if one is born and raised in a tolerably just society one is legitimately subject to the authority of its government in the absence of any consent one has given to this just authority. The claim also seems to conflict with the view that there are forms of subjection that are not morally legitimate and that should be viewed as violating the Lockean right of equality properly construed even if they secure the voluntary consent of all parties to the relationship. This is to claim that some right of equal freedom is inalienable (nontransferable) and nonwaivable (the right-bearer cannot release those bound by the duty to comply).

2. Democratic Equality

The Lockean idea that all adult persons have equal rights to liberty and property opposes the idea that by birth some persons legitimately acquire authority and power over others. But as stated the Lockean ideal does not require equality of political status, and is compatible with (for example) an hereditary monarchy, so long as the king respects everyone’s Lockean rights. A further and independent requirement of equality is equality of democratic citizenship—that the coercive political order of government should be subject to popular control, with each qualified adult having an equal right to stand for political office and to vote in free and fair elections. Rousseau (1968) argues for democratic equality on the ground that only in an ideal form of democracy can individuals submit to political authority while being autonomous in the sense of obeying only laws they give themselves and avoiding subjection to the will of another person.

Democratic equality can be interpreted more expansively. In this broad sense, democratic equality prevails in a society to the degree that each adult person has equal power to influence the outcome of political processes, or alternatively, to the degree that all adult persons with equal personal ability to influence others’ opinions have equal power to influence political outcomes.

3. Equality Of Opportunity

In a caste society, accidents of birth and social connections strongly influenced by birth tend to determine who enjoys positions of special privilege and above-average advantages. Desirable niches in the hierarchical social structure may be reserved for men rather than women, for those of noble lineage rather than commoners, for those who are members of a favored religion, clan, tribe, or skin color grouping.

3.1 Formal Equality Of Opportunity

The ideal of formal equality of opportunity or careers open to talents challenges the legitimacy of caste privilege. Applied to places in educational institutions, formal equality of opportunity requires that such places be open to any applicants, and that applications be judged on their merits, with criteria of merit being selected so they are predictive of applicants’ ability and ambition to succeed at the course of study to be undertaken. (It is consistent with formal equality of opportunity that schools charge tuition and fees and that among applicants selected on the basis of merit, only those sponsored by someone willing and able to pay tuition and fees are actually admitted to school.) The formal equality of opportunity ideal can be adapted to apply to competitions for desired positions in business enterprises and state bureaucracies and to bank loans made available to would-be entrepreneurs. Formal equality of opportunity constrains the freedom of property owners to do whatever they might choose with property they legitimately own. At least, if formal equality of opportunity is enforced by coercive legal rules or social norms backed by informal sanctions, the freedom of property owners is to that extent limited. The ideal of formal equality of opportunity is compatible with any degree of inequality in the extent to which individuals have the opportunity to develop their native talents into skills that would render them qualified in meritocratic competitions. Hence, it could happen that in a society regulated by equality of opportunity all good jobs go to the children of the wealthy and well educated.

3.2 Fair Equality Of Opportunity

A public school system funded by general taxes exhibits a commitment that goes beyond formal equality of opportunity in the direction of assuring to all individuals at least some minimally adequate opportunity to become trained and to acquire skills that will render them qualified for meritocratic competitive posts. The ideal implicit in the idea of education funded by the public, pressed to its limit, becomes substantive or fair equality of opportunity. This norm is satisfied when all have equal opportunity to develop their native talents into the skills needed for meritocratic success. If better-off parents provide special education and socialization for their children so that they have special opportunities to become qualified, these advantages are somehow exactly offset, in the society of fair equality of opportunity.

Rawls (1999) espouses fair equality of opportunity and specifies that in the society that satisfies this norm any two individuals drawn at random from the population who have the same ambition and the same native talent will have the same prospects of competitive success for posts that confer advantages. Ambition here is a desire to attain some class of advantageous positions coupled with the willingness to work hard to become qualified for meritocratic competition. Having the same native talent as another is having the same disposition to develop skill given an identical environment. This latter idea is inherently fuzzy, as one sees by noting that one person might develop greater skill than another under educational regimen A and lesser skill than the other under educational regimen B. The notion of ambition embedded in the idea of fair equality might also provoke unease, as when it is noted that a society in which all girls develop the ambition to be homemakers and all boys develop the ambition to have satisfying and lucrative employment could satisfy fair equality even though all meritocratic competitions are won by men. But the general intent of the Rawlsian norm is clear. One might regard the norm of fair equality of opportunity as the ideal of a classless society, in which being born of privileged parents does not affect in the slightest an individual’s prospects for acquiring a privileged position in adult life except via the mechanism of inheritance of genes and via parental and other social effects on the development of ambition. Evidently the norm is intended to be at best very roughly approximated, because precisely measuring the degree to which a society deviates from fair equality as defined here is not possible even in principle.

4. Equality Of Condition

In a democratic society with fair equality of opportunity prevailing, some people could end up leading grim, unenviable lives while some are extra-ordinarily prosperous, and some of the prosperous may lead wonderful, enviable lives. This could occur whether the economy consists of state-owned or privately-owned firms. The discussion to follow focuses on a competitive market economy with private ownership.

Some would hold that equality of democratic citizenship along with equality of opportunity is equality enough, and that inequalities in life prospects that emerge in a market economy over time are not morally troublesome. Others disagree. Seminal works exploring this issue include Rawls (1999) and Nozick (1974).

4.1 Pure And Impure Egalitarianism; Equality Vs. Priority

Call someone who claims that it would be morally desirable if the material condition of people were to become more nearly equal an egalitarian. This view takes many forms. One important distinction is between those who regard material equality as contributing to an ideal that is morally desirable but morally optional and those who hold on one or another ground that closer approximation to material equality is morally required. This distinction crosscuts another, between those who believe that it is morally appropriate for the state to enact coercive social policy aimed at equality of condition and those who deny that such use of state power can be morally permissible. One might be an egalitarian either because one believes (a) that equality is instrumental to attaining some further moral goal or partially constitutive of some further moral goal or because one believes (b) that equality of some sort is per se morally desirable. The impure egalitarian has a reason of type (a) for affirming equality, the pure egalitarian a reason of type (b).

One should also take note of a position that may be confused with egalitarianism but is in fact distinct from it. The egalitarian holds that it is better if all have the same level of benefit. The prioritarian on the other hand holds that it is morally better to bring about a gain in benefit for someone, the lower that person’s lifetime benefit level would be absent the particular gain in question. In short, the prioritarian gives priority to helping the worse off. Everyone’s having the same, or closer to the same, is not a goal for the prioritarian (see Parfit 1995, Temkin 1993).

An egalitarian advocate, whether pure or impure, is better regarded as proposing a component of fundamental moral principle, not an immediate guideline for laws and public policies. Public policies should be set in terms that are operationalizable, feasible to administer. A society would presumably do better by its fundamental values if it does not attempt to enact them as public policies but instead chooses policies that seek to achieve feasible goals that are reasonable proxies for the fundamental values.

Equality is in one respect a clear notion: given some way of measuring people’s condition, their condition is equal when everyone’s is the same according to this measure. But when people’s condition is unequal, the notion of equality itself does not provide a measure that ranks different possible distributions and specifies which are more or less equal than others and by what extent. Philosophers discussing equality in recent years have not paid much attention to this issue (but see Temkin 1993, and Sen 1992).

4.2 Equality Among Whom?

The articulation of an ideal of equality requires a specification of the persons or entities whose condition should be rendered equal. One aspect of this issue is whether the relevant units to be equalized are individuals or social groups. Some might hold that equality of condition should hold across ethnic, supposed racial, or religious groups, or across groups living in different regions of a society. The discussion to follow simply assumes that individual human persons are the relevant units for an ideal of equality of condition.

Equality of condition might be deemed desirable to sustain either (a) among the inhabitants of each political society taken one at a time or (b) among all human persons alive anywhere. Those who favor equality within each political society but not across political societies are sometimes labeled ‘patriotic egalitarians’ and those who favor equality across political societies are labeled ‘cosmopolitan egalitarians.’ A further dimension of the ‘equality among whom?’ specification is time. An egalitarian might give priority to attaining a closer approximation to equality among persons alive now or among persons who shall live now and in the future. (Policies that affect population growth and economic growth will affect the degree of inequality obtaining among persons living at different times.)

Another aspect of ‘Equality among whom?’ is whether equality is supposed to obtain in the condition of persons at each moment of time, or in the lifetime overall condition of persons, or perhaps among age groups at each moment of time. Notice that inequality between young and old is consistent with equality among all persons over the life course.

4.3 Equality Of What?

Under this heading theorists debate how to measure people’s condition for purposes of determining who qualifies as better off and who worse off when policies to enhance the extent to which equality is achieved are being considered or applied. (But it is evident that this issue of the basis of interpersonal comparison must be addressed by a wide class of theories of distributive justice, not just those that affirm equality of condition. Anyone who espouses the notion that government should redistribute from better off to worse off persons needs some metric for deciding who is better off and worse off, and the metric had better make sense or else the ethic of redistribution will be unpalatable.)

Perhaps the most obvious candidate measure is equality of money or, more broadly, equality of material resources. On the simplifying assumption that material resources can be divided into homogeneous lots, one implements this ideal by dividing all such resources into N identical lots, one for each of the N persons in the group whose members are to be made equal.

Equality of material resources might be thought problematic on at least two grounds. The first difficulty is that this ideal leaves intact and unremediated the inequalities in the talents and useful personal traits possessed by individuals. If equality of material resources obtains between two persons, otherwise similar except that one is born legless and armless, the handicapped individual must devote a large portion of her resource allotment to compensate for the lack of abilities that normal legs and arms provide. One’s resources for achieving one’s ends include personal resources as well as material resources. Excluding the former may seem an arbitrary limitation.

A second difficulty is that equality across individuals’ holdings of material resources over their entire lives might be thought to leave too little role for personal responsibility in the proper determination of each person’s holdings. One might seek an interpretation of the ideal of equality of condition that does not require society continuously to offset in the name of equality the foreseeable impact of the risky and conservative, wise and foolish, careless and prudent choices made by individuals as they pursue their individual life plans.

This concern about responsibility might regard it as instrumentally valuable (holding people responsible for their choices is a useful means to attain other goals) or as intrinsically morally desirable (it is better in itself if benefits go to the responsible and deserving rather than to the irresponsible and undeserving).

Responding to these difficulties, Dworkin (2000) has proposed that people should be made equal in the level of uncourted disadvantage they suffer in their lives. The idea is that people should be made equal in their unchosen circumstances so far as is feasible, but they should not be compensated for differences among them that stem from their different ambitions and preferences and their choices of action to achieve their individual aims in life. Accordingly, equality of resources is expanded to encompass personal resources and adjusted to integrate a notion of individual responsibility for how one’s life goes.

The family of views that interprets the ideal of equality of condition as equality of resources of some sort is united in rejecting the family of doctrines that prizes equality of utility, or well-being, or welfare across persons. This welfarist family of views supposes that when one person’s condition is assessed as better or worse than another’s for purposes of distributive justice the relevant measure is how well the person’s life is going, the goodness of the life for the person who is living it. The goodness of a life in this sense is different from the sense in which the life of a person who sacrifices herself for others might well be deemed noble or admirable or good. Such a life is good (admirable), but not by virtue of that fact good for the person whose life it is. Good in the welfarist sense is what a person aims at when she is being rationally prudent.

Resourcist theories of distributive justice take it to be an important principle that society should not seek to make people equal in their personal well-being. Two considerations support this principle. One is that reasonable people will persist in disagreeing about what is ultimately valuable or worthwhile in human life. What people owe to each other by way of equal justice cannot depend on agreement on some conception of human good, because no such agreement can be forthcoming. Hence individual well-being cannot serve as a standard for determining whether someone is better off or worse off. The second consideration is that there should be a division of responsibility between society and the individual, such that if each individual is allotted equal resources according to the appropriate conception, then what individuals do with their equal resources is their business, not society’s.

The ideal of equality of welfare varies in content as it is filled in with different conceptions of welfare or well-being. On subjective conceptions, whether something is good for a person and to what degree depends on her attitudes and opinions regarding it. A subjective conception might identify individual welfare with desire satisfaction or life aim fulfillment or enjoyment. On objective conceptions, whether something is good for a person and to what degree is fixed independently of her subjective attitudes and opinions regarding it. One might identify individual welfare with entries on an objective list, such that the greater the extent to which the person gains items on the list, rated by their relative importance, the better her life is going. To give a welfarist conception the best run for its money, the most plausible conception of welfare must be used to fill in its content.

The welfarist responds to the claim that reasonable people cannot agree about what renders a life intrinsically valuable for the one who is living it partly by insisting that the claim greatly underestimates the degree of consensus on the nature of the human good that does exist among reasonable people and partly by allowing that to the extent that there is genuinely reasonable disagreement about the human good, to that extent there is only limited commensurability in this domain.

The responsibility objection against the ideal of equality of welfare has prompted the reply that the welfarist egalitarianism can accommodate a sensible norm of personal responsibility (Cohen 1989). But when one tries to work out the details it becomes clear that integrating an appropriate norm of personal responsibility into any ideal of equality of condition is so far an unsolved problem.

Consider this revision of equality of welfare: Society is responsible for bringing about an arrangement that induces equality of opportunity for welfare among individuals. Roughly, the level of opportunity for welfare provided by one’s circumstances is the level of welfare one would reach if one conducted oneself as prudently as can reasonably be expected over the course of one’s life. A prudent individual acts efficiently to advance his or her own welfare within the limits of legal and moral constraints. One determines whether a person has acted as prudently as can reasonably be expected by relativizing the requirement of prudence to that individual by taking account of the person’s unchosen deficits in choice-making and choice-executing talent.

Equality of resources could be revised to become equal opportunity for resources, an ideal that is satisfied among a group of persons just in case all would have the same resources (or alternatively, the same expected level of resources) if all behaved as prudently as can be expected. As stated, both equal opportunity views may seem too unforgiving in the way they incorporate personal responsibility into an egalitarian ideal. If one fails to meet the specified standard of prudent conduct by even a tiny amount, there is no constraint on the extent to which one’s fortunes may plummet without triggering egalitarian concern.

Another approach to interpreting distributive equality supposes that what people owe to each other by way of providing all opportunities for a choice worthy life is a set of freedoms (Sen 1992, Nussbaum 1999). Freedom might seem just another way of referring to opportunity, but identifying these two approaches would be a mistake. For one thing, since an individual’s opportunity for welfare provided by her circumstances is the welfare level she would reach if she behaved as prudently as could reasonably be expected, with less freedom the individual who has difficulty being prudent could have more opportunity for welfare.

The freedom metric for distributive justice is calibrated in terms of effective not merely formal freedom. The distinction is that one is formally free to do X if no law forbids the doing of X and no one wrongfully interferes with one’s attempts to do X. One is effectively free to do X provided that if one chooses to do X, and genuinely tries to do X, one will do X.

The ideal of equality of effective freedom is indeterminate pending some specification of significant or valuable freedoms, the ones that should be equally secured for persons. To fix the content of the ideal, it is necessary to identify valuable modes of action or ways of being such as being well nourished, having adequate shelter, having relationships of friendship and love, sustaining close family ties, attaining significant work achievement, experiencing enjoyment in one’s activities and avoiding useless pain, participating in the political life of one’s community, gaining understanding of the world, and so on. Call these various doings and beings ‘functionings,’ and identify equality of freedom with the effective freedom or capability to function in these valuable ways.

Since individuals differ in their traits, they will require different packages of education and resources in order to get (close to) equal effective freedom to function. For the effective freedom approach, what is morally important is not the level of resources that one has access to per se but what one is enabled to do and be by means of these resources.

The equality of freedom approach limits the responsibility of society to provision of real freedom for individuals. The level of actual functionings reached is a ‘don’t care’ from this standpoint. For example, society provides conditions in which each can exercise religious liberty, but whether and how religious freedom is exercised and the resultant spiritual life that people experience is a matter of culture, not justice as equality.

Equality of effective freedom or capability to function as stated does not adopt a stance on personal responsibility. Suppose that an individual has an initial effective freedom to function in some significant way, but squanders the resources that assured the freedom, and when equivalent resources that are supplied again, squanders them again. At some point in this cycle one might suppose that equality of effective freedom should not be sustained further.

However, how to integrate a sensible account of personal responsibility into an egalitarian distributive ethic is far from settled. No account asserted in current discussions has attracted a consensus of support.

4.4 Doubts About Whether Equality Of Condition Is Morally Desirable

The question arises, why should everyone have the same? What makes equality of condition morally desirable? Some theorists suspect the answers are that nothing renders equality of condition per se desirable. One seed of doubt about the intrinsic value of equality is planted by noting that if one can achieve equality or a closer approximation to it by worsening the condition of those who are better off without improving anyone’s condition, from the standpoint of equality one must hold that this leveling down is desirable. This implication of equality is expressed in the slogan, ‘Equality itself is as well pleased by graveyards as by vineyards.’ But a change from the status quo that worsens someone’s condition without making anyone’s condition better in any respect cannot be a change for the better in any respect, some think. This thought rejects the idea that equality of condition is per se desirable.

Asserting the intrinsic moral significance of equality of condition, theorists sometimes note that the wealthy in a prosperous world control enormous amounts of resources while the impoverished of the world lead grim lives in horrible conditions. But a plausible rejoinder (Frankfurt 1987) is that it is evidently not the gap between rich and poor per se that is morally troublesome but rather the sheer badness of the lives that the poorest people on the earth lead. For if the gap between rich and poor were per se significantly objectionable then the same-sized gap between superrich and merely rich should be equally objectionable. But if the latter gap does not seem especially morally problematic, then the relative position of rich and poor cannot be regarded as per se especially morally problematic either.

5. A Puzzle About Basic Equality Status

An egalitarian holds that people should be made equal in some aspect of their condition on some moral ground. What justifies equality among persons on any conception? It is often supposed that nonhuman animals, even if their interests should be considered in determinations of action and policy, do not count for as much as humans. This discounting of animals strikes many as plausible, but what underlies it? The usual suggestion is that normal adult humans have cognitive capacities that render them intrinsically better than animals, so their interests and welfare should count for more. The puzzle then is that normal humans differ significantly in their possession of the cognitive capacities that are supposed to render all humans fundamentally equal in their basic moral status. If an ordinary gorilla has a lesser moral status than an ordinary human because the latter is smarter, why does not the ordinary human have lesser moral status than another human who is much smarter? It might be urged that what makes all persons equal and superior to other animals is that all normal humans have cognitive capacities at some threshold. Having cognitive capacities above the threshold does not confer superior moral status. But why and how this is so is not yet clear.

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