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Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. So long as they live in a society built on injustice, even those who have not incurred guilt are responsible for correcting it. If some of the most serious criticisms of Donald Trump concentrate on his character , we must not allow the experience of the past four years to lead to the corruption of our own.
Our best chance of putting an end to extreme divisiveness is to exhibit the virtues that Trump himself so sorely lacks. After all, society is only as good as the individuals that constitute it.
Contrary to arguments that the concepts of national identity and state sovereignty have become outmoded, an inclusive sense of national identity remains critical to maintaining a successful modern political order.
But that clock is now in a state of terminal disrepair. What would Thomas Jefferson and James Madison say if they saw the all-consuming factionalism in our capitol, and the climate of fearfulness, intimidation and conflict in our universities?
A perfectionist is not a person who links her sense of accomplishment to impossibly high standards — someone for whom nothing is good enough. Rather, perfectionism is a philosophical perspective, one that depicts moral excellence as a matter of continual striving and self-criticism.
The perfectionist has never arrived; the perfectionist is always on the way. Is there a better way to capture the essence of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Trump presidency may be just the nadir we needed, but it can only give rise to genuinely new possibilities if we insist on what Trump insists on: that he and the party of Reagan are one. Mere civility reminds us that the temptation to achieve a tolerant society through exclusion is constant.
We need to be careful that we are not eager to avoid the disagreeableness of disagreement in favour of the more agreeable company of the like-minded. At the heart of liberalism, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke , is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence. Frederick Douglass was a prophet in a time of national destruction, exile, war and redemption. Jeremiah and Isaiah gave him story, metaphor and resolve to deliver his ferocious critique of slavery and hold out hope after The United States is being hit by a series of interconnected crises.
It has been hit by crises before, but not in this order, not in this magnitude, and not in this environment. Understanding the multiple, overlapping catastrophes, and how they echo but do not repeat their historical counterparts, is crucial to understanding where US politics is now.
Overtly political films have never been popular in American cinema. No other American filmmaker has confronted the internal contradictions of America in a more revealing way. An exchange with philosopher John Dewey is central to this misreading. In our current political malaise, this is an exchange well worth revisiting.
Opinion Why liberty depends on political equality Danielle Allen. Friday 20 November pm. Newsletter Subscribe. John Rawls and the principles of political morality John Rawls was deeply concerned about being understood. The moral case for reparations Those responsible for slavery may be long gone, but many of the corporate entities that legalised and profited from slavery still exist.
The vision of personal responsibility that is integral to Dworkin's approach does not characterize the broader family of resourcist distributive fairness doctrines that eschews interpersonal welfare comparisons and investigates variants of the no-envy test see Fleurbaey for an accessible survey and somewhat skeptical exploration, and Varian for an early contribution. Go back to the idea that a viable account of equal distribution must be appropriately sensitive to personal responsibility by dictating compensation for unchosen endowments but not for ambition and choice.
The most far-reaching skepticism on this point denies that personal responsibility can be more than instrumentally valuable, a tool for securing other values. One might hold that in a world in which human choices are events and all events are caused by prior events according to physical laws, responsibility can make sense pragmatically and instrumentally in various settings but does not really make good normative sense under scrutiny.
One might reach a similar result by noting that even if persons are truly responsible for making some choices rather than others, what we could reasonably be held responsible for and what surely lies beyond our power to control run together to produce actual results and cannot be disentangled.
On this view, if we care about equality, we should seek not responsibility-modified equality but straight equality of condition, using responsibility norms only as incentives and prods to bring about equality or a close enough approximation to it at a higher level of material well-being.
Another sort of skepticism challenges whether the broad project of holding people responsible for their chosen luck but not for their unchosen luck really makes sense, because unchosen luck of genetic inheritance and early socialization fixes the individual's choice-making and value-selecting abilities. What one chooses, bad or good, may simply reflect the unchosen luck that gave one the ability to be a good or a bad chooser.
Suppose for example that Smith chooses to experiment with cigarettes and heroin, and these gambles turn out badly in the form of contraction of lung cancer and long-term hard drug addiction. He is then far worse off than others, but his bad fortune comes about through his own choice—hence is not compensable according to Dworkinian equality of resources. But that Smith chooses these bad gambles and Jones does not may simply reflect the unchosen bad luck that Smith had in his genetic inheritance and early socialization.
So holding him fully responsible for the fortune he encounters through chosen gambles may make no sense if we follow through the underlying logic of the Dworkin proposal itself. This takes us back to welfarist equality conceptions, which the resourcist theorist wishes to steer away from at all cost Roemer and The ideal of equality of welfare holds that it is desirable that the amount of human good gained by each person for herself and by others for her over the course of her life should be the same.
Human good, also known as welfare or well-being or utility, is what an individual gets insofar as her life goes well for herself Parfit , Appendix I. This awkward phrase is meant to distinguish one's life going well for oneself, as one would wish one's life to go from the standpoint of rational prudence, and its going well by way of producing good that enters the lives of other people or animals or fulfills some impersonal good cause.
Suppose my life in its entirety consists in sticking my finger in a dike and slowly painfully freezing to death, like the little Dutch boy in the children's fable. So lived, this life produces lots of good for millions of people saved from flood and drowning, but for me it produces no good, just slow misery. The life just imagined is a good in the sense of morally admirable life but not a life that contains much welfare or human good for the one living it.
The background thought is then that morality is concerned with the production and fair distribution of human good. Nothing else ultimately matters except animal and nonhuman person welfare, but leave these important qualifications aside.
So to the extent we believe that fair distribution is equal distribution, that morality requires that everyone get the same, what everyone should then have the same of is human good or welfare or well-being. To work out this conception of equality of condition would involve determining what account of the nature of human good is most plausible. One account is hedonism, which holds the good to be pleasure and absence of pain.
Pleasure and the absence of pain might be identified with happiness, but there are alternative accounts of happiness. For example, one might hold that a person is happy at a time just in case she is satisfied with how her life is going at that time, and happy regarding her life as a whole up to now to the degree she is satisfied with how her life has gone as a whole up to now.
If one identifies the good with happiness according to this or another construal of what it is to be happy, we have a non-hedonic happiness account of human good Sumner , Haybron , and Feldman Another account identifies the good with desire satisfaction or life aim fulfillment.
A variant of this last approach holds that the relevant aims and desires are those that would withstand ideal reflection with full information unmarred by cognitive error such as adding two and two and getting five.
A quite different account supposes that the good is constituted by the items on a list of objectively valuable beings and doings. The more the individual attains the items on the objective list over the course of her life, the better her life goes, whatever her subjective opinions and attitudes about such attainments might be.
There are also hybrid views, such as that the good is valuable achievement that one enjoys, or that the good is getting what one wants for its own sake in so far as what one wants and gets is also objectively valuable Parfit , Appendix I; Adams , chapter 3.
The most plausible conception of the ideal of equality of welfare incorporates whatever is the best theory of human good or welfare. In this connection see Griffin and Hurka Any such account bumps into problems concerning personal responsibility and the sense that the obligations of society are limited—problems already mentioned in this discussion.
A society bent on sustaining equality of welfare would continue pouring resources down the drain if worse off individuals insist on negligently squandering whatever resources are expended on them in order to boost their welfare level up to the average level. One might respond to this responsibility challenge by stipulating that equality is only desirable on the condition that individuals are equally responsible or deserving: It is bad if some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own.
In a slogan, one might assert an ideal of equality of opportunity for welfare. Another criticism does not so much challenge the welfarist interpretation of equality of condition but presses the issue, how much weight any such equality of condition ideal should have in competition with other values. Imagine for example that some people, the severely disabled, are far worse off than others, and are through no fault or choice of their own extremely poor transformers of resources into welfare.
A society bent on sustaining equality of welfare or equal opportunity for welfare as a first priority would be obligated to continue transferring resources from better off to worse off no matter how many better off people must then suffer any amount of welfare loss just so long as the pertinent welfare condition of a single still worse off individual can be improved even by a tiny amount.
Another criticism challenges the welfarist conceptions of equality of condition directly. One observes that in a diverse modern society, individuals will reasonably disagree about what is ultimately good and worthwhile in human life.
Hence no conception of welfare is available to serve as a consensus standard for a public morality acceptable to all reasonable persons. In a similar spirit, one might invoke the idea that responsible individuals cannot acquiesce in the assumption of the responsibility on the part of the government to determine what is worthwhile and choiceworthy for them, for this responsibility rests squarely on each individual's shoulders and cannot legitimately be dislodged from that perch.
See especially Dworkin, , chapter 7, also Arneson Notice that equality of welfare and equal opportunity for welfare do not exhaust the welfarist egalitarian alternatives. Take the example of a view that is oriented to equality of perfectionist achievement achievement of objectively valuable achievements of a kind that make one's life go better for oneself.
One might hold that what is morally valuable and ought to be promoted is equality of achievement, or equal opportunity for achievement, or another view along the lines of equal achievement of one's potential or equal opportunity to achieve one's potential.
Say that each person has a native talent for achievement. I have little native talent; you have a lot. Egalitarianism might be construed as requiring that so far as is possible, social arrangements be set so that each of us achieves, or can achieve, the same percentage of his native potential over the course of her life.
Everyone's ratio of actual achievement to native potential for achievement should be the same. So my having the opportunity to achieve little, and my actually achieving little, compared to you, on this conception would not necessarily offend against the egalitarian ideal see McMahan , and for the thought that measurement of achievements on a single scale is chimerical, Raz Philosophical discussions of what should be equalized if we care about equality of condition raise dust that has not yet settled in any sort of consensus.
All the rival views canvassed encounter difficulties, the seriousness of which is at present hard to discern. It should be noted that the issue, how to measure people's condition for purposes of a theory of equality, connects to a broader issue, how to measure people's condition for purposes of a theory of fair distribution.
Equality is just one of the possible views that might be taken as to what fair treatment requires. Any theory of distributive justice that says that sometimes better off persons should improve the situation of worse off persons requires an account of the basis of interpersonal comparisons that enables us to determine who is better off and who is worse off.
Finally, the reader might wish to test the merits of rival answers to the equality-of-what question by considering a social justice issue different in character from the issues considered so far. Suppose a society is divided into two or more linguistic communities, one being by far the most populous. The language of the dominant community is the official language of public life, and a minority linguistic group demands redress in the name of social equality.
The minority group seeks government action to help sustain and promote the survival and flourishing of the minority linguistic community. For another example, suppose a modern democratic society contains more or less intact remnants of hunter-gatherer bands who claim in the name of social equality the right to withdraw from the larger surrounding society and practice their traditional way of life and run their affairs autonomously.
How should a society committed to an ideal of equality of condition handle this type of issue? See Kymlicka , Young , Anderson , and Barry The discussion so far presupposes that an egalitarian holds that in some respect people should get the same or be accorded the same treatment. There are other possibilities. One is the idea that in an egalitarian society people should relate to one another as equals or should enjoy the same fundamental status and also perhaps the same rank and power.
Relational equality ideals are often coupled with the ideal of equal democratic citizenship. On this view, in an egalitarian society, all permanent adult members of society are equal citizens, equal in political rights and duties, including the right to an equal vote in democratic elections that determine who shall be top public officials and lawmakers responsible for enacting laws and public policies enforced on all.
An ideal of social equality complements political equality norms. The idea is that citizens might be unequal in wealth, resources, welfare, and other dimensions of their condition, yet be equal in status in a way that enables all to relate as equals. On this approach, an egalitarian society contrasts sharply with a society of caste or class hierarchy, in which the public culture singles out some as inferior and some as superior, and contrasts also with a society with a dictatorial or authoritarian political system, accompanied by socially required kowtowing of ordinary members of society toward political elites.
From the standpoint of the relational equality versions of egalitarianism, equality of condition doctrines get the moral priorities backward. These doctrines make a fetish of what should not matter to us, or should not matter very much.
A better approach is to look at distributive justice issues by asking what social and distributive arrangements are needed to establish and sustain a society of free, equal people, a society in which individuals all relate as equals.
When the question is posed in this way, relational equality advocates sometimes claim to discern a new strong case for embracing a sufficientarian approach to distributive justice. That some people have more money than others is not an impediment to a society of equals, the argument goes. But if some are so poor they are effectively excluded from market society or pushed to its margins, they are in effect branded as socially inferior, which offends against relational equality.
Some philosophers argue for some restriction on the size of the gap between richest and poorest that society tolerates, again as what is needed to sustain a society of equals.
Others might see the difference principle as required for the same purpose. Some also pleas for institutional insulation of the political and some social spheres so as to protect these as realms of equality from the corrosive influence of economic inequality Walzer and Rawls , Lecture VIII.
The ideal of a just modern society as a democratic society in which citizens relate as equals appears in writings by Michael Walzer on social justice Walzer, Cohen and Ronald Dworkin Cohen , Anderson , Scheffler , chapters 7 and 8, Dworkin , and for responses to criticisms, Dworkin and and Arneson According to Anderson, the luck egalitarian holds that unchosen and uncourted inequalities ought to be eliminated and that chosen and courted inequalities should be left standing. She criticizes these views on several grounds.
One is that the luck egalitarian wrongly takes the aim of egalitarian justice to be achieving an equal distribution of stuff rather than egalitarian solidarity and respect among members of society.
Another is that the policy recommendations implied by luck egalitarian principles are too harsh in their dealings with people who fare badly but are deemed personally responsible for their plight see also Fleurbaey A third is that the luck egalitarian, in order to establish that people who are badly off are owed equalizing compensation, must involve distributive agencies in intrusive and disrespectful inquiries that issue in public negative assessments of people's traits as grounding the conclusion that these unfortunate individuals are not properly held personally responsible for their misfortune see also Wolff A related criticism is that luck egalitarianism adopts a moralizing posture toward individual wayward choice that would make sense only if free will libertarianism were correct Scheffler A further criticism is that the luck egalitarian supposes that if we aim to undo unchosen luck, this aim somehow provides an underlying justification for some form of equal distribution Hurley It is not clear that undoing the influence of unchosen luck has anything to do with promoting equal distribution: consider that sometimes via unchosen luck people end up equally well off.
A better strategy is for the luck egalitarian to start with the intuitive idea that distribution should be equal and then allow that this presumption for equality can be taken away when people could sustain equal distribution and instead end up unequally well off via individual choices.
Equality is deemed morally valuable on the condition that inequality does not emerge from choices for which people are reasonably held responsible. Another criticism of luck egalitarianism, pressed by Scheffler and especially Anderson, is that the doctrine engenders an inappropriate expansion of what is deemed to be the legitimate business of the state. Suppose we distinguish roughly between misfortune that is imposed on people by social action and social arrangements and misfortune that just falls on people without being imposed by anyone.
The distinction draws a line between inequality due to society and inequality due to nature. Relational equality ideals might be regarded either as required by justice or as not required by justice or other morally mandatory principles, rather as morally optional. Or a component of social equality might count as a justice requirement while another component is treated as a part of a broader social ideal that is desirable but not mandatory. The idea of relating as equals can be construed in different ways.
The idea is that equality of rank, power, and status is both instrumentally valuable and valuable for its own sake. He immediately notes that such differences are ubiquitous in the social life of modern industrial democracies, so equality so understood is puzzling.
If the ideal calls on us to tear down and completely restructure the social life of modern industrial democracies, it looks problematic.
Why accept this demand? If one qualifies and hedges the ideal, so it is less revisionary, then the question arises, what is the basis for drawing these lines of qualification and hedge. At this point the advocate of an equality of condition doctrine in the luck egalitarian range may see an opening. The advocate may urge that we should regard inequalities in rank, power, and status not as desirable or undesirable in themselves but in purely instrumental terms, as means or impediments to fundamental justice goals, the ones identified by the best version of luck egalitarianism.
For example, a welfarist luck egalitarian will say that the inequalities in rank, power, and status that we should accept are those that contribute effectively to promoting good lives for people, taking account of fair distribution of good across individual persons. The inequalities that are impediments to promoting good lives for people, fairly distributed, we should oppose. The luck egalitarian will add that we should distinguish two different claims that might be asserted in holding that Schefflerian social equality is valuable.
Social inequality might be affirmed either as morally wrong or as humanly bad, something a prudent person would seek to avoid. The luck egalitarian critic of this relational equality ideal is committed only to rejecting it as a proposal for the domain of moral right. If being on the lower rungs of a status hierarchy were per se a way in which one's life might go badly, like failing to attain significant achievement or to have healthy friendships, it would register in a luck egalitarian calculation of a person's situation that determines what we fundamentally owe one another—at least according to versions of luck egalitarianism that affirm a welfarist measure of people's condition.
One might invoke the Rawlsian political liberalism project Rawls, In this project what is rock-bottom is the idea of society as a system of fair cooperation among free and equal people. This idea is understood in philosophically noncommittal ways so that it can plausibly command support from all of the reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the right and the good affirmed by members of society and also from reasonable individuals who affirm no such comprehensive conception. The principles of justice are the principles people committed to this idea of social cooperation would affirm as capturing the core of their intuitive pre-theoretical commitment.
Norms of relational equality that figure in this scheme would then qualify as principles of justice that all citizens of modern democracies can affirm, and to which we are already implicitly committed. To evaluate this suggestion one would have to examine and assess the Rawlsian political liberalism project.
An alternative construal of the relational equality ideal proposes that people in a society relate as equals when the society's political constitution is democratic and all members are enabled to be fully functioning members of democratic society Walzer , Anderson So understood, the relational equality ideal becomes a version of the sufficiency doctrine on which, see section 6. Relational equality advocates usually advance their equality ideal as a rival to other understandings of equality including luck egalitarianism.
But these disparate equality ideals need not be opposed. For example, one could 1 affirm relational equality and hold that in a just society people should relate as free and equal and also 2 affirm luck egalitarianism and hold that people should be equal in their condition according to their holdings and attainments of resources, capabilities, or welfare or according to some other measure except that people's being less well off than others is acceptable if the worse off could have avoided this fate by reasonable voluntary choice.
One could uphold both ideals even if they sometimes conflict. One could also mix and match elements of these different equality ideals.
For example, one might hold that people should have equal status and relate as equals but add that one can legitimately be demoted to lesser status by being responsible for making bad choices or failing to make good choices. Along this line, even a staunch democratic equality advocate might allow that by virtue of committing a serious crime and being convicted of this offense one forfeits some citizenship rights at least for a time.
Egregiously bad conduct might warrant exile. Along the same line, some benefits disbursed by a democratic state might be made conditional on specified forms of responsible choice. These moves would all involve qualifying the relational equality ideal by a luck egalitarian commitment to appropriate sensitivity to personal responsibility. On the other side, a luck egalitarian view might allow that in certain domains entitlement to equal treatment might be forfeitable by one's irresponsible choice but maintain that there is a floor of democratic equality status to which all members of society are unconditionally entitled.
Taking this stance would be to qualify commitment to luck egalitarianism by a constraint of insistence on some democratic equality. Luck egalitarianism could be a module or component in either a consequentialist or non-consequentialist moral doctrine.
Luck egalitarianism might specify one goal or even the sole goal to be promoted in the former, or might be understood as a deontically required form of treatment in the latter.
The same is true of the relational equality ideal. That people should relate as free and equal might be taken to be a goal to be promoted or an entitlement to be respected. The discussion of relational equality versus luck egalitarianism has stressed the relational equality critique of the luck egalitarian way of integrating personal responsibility concerns into the ideal of equality.
There are other lines of potential conflict. What these are will turn on the particular versions of the ideals being considered.
For example, consider versions of luck egalitarianism that affirm the idea that all should have equal opportunity for welfare as assessed over the life course. The advocate of views in the welfarist equality of condition family will worry that relational equality could be fully achieved world-wide even if in each society some people lead avoidably miserable and squalid lives and even if in some societies people on the average are far more likely to lead avoidably miserable and squalid lives than in other societies.
In other words, the concern is that the relational equality ideal pays no heed to the moral imperative of bringing it about that people lead genuinely good lives, or have the opportunity to lead genuinely good lives, while ensuring that the opportunities for good are fairly distributed. Settling which aspect of people's condition if any should be the same for all and fixing a measure of people's condition in this respect still does not render an ideal of equality of condition fully determinate.
So far the question remains open, among whom should equality of condition obtain? The same question arises if one dismisses or downgrades the equality of condition views and takes some relational equality ideal to capture the core morally required egalitarian aspiration. Among whom should equality, of whatever type is deemed morally required, obtain? At some spots the discussion to this point has assumed an answer to this question. The issue is posed, in what ways should the members of a society or nation state be made equal?
Framing the issue in this way presumes that what is morally valuable is that equality prevails among the members of each separate society. Select basic ads.
Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Egalitarianism is a philosophical perspective that emphasizes equality and equal treatment across gender, religion, economic status, and political beliefs.
Egalitarianism may focus on income inequality and distribution, which are ideas that influenced the development of various economic and political systems. Egalitarianism also looks at how individuals are treated under the law. Karl Marx used egalitarianism as the starting point in the creation of his Marxist philosophy, and John Locke considered egalitarianism when he proposed that individuals had natural rights.
One of the significant tenets of egalitarianism is that all people are fundamentally equal. Egalitarianism can be examined from a social perspective that considers ways to reduce economic inequalities or a political perspective that considers ways to ensure the equal treatment and rights of diverse groups of people.
A current prominent issue regarding egalitarianism is international migration. A debate in many countries analyzes the effects of immigration on their domestic citizens only, and some seek to restrict immigration to protect domestic economic interests.
The reality is that immigration is a significant gain for those who move to a new country. Philosophers break down egalitarianism into several types.
Proponents of economic egalitarianism, or material egalitarianism, believe every member of society should have equal access to wealth. Economic egalitarianism forms the basis for Marxism and socialism. In terms of wealth and finance in free-market economies, supporters of economic egalitarianism believe everyone has the right to accumulate wealth. Therefore, each individual should have the opportunity to make money in this system. People may amass wealth through investments, entrepreneurial efforts, and income from employment.
Starting a business can be attempted by anyone and represents an opportunity to make money. The entrepreneur will typically seek financing and invest the capital in a business enterprise.
Customers have an equal opportunity to buy the company's products or services. Finally, these consumers have an equal choice to respond to the company's prices and quality of goods or services to make an informed decision about a purchase. A few things limit economic egalitarianism in a free market society. Money supply , inflation, lack of jobs, and consumer prices may limit economic activity for people who lack wealth.
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