The Nature and Limits of Human Equality

John Charvet

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137329165
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

The belief in equality as the basis of a just society is fundamental to the dominant western, liberal viewpoint. Yet, the standard individualist justification for it is weak and contradictory. This book provides a radically new communitarian account of the value of equality and establishes it's proper limits.

1

The Strange Neglect of the Basis of Equality in Contemporary Egalitarianism

Basic equality

A view widely held in contemporary Western ethical thinking is that all serious thought about political ethics in the modern world must begin with a belief in human equality that is substantive rather than formal. This is the belief that justifies Ronald Dworkin’s claim, in a phrase frequently endorsed, that modern political philosophy inhabits an egalitarian plateau.¹ This book will begin with a discussion of what this substantive sense of equality is. However, the book’s main aim is to explore the very serious problems that arise from the way in which this sense of equality has been standardly justified and to propose a revision of that justification which will resolve these problems. Subsequently, the implications of this revised version for acceptable principles of justice, at national and international levels, will be discussed.

The nature of the modern commitment to equality is sometimes explained as arising from the very idea of morality. It is believed that it is incompatible with a moral attitude to relations between human beings that one should attach more weight to the interests of some than to the interests of others for reasons that cannot be justified from the moral point of view. In an off-quoted phrase, each person is to count for one and nobody for more than one.² This is sometimes regarded as purely a matter of the meaning of the moral words as by Hare.³ Amartya Sen, on the other hand, believes that a basic equality, which consists in the requirement to give equal consideration to everyone’s interests in the determination of social arrangements, arises from the need to be able to defend a proposed scheme of social organization to everyone affected by it. He believes that it is implausible to think that one could successfully do this in a way that attaches more weight to the interests of some than to the interests of others.⁴

However, is this need for justification itself an ethical requirement or a pragmatic consideration? If it is the latter only, then it would seem to permit the justification of a proposed scheme on the grounds that it brings peace in a situation by reflecting accurately the balance of power between the parties even though it gives more weight to the interests of the stronger party. If one rejects such a proposed justification because one believes that it is ethically unacceptable, one is already committed to the view that an acceptable justification must treat the participants in an arrangement as equals in the sense that their interests must count equally in some fundamental way. I am committed to such a position in this book, namely that a basic notion of human equality is present in the very idea of an ethical justification. Ethical justification is what we are concerned with in considering the nature and limits of human equality and such justification demands that we treat each party to a suggested social scheme as an equal end, by which I mean that each person’s interests must count equally in the determination of the scheme’s system of rights and duties. This is not so much a logical point as a central aspect of the human practice of ethical interaction. The problem then becomes not so much why we should accept a basic equality, but why we should be interested in interacting on ethical terms. I shall attempt to answer this question when I give my revised account of the justification of the modern point of view on equality in Chapter 4.

However, the above account of the equality present in ethical justification is not a strong enough sense of equality to generate the egalitarian standpoint of modern political philosophy. It is undoubtedly a basic and important equality but it is, at the same time, compatible with the justification of unequal and hierarchically organized societies, such as those justified in the perfectionist ethics of Plato and Aristotle. Plato does not say that the interests of those with inferior rational capacities count less than the interests of the superior and hence should be sacrificed to the interests of the superior. He claims that the inferiors’ subordination to the rule of the higher type of man is in the inferiors’ best interests and that under such a rule all are treated equally.⁵ Aristotle’s view of the interests of natural slaves and women is the same.⁶

There is, however, a kind of formal equality present in some supposedly ethical theories which do not recognize the requirement in my account of a basic moral equality that everyone be recognized as an equal end. Thus a standard objection to direct forms of utilitarianism is that it permits the subordination of the interests of some to others should that be the best way to maximize the general utility. Each person’s interest counts for only one, yet the gains to the advantaged party arising from a socially inegalitarian scheme outweigh the losses to the disadvantaged. In such a calculus everyone is not being treated as an equal end since the interests of some in maximizing their utility is not being given equal consideration with that of others.

In a recent research paper,⁷ which unusually explores the question of the basis of equality, Jeremy Waldron discusses the claims of Hastings Rashdall, the early twentieth-century English writer on ethics. Waldron believes that Rashdall is a clear case of someone who does not accept a basic human equality but perceives a radical division within humanity between higher and lower races or individuals. The ground for Rashdall’s distinction is capacity for high culture. He claims that the white races have a greater capacity for the higher life than the Chinese or the Africans. He thinks that this may justify the sacrifice of the lower well-being of countless Chinese for the sake of the higher life of a much smaller number of white men. He denies that one can still identify a sense in which the interests of the superior and inferior beings are given equal consideration. He says that ‘individuals or races with higher capacities (i.e. capacities for a higher sort of well-being) have a right to a more than equal consideration’.⁸

Rashdall is a perfectionist in ethics like Plato and Aristotle but they believe that a social arrangement that subordinates inferior types of human being to the higher types must be justifiable to the former in terms of their best interests. Rashdall is clearly rejecting this view since he admits that the value present in the higher life ‘may not contribute to the greater good of those who do not share it’. His ground for so doing lies in his conception of the higher life ‘as intrinsically, in and for itself, more valuable than lower life’. Because the higher life is intrinsically more valuable, it may be permissible to promote its realization in the world with little regard to the costs thereby imposed on lower life. Indeed, this is the standard attitude of human beings to animals.⁹

Nevertheless, it does not seem to me that Rashdall is claiming that the good of some people, such as white men, counts for more than that of others just because they are white or possess some other axiologically irrelevant attribute. He is saying that the lives of white people are more valuable because they (potentially) contain a higher intrinsic value than the lives of Chinese or Africans. His underlying principle would seem to be that in itself one human life is no more valuable than another. Its value depends on its potentiality for realizing the good, and in any such calculation one must distinguish the intrinsically more valuable higher goods from lower ones. Individual lives are vehicles of value and these vehicles in themselves count equally and lives of equal potentiality will possess equal value.¹⁰ While it will still be the case that on his view of value the bearers of lower-value lives may be sacrificed for the greater good that others may achieve, this is similar to the willingness of direct utilitarianism to sacrifice the interests of some for the sake of a greater overall utility. So Rashdall’s view, like that of direct utilitarianism, does not recognize the basic moral equality that I believe requires the fundamental interests of each individual to be given equal consideration. On Rashdall’s theory of the good, the fundamental interest of each individual is to maximize the realization of his potential for being the vehicle of objective value. Rashdall says this interest may be sacrificed to the interests of the higher types. This is probably the view of Friedrich Nietzsche as well.

What is the difference between the perfectionism of Plato and Aristotle and that of Rashdall? How can they reach such radically different views of the claims of the lower types? The former take seriously what I am calling a basic moral equality. Rashdall and Nietzsche do not. Nor does direct utilitarianism. To take seriously a basic moral equality is to treat each person’s fundamental interest in achieving a good life as worthy of equal consideration.

It should be noted that the enormously influential utilitarian J. S. Mill makes the same distinction as Rashdall between intrinsically higher and lower life and avoids Rashdall’s conclusions only through some questionable claims about people’s natural capacities.¹¹

What is the justification for denying that Rashdall’s kind of perfectionism as well as direct utilitarianism are serious ethical views? The presupposition of such a claim is that ethical interaction is a human cooperative practice. It involves an undertaking on the part of the participants to interact on certain terms and these are the terms that define the ethical practice. Terms that sacrifice some people’s interests to those of others cannot be considered to be constitutive of a cooperative practice. So Sen’s claim, mentioned above, that a social scheme based on the sacrifice of some people’s interests to those of others could not be justified to the former is correct. However, the claim is a significant one only if we understand ethics as a cooperative human practice through which all participants can achieve a higher level of well-being. If we adopt Rashdall’s conception of ethics as involving those social arrangements necessary to maximize the realization of the good, then his sacrificial scheme will be objectively justifiable and it will not be necessary to justify the scheme subjectively to those inferior beings who cannot understand its conception of the good.

The Modern Egalitarian Plateau

Plato and Aristotle’s concern to justify their political inegalitarianism in terms of the benefits of rule by the higher type of human being for the lower type is, of course, just the kind of paternalism that the modern egalitarian finds deeply repugnant. Does this mean that, while remaining perfectionists, the moderns reject the classic perfectionists’ belief in the unequal capacities of human beings for attaining the good? In fact, a contemporary perfectionist – Thomas Hurka – rejects that belief while at the same time affirming perfectionism,¹² and contemporary egalitarians for the most part are anti-perfectionists but accept the inequality of human beings’ natural capacities. Human beings, they believe, are morally equal in a strong sense despite the facts of natural inequality. They would endorse the view of Rousseau that ‘however unequal in strength and intelligence [by nature], men become equal by covenant and by right’.¹³

What, then, is this substantive sense of equality that is said to inform modern political philosophy? It is the belief that a just society must be characterized by a fundamental social structure of equal substantive rights. The basic equality discussed in the previous section and consisting in an equal consideration of interests is not in itself sufficient to establish such a fundamental structure of equal substantive rights. It is compatible with support for radically unequal social schemes. What the equal substantive rights are is a matter of dispute between the contending parties in modern political philosophy. Thus the so-called libertarians believe that what should be equalized are certain very important liberty rights. The general form of the liberty right is to be free to do what one pleases so long as one does not harm others in respect of their life, liberty, health, and possessions.¹⁴ Of major importance for libertarians is the right to acquire and alienate property. The other important liberties are the freedoms of thought and expression, association, movement, and so on. The right to acquire and alienate property subject only to the above no-harm principle allows for the emergence of huge disparities in income and wealth between the possessors of equal liberty rights and indeed for destitution as well as opulence. At the other extreme are those who believe that the fundamental rights are to the equal distribution of welfare (or the means of welfare) or the equal distribution of resources or capabilities.

I shall call the modern view that a just society must manifest the above kind of structure of equal rights ‘egalitarianism’. This is certainly a non-standard terminology for it has the consequence that libertarians are egalitarians when the normal terminology opposes the two terms. I shall talk of libertarians as weak egalitarians and those believing in equality of welfare, resources, or capabilities as strong egalitarians. The justification for this non-standard terminology is that it allows, in the first place, for the term ‘basic equality’ to cover all ethical views and, in the second place, it catches best the contrast I wish to make between believers in inegalitarian social structures, such as the ancients, and the modern believers in egalitarian social structures. Between weak and strong modern egalitarians fall many writers who qualify in different ways and to different degrees the exercise of the liberties by the requirement to meet certain levels of welfare or resources for everyone. Of major recent political philosophers, John Rawls clearly falls within this intermedi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Strange Neglect of the Basis of Equality in Contemporary Egalitarianism
• 2  Ancient Ethics and the Transformation of Political Values in Early Modern Natural Law Theory
• 3  The Individualist Ethical Justification of Equality and Its Problems
• 4  The Community as the Source of Individual Ethical Worth
• 5  Communitarianism, Old and New
• 6  Global Justice in the Contemporary Literature
• 7  Liberal Communitarianism from a Global Perspective
• Selected Bibliography
• Index