What is the point of equality ?

1. What is the point of equality? Elizabeth Anderson

2. Anderson’s Project • Elizabeth Anderson’s project isthe following: • Distinguish Luck Egalitarianism as an ideal of equality and justice from Democratic Equality. • Argue against the importance of Luck Egalitarianism. • Provide an interpretation and defense of Democratic Equality.

3. Luck Egalitarianism • According to Luck Egalitarianism the aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own. • In the ideal luck egalitarian society, there are no inequalities in people’s life prospects except those that arise through processes of voluntary choice or faulty conduct, for which the people involved can be reasonably held responsible.

4. Democratic Equality • According to the Democratic Equality conception, justice as equalityrequires an end to oppressive social relationships. • In the ideal society of democratic equality, the social conditions of everyone’s freedom are secured, each stands to every other in a relationship of fundamental equality, including equal respect, and all have real freedom to participate in democratic self-government.

5. The Claims of Luck Egalitarianism • Luck Egalitarianism holds that it is morally bad if some are badly off through no fault or choice of their own. • Luck Egalitarianism holds that it is morally bad if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. • In general social justice is important, and requires us to eliminate, so far as is possible, the moral wrongs described in (1) and (2). • So, Luck Egalitarianism is important in so far as social justice is important.

6. Criticism 1 • Luck Egalitarianism takes the distribution of goods and resources to be morally important in its own right, but the concern of social justice should be the quality of human relationships. • What matters is not the distribution of goods, but how the distribution of goods impacts people’s lives and the quality of the relationshipspeoplecan have. • If the quality of human relationships is what fundamentally matters morally, then the distribution of goods is only important instrumentally as a means to enabling the correct quality of human relationships.

7. Criticism 2 • Luck Egalitarianism misconceives the role of individual responsibility in distributive justice. • According to LE misfortune that is due to our own choices, are misfortunes thatjustice as equality are blind to. • As a consequence, LE allows for people to fall below a social safety net simply because they are responsible for their misfortune because they made a free choice. • But justice as equality is not blind to the needs of those that fall into misfortune because of their own choices. • So, LE misconceives the role of individual responsibility in distributive justice.

8. Criticism 3 • Luck Egalitarianism violates the norm that we should respect persons. • LE distributes goods on the basis of inequality in endowment. As a consequence it says that some people have, while others do not, have the appropriate endowment for success in society. • Distributing on the basis of endowment is a form of distributing on the basis of pity. Those that are not endowed properly are deserving because of the pity the endowed feel for the situation of those not endowed with valuable traits and skills. • Distributing on the basis of pity violates respect for persons. • So, LE violates the norm that we should respect persons.

9. Criticism 4 • Luck Egalitarianism wrongfully bloats state authority. • LE maintains that any undeserved inequality in people’s condition can trigger the requirement that the state intervene to alter their condition through compensation or redistribution. • Social justice requires that state intervention respect persons. Respecting persons requires allowing them to live their life as they choose. • So, LE is in conflict with the limits of state authority in terms of respecting persons.

10. Democratic Equality • Democratic equality has three spheres that are central to it: Functioning as a human being, which requires access to the means of sustaining one’s biological existence –food, shelter, clothing, medical care – and access to basic conditions of human agency – knowledge of one’s circumstances and options, and the ability to deliberate about means and ends, the psychological conditions of autonomy, including the self-confidence to think and judge for oneself, and freedom of thought and movement.

11. Democratic Equality • Democratic equality has three spheres that are central to it: Functioning as a participant in a system of cooperative production, which requires effective access to the means of production, access to the education required to develop one’s talents, freedom of occupational choice, the right to make contracts and enter into cooperative agreements with others, the right to receive the fair value for one’s labor, and recognition by others of one’s productive contribution.

12. Democratic Equality • Democratic equality has three spheres that are central to it: Functioning as a citizen in a democratic state, which requires rights of political participation, such as freedom of speech and franchise, and also effective access to the goods and relationships of civil society – freedom of association, access to public spaces, access to public accommodations, and the social conditions of being accepted by others – such as the ability to appear in public without shame, and not being ascribed outcast status.

13. Democratic Equality • Democratic Equality aims for equality across a wide range of capabilities. It does not support comprehensive equality in the space of capabilities. Only some capabilities are to be equalized. • Democratic Equality guarantees not actual levels of functioning, but effective access to those levels. Individuals are free to choose to function at a lower level than they are guaranteed. • Democratic Equality guarantees not effective access to equal levels of functioning, but effective access to levels of functioning sufficient to stand as an equal in society. • Democratic Equality guarantees effective access to a package of capabilities sufficient for standing as an equal over the course of an entire life

14. Examples of Democratic Equality • Feminist work to overcome the internal obstacles to choice –self abnegation, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem– that women often face from internalizing norms of femininity. • Gays and Lesbians seek the ability to publicly reveal their identities without shame or fear, which requires significant changes in social relations of contempt and hostility, and changes in norms of gender and sexuality. • The disabled aim to reconfigure public spaces to make them accessible and adapt work situations to their needs, so that they can participate in productive activity

15. Democratic Equality and Low Talents • Equality of fortune would offer compensation to those with low talents precisely because their innate inferiority makes their labor so relatively worthless to others as judged by the market. • Democratic equality calls into question the very idea that inferior native endowments have much to do with observed income inequalities in capitalist economies. The biggest fortunes are not made by those that work, but by those that own the means of production. • Democratic equality stresses the importance of educating the less advantaged and by offering firms incentives to increase the productivity of low-wage jobs through capital investment.