Egalitarianism Research Paper

1. The Origins Of Egalitarianism

As just noted, in modern democracies equality in one or other of its versions has gained widespread acceptance as a political principle. For most of human history, however, this was not so. The idea that all human beings are, at some level, one another’s equals can be found in the major religions and in a variety of cultures. But this foundational equality did not translate into a demand that human beings should associate politically on an equal footing. On the contrary, although a society of equals was sometimes presented as a Golden Age, or a utopian vision of the future, the current human condition was thought to require hierarchical relations in which men exercised authority over women, masters over slaves, lords over vassals and so forth. Accordingly if we search through the texts of classical or medieval political thought, we do not find equality held up as a principle that should inform existing practice (see Lakoff 1964)

This began to change in the early modern period, with the emergence of the centralized state and the accompanying gradual transition to a market economy. The state was founded on the assumption that everyone living within its territorial boundaries was to be equally subject to its authority and its laws. This idea was expressed with particular clarity by contractarian thinkers such as Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke, who argued that the state emerged from a covenant between men whose natural condition was one of equality: each had equal rights by nature, and they would therefore consent only to a state whose laws afforded them equal protection. Meanwhile the gradual shift away from feudal economic relations, in which people were linked together in a vertical hierarchy, toward a market economy, in which contracts and exchanges took place between individuals who were at least formally equal to one another, fostered the notion that each person had an equal right to freedom, and an equal right to the fruits of his labor.

By the end of the eighteenth century these principles had become widely accepted in Western societies, and found expression in the two great political documents of that era—the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—both of which boldly inscribed the principle of equality at the heart of political life. In practice, however, equality was still very far from being realized: large sections of the population (most notably women and the working class) were still denied the vote, many Americans found it possible to reconcile the equal rights of mankind with the practice of slavery, and economic opportunities still depended very largely on inherited social position. The story of the last two centuries can be seen from one angle as the steady (though still far from complete) overcoming of these inequalities in the name of equality itself.

2. Political Equality

The fierce debates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the extension of full political rights first to the working class and then to women have long since ended, and yet the issue of political equality is still far from settled. One problem has to do with representation. Even though every citizen in contemporary democracies has an equal right to vote, those elected are still primarily male, middle class, and drawn from majority ethnic groups. Does this matter? The answer depends on whether political representation means the representation of interests, and if so whether the elected members are able adequately to represent the interests of those who belong to a different section of the population. Critics argue that political equality requires the direct presence, in elected bodies, of people drawn from different groups in society, who are then able to articulate the perspectives and interests of those groups in an undistorted way (see Phillips 1995).

A second problem has to do with majorities and minorities—a problem, it should be noted, that may arise even within fully representative political institutions. At first sight it might seem as though political equality entails the majority principle for making decisions, since this is the only method of deciding issues that gives each vote an equal weight. But consider a case in which a relatively apathetic majority defeats a minority whose members care intensely about the issue that is being decided; or consider a case in which a minority group finds itself repeatedly outvoted in a series of decisions that affect its interests. Reflection on these cases suggests that political equality entails more than just formally equal voting rights. It requires something like an equal chance to influence the outcome of the decision procedure. But it is hard to design institutions that can achieve political equality in this fuller sense (see Beitz 1989).

3. Equality Of Opportunity

Alongside political equality, equality of opportunity—the principle that each person should have an equal chance to gain jobs, offices, and other positions of advantage—has become a staple of liberal-democratic thinking. Yet here, too, we find ongoing disagreement about how the principle should be understood. In its original formulation, it meant simply that there should be no legal barriers preventing those with certain characteristics (class or religious affiliation, for example) from attending schools and universities, entering careers or holding public office. But this left in place the practical obstacles, chiefly lack of resources, that effectively closed off such options to many citizens. Many people therefore now take equality of opportunity to mean what John Rawls has called fair equality of opportunity, the principle that ‘those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system’ (Rawls 1971, p. 73). Taken literally, this calls for the elimination of all those disparate influences—family background, school choice, and so forth—that today help to determine a person’s likely social destination. Most liberal thinking opts for the middle ground: the state should try to mitigate disadvantage by, for example, curtailing the right to inherit, and insuring that children from all backgrounds have access to good schools, but it should not interfere directly with the transmission of cultural and other advantages through the family (see Fishkin 1983 for an analysis).

4. Equality Of Outcome

The most radical versions of egalitarianism hold that equality of opportunity is not enough, since even in its stronger Rawlsian guise it still permits a person’s life prospects to be determined by their talent and ability. Instead it should be the goal of public policy to make every citizen as materially well off as every other, except insofar as people can be held personally responsible for having less (thus equality of outcome, as it is usually understood, does not require that people who gamble away their share of resources should subsequently be compensated).

Several questions may be asked about equality of outcome. The most basic has to do with the respect or respects in which people’s condition is to be made equal—what is sometimes referred to as the currency of equality. The natural currency might seem to be that of welfare: how much happiness or well-being each person enjoys. This suggestion faces acute difficulties of measurement—how can we decide when one person is happier or has more welfare than another?—but beyond that it may be criticized on grounds of principle. Someone’s level of welfare depends in part on how far they are able to realize their aims and ambitions, but should they not be held responsible for having these aims and ambitions in the first place? Should equality involve giving more material resources to people whose welfare is reduced because they cannot fulfil expensive ambitions such as consuming fine wines or collecting great works of art?

Some contemporary liberals, most notably Ronald Dworkin, have therefore advocated equality of resources as a better alternative to equality of welfare (Dworkin 2000). People are equal, on this view, when they have access to resources of equal value, which they can then choose to use in whatever way their preferences dictate. Dworkin proposes the device of an auction as a way of determining when external resources are equally distributed. He has greater difficulty when he comes to deal with internal resources, the talents and abilities that determine what people can do with the external resources they are given. How can equality be achieved here without forcing highly talented individuals to use their talents in ways that they may strongly dislike—the so-called ‘slavery of the talented’ (Roemer 1985)?

A further problem for equality of resources is that it appears not to accommodate people whose special needs mean that they derive less welfare than others from a given bundle of resources almost regardless of their preferences about how to live. In recognition of this problem, a third interpretation of equality of outcome has been proposed by Amartya Sen: basic capability equality, according to which people should as far as possible be made equally capable of achieving a set of functionings, such as being well nourished, moving about, etc. (Sen 1992). Sen claims that this conception focuses, properly, on what resources can do for people, as opposed to the bare fact of having resources, while it avoids the difficulties that arise when equality is defined in terms of happiness or preference satisfaction. It does, however, face the problem of comparing different capability sets. If I can do A, B and C and you can do D, E and F, how do we decide whether we are equal or unequal to each other, without surreptitiously referring to a criterion such as welfare?

5. Social Equality

Equality of outcome faces serious problems beyond that of finding a suitable currency in which to express it. The most rehearsed of these is perhaps the incentives problem: if everyone is to be made equally well off at the end of the day, what incentive is there for people to use their talents in productive ways? A different line of criticism challenges the view that equality of outcome is something we should care about ethically. Instead, it is argued, we should be concerned about sufficiency—about insuring that everyone reaches a standard of living sufficient to satisfy their essential needs and interests, or alternatively about giving priority to the worst off—about insuring that public policy attaches special weight to improving the material situation of those who have least. (See Raz 1986, Chap. 9, Frankfurt 1987, Parfit 1998 for arguments of these kinds.)

Another view maintains that inequalities of outcome matter only when they create social inequalities. On this view, what matters is that each member of a given society should feel himself or herself to be the equal of every other, that there should be no inequalities of status such that A regards himself as socially inferior to B in an across-the-board sense. One way to achieve this is to prevent inequalities from accumulating in such a way that when B enjoys more goods of one kind than A, he also enjoys more goods of other kinds. Michael Walzer has applied the term ‘complex equality’ to a society where different people are ahead along different dimensions of advantage (some enjoy greater wealth, others more power, yet others are more highly educated, and so forth) and there are blocking mechanisms that prevent people from using their advantaged position on one dimension to gain unjust advantages on others (Walzer 1983). One merit of this way of understanding equality is that it allows justice and equality to be reconciled, even in cases where justice itself mandates inequality, such as cases in which some people deserve more than others. Such justified inequalities need not threaten social equality provided Walzer’s conditions are met. (See Miller 1999, Chap. 11 for a fuller discussion.)

Bibliography:

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