1 Introduction

From a structural perspective, hierarchies can plausibly be described as consubstantial with authority and authority is deeply embedded in social patterns of coordination and cooperation. Looking at the social order from the point of view of individuals, it can be said that authority is part of the basic structure of society—those features of social life which condition the opportunities and expectations of individuals in a fundamental way, as described in Rawls (1971), not just in the setup of an analytical tool but also in a valuable contribution to a social view of life plans in human existence. To be sure, this association of authority (which appears to play a functional role in social cooperation on the face of it) and inequality (which is so often at the root of various evils in social and political life, including the bad consequences for individual lives) is worrying from an egalitarian point of view. In the examination of some dimensions of these issues, however, the development of a specifically egalitarian doctrine will not be privileged here. The problems are serious enough to go beyond the specific worries of egalitarians, and a more general humanist and progressive concern for the needs, well-being and aspirations in human existence is needed.

Although it is arguable that progress in the direction of egalitarian systems of cooperation is to be favored, social life usually involves patterns of unequal authority, responsibility and liability. It also exhibits correlated, unequal patterns of social recognition and support, opportunities in life and personal achievements in a large array of social and political systems. The acceptability of such inequalities conditions the acceptability of the powers which are bestowed onto individuals and offices. Granted the existence and recognition of a highly-respected principle which confirms the fundamental equality among human persons (again a principle which is widely considered transversal with respect to particular social and political systems), the interpretation of such a principle, the assessment of its consequences and developments in practical matters will be of paramount importance when the acceptability of existing inequalities is at stake. The various equality-based guidelines of normative judgment we put forward reflect a concern for the equality among people at a fundamental level (Sen 1987; Fleurbaey 1996).

On the face of it, it is by no means obvious whether exercizing authority should be viewed as a good for the holders of it. At least there is no denying that submission to power or authority can be hurtful. Nevertheless, the expression of values or principles in real social life (including justice ideals) ordinarily requires that competent authorities are able to act in such a manner that this expression is carried out, and this makes it valuable that the authorities are obeyed (it is expected that they are being obeyed to a reasonable degree at least). Hence, hierarchical authority provides resources for such « justice» ideals as the egalitarian ones, even though the unequal distribution of authority, as well as possible misgivings in the concrete use of authority, can be hurtful and unjust. This suggests a pattern of problematic complementarity and there is a need to clarify the conditions under which justice and unequal authority can be hold to be complementary in some sense to a certain degree at least. There is, correlatively, a need to try and understand the possible implications for equality ideals and for the interpretative uncertainties which surround them.

Focusing on the « functional» side of hierarchies seems in order because we are concerned, here, with the beneficial effects which are expected to follow from the use of those powers or prerogatives which are conferred on the basis of the acceptance of a role (or a « function») in a more or less hierarchical structure of social roles. In other words, we are interested in the consequences of our collective reliance on institutional capacities to make choices on behalf of a collectivity and/or be obeyed by others when doing so.

Let it be clear that this article does not focus on inequality or hierarchy (or the lack of them) as goals in themselves, or as components of a world order which is valued in itself in connection with a set of specific beliefs. This being said, there is little doubt that beliefs about order and virtue, which are transmitted through tradition and schools of thought, play an important role in the acceptability of inequalities. For example, Duby (1996) has convincingly showed that reasonings and legitimacy issues played an important role in the stability and transmission of order, and resources for crisis resolution, in the case of the feudal structure in medieval Europe. In the case of Chinese culture and the important Confucian heritage, a concern for social harmony is key to the understanding of appropriate social structures with hierarchical characteristics (see Cheng 1997). Kim (2019) emphasizes the consistency of a political thought which, in the long run and irrespective of plural views about human nature, supports a distinct view of the legitimate view of power, in a framework which gives a prominent role to order, stability and virtue. Bai (2020) has argued in favor of the universal relevance of Confucian conceptions which challenge the equality ideal. In the West, conservative writers have repeatedly tried to put forward the notion of a cultural and institutional heritage which makes it likely that power and privilege can be vindicated against the pretense of reason (see Philonenko (1976) for examples to do with reaction to the French revolution) or fruitfully concentrated in the hands of experienced people, heirs to the uses of institutions and equipped with an appropriate social background—see Oakeshott (1947) in the British anti-egalitarian tradition.

To be sure, hierarchies are often accepted in the social world as it is, owing to the influence of culture and tradition, and also the flattery of the rich and powerful, even though a rational perspective on humanity clearly favors a postulate of equality. Following Kolm’s (1971) principle, inequalities must be justified, and in the absence of reasons for them, equality is the default approach. A major concern is to see to it that inequalities are prevented from becoming active forces in the nurturing of objectionable inequalities. This makes it necessary to reflect on the morally serious hierarchy-related threats to equality. It also proves inevitable to pay attention, symmetrically, to the role or function of hierarchical patterns in connection with the practical implementation of equality-related ethical requirements.

2 Social Inequality and the Virtue of Justice

Bell and Wang (2020, p. 8) write:

“In a purely descriptive sense, a hierarchy is a relation that is characterized by (a) difference and (b) ranking according to some attribute. Social hierarchies tend to have a normative dimension: They are social systems in which there is “an implicit or explicit rank of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension.” But we need further normative justification to argue that societies should value those dimensions.”

In particular, given this clear definition of hierarchy, normative justifications are typically concerned with the merits of actors or groups, and the merits of those rulers who prove able to uphold the stability of an appropriate hierarchical system. However, those hierarchical organizations which seriously threaten the equal recognition of the same status for all call for another sort of virtue: the consistent determination to restore equality or help progress in the direction of equality, and protect such achievements against threatening manoeuvers.

Social justice is a virtue, not just a system of criteria which pertains to patterns of possible states of the social world. This holds even though social justice has sometimes been identified with such a set of criteria in an arbitrary way by authors who object to collective social goals as such (e.g. Hayek 1982), and then criticize social justice because it allegedly relies on arbitrary preferences for specific patterns of social states (see Légé 2008). Results, “impacts” or patterns of social states are, of necessity, embedded in a world of individual action, social cooperation and responsibility. Thus, being concerned about results in the perspective of social justice cannot just be a contemplative activity or an expression of preferences: it goes hand in hand with serious, principle-based commitment to acting and cooperating in a way which can reasonably be assessed as right answers to our duties or obligations to others in given contexts. This perspective has been criticized in the context of those theories of justice which focus on property rights and the entitlements which follow from the free exchange of property rights, thus emphasizing the procedural dimension of contract (as in Nozick 1974). Be this as it may, the use of principles to assess the results of organized social life is central to common concerns about social justice.

Whenever we claim that social justice implies equality (or equal treatment, or equal opportunities), we must be prepared to allow that some institutional actors or groups of people will need to plan appropriate actions – in a virtuous manner, with dedication and courage—in order to counter the forces which cause marked increases in inequality or the emergence of new or worse inequalities. In other words, justice as a practical ideal has collective implications. It cannot be severed from the personal and institutional commitment to see to it that justice is paid due attention, with trackable consequences in the real world.

In market economies, for example, the « forces of the market» do not spontaneously lead to equality, although it has been argued that original pro-market liberalism was motivated by 18th-c. ideas about the desirable equilibrium between social forces, not by a will to let the powerful gain additional power in an indefinite manner (Charolles 2006). The intellectual roots of market liberalism are what they are, and the real-world activity of markets and collective economic agents in today’s world is something else.

In the winner-takes-all models of today’s under-regulated and greed-based capitalism, and in the correlated models of modest public action, it can easily be checked that equality is by no means a typical result of social proceedings as they are; the rise of deeply grounded inequalities in the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan world has been well documented (Piketty 2014). This will hold no matter the precise identification of those kinds of equalities and inequalities which are considered prominently relevant for evaluative purposes. Significant equality-related achievements are unlikely if equality isn’t a concern in policy-making. They are the results of purposeful and dedicated collective action to change the world as we find it and, conversely, policies which are not aiming at equality achievements are not notorious for such achievements (see Plotnick 1993 about the emblematic case of policy trends in the USA under Ronald Reagan’s presidency). This kind of action is usually characterized by resistance to some dimensions of the market forces at least, because it is hardly possible to show ex ante that a general improvement of the situation of all economic actors is to be expected. Generally speaking, collective action is an exploration of the back of the « invisible hand» in Adam Smith’s celebrated parable in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hardin 1982).

Insofar as public action is involved, the institutional commitment to a non-fatalist view of social life proves essential (otherwise public action lapses into the mere acceptation of inequalities and this can hardly count as a plausible model of progressive policies). In this respect, laissez-faire capitalism is problematic because it potentially turns sheer inaction and the doctrinaire’s acceptance of untouched processes, and states of affairs as they are, into virtues. This has no plausibility whatsoever. Indeed, marked-based conceptions of social structure and politics are by no means confined to the domain of economics stricto sensu. Market-oriented reforms are usually defended as tools for the management of rare resources and price-based coordination, but the underlying market-based conceptions of society and politics are more contentious in character (see Eyene-Mba 2007 for a comparison of classical doctrines and also Bourdeau 2023). In many respects, these conceptions inhibit progressive virtues in specific ways and, of course, they hinder the serious consideration of the drawbacks and injustices associated with inequalities.

As exemplified in Attali’s (1972) early synthetic book about the so-called “public choice” approach to politics, it extends to a particular understanding of the logic of political life, stressing industry-like competition and consumer-like satisfaction. More recently, marked-based conceptions of the so-called “regulatory state”—as characterized in Majone (2014) in connection with legitimacy problems—have put emphasis on those types of social and economic regulation through which the state relies on forces, mechanisms and equilibria which are by and large supposed to exist in a way which does not depend on civic commitments, shared history and cultural contexts. Privatization and deregulation create a context in which public action gets mixed up with simply enforcing the alleged logic and quasi “natural” rules of “markets”, which takes us a distance from the rival model of the responsible state which plans useful collective action for the common good in partnership with both private and public, national and multinational (or foreign) actors (Picavet 2022).

Even more pervasively, transformations of public administrations into firms, and of public firms into privately run firms in the West are accompanied by market-based doctrines which stress that the resulting inequalities among users are more than offset by hypothesized gains in “efficiency”, and that individual “consumption” and “consumer satisfaction” (imported from the micro-economic theory of the consumer) should be central concepts for the assessment of benefits and for the evaluation of results (rather than more natural concepts such as use, answer to needs, shared experience, contribution to collective welfare, public interest, etc.).

In the European Union, the occasional substitution (by various collective actors at several levels of the private and public spheres) of a bureaucratic variant of the English language to the idiom of everyday life and thought in the European nations is by no means innocuous. The concomitant concentration on a restrictive set of concepts paves the way for impoverished standards. For example, the notion of a responsabilité sociétale des entreprises (in French) refers to a number of topics (such as the regression of unequal treatment in connection with gender or a concern for animal well-being) and to the progressive affirmation of broad concerns in the management of private companies (see the comments by Sainteny in Smouts 2005, p.209) over and beyond the responsabilité sociale which is often understood with a focus on distributive issues in the economy as a whole or with respect to whole local communities. The distinction and the complementarity in the use of such notions are perhaps not ideally clear. However, they are part of corporate life. They play a role in public debate about the respective responsibilities of the state and the private actors. They are not easily understood if we insist on the use of a single word, such as “social” in English.

Market-based doctrines have heavily influenced the ethos of policy-making and the design of public policies in the West, where the operations and the very structure of states, e.g. with respect to the responsibilities of the state in banking, housing and the industry, have been influenced by the neoliberal family of ideologies. This has not led to a modest view of power. On the contrary, it has nurtured the heavy use of hierarchical constraint in the exercise of power. It can even be said that it has channeled the exercise of personal and office-related virtues into new directions, which are quite remote from the direct and personally endorsed service of social justice, including the active limitation of inequalities.

Modesty in the use of power is to be found, rather, on the side of the attitudes towards the growing inequalities which arguably result from the gradual substitution of comparatively inefficient “regulatory” policies (with money flows in the direction of authoritative competition-enhancement agencies, the reshuffling of structures, the buildup of costly and difficult-to-steer private/ public partnership, bureaucratic ex-post evaluation which distracts attention from means and priorities, etc.) to more traditional and robust interventionist policies.

Provided we are not extremist laissez-faire supporters, equality gives serious reasons to be concerned about our own ability to resist the attacks and threats (both intentional and unintentional) which jeopardize the effectiveness of substantial equality standards or norms. As argued by Scanlon (2018), taking inequalities seriously is part of an adequate response to the legitimate ethical claims of other persons. This has to do with justification in a basic sense (Guibet Lafaye and Picavet 2010). More precisely, as illustrated in a number of T.S. Scanlon’s discussions of examples, taking inequalities seriously, all the route down to ethical practice, is a matter of trying to understand what’s wrong with choice situations, even when choice is possible and must be respected. Some choice situations are simply inappropriate from an ethical point of view, even though they result from the free use of various agency-related capacities, from ordinary acceptance to elaborate contractual arrangements.

Thus, the ethical concern for the inequalities which mar important choice situations must be considered as such, as it matters in itself in practical life. Consistently looking for a clarification of social responsibilities makes it important to identify the channels through which inequalities alter choice situations—that is to say, personal practical situations and the occasions for collective action—in a negative way. This way, it becomes apparent that functional hierarchies cannot be justified on a “law-and-order” understanding only. Their contribution to an effective protection of rights and personal capacities must be supplemented by a contribution to the suppression or alleviation of harmful inequalities which negatively impact the fruitful exercise of personal rights and capacities (in action and cooperation).

In a global assessment, the functional hierarchies themselves must be considered a part of the social scheme which potentially causes inequalities, even though this social scheme also includes resources for the effective suppression or alleviation of the same inequalities. For example, the exercise of administrative authority can, in itself, bring about harmful subjection; then it has a negative impact on the choice situations of the “beneficiaries” of administrative action, even though a number of benefits are indeed to be expected from this action, and in spite of the fact that respect for the officers in charge of public authority—which is a kind a hierarchy—plays a functional role in the efficient delivery of services. Looking for a balanced overall judgment, the different components must be weighted in due course.

3 The Challenges of Interpretation and Principles

Equality takes rank among those concerns about social justice which make it particularly important to be able to rely on definite functional structures, usually hierarchical ones, which do have generic efficiency advantages (see Bell and Wang, p.9, also Bunderson et al. 2015 on the importance of modelling choice for the understanding of these issues). De Deo and Hobson (2021) stress the advantages of hierarchical structures for enhanced perceptions and predictability. This is not to say, however, that just any kind of hierarchy in a decision-making chain is deemed to be acceptable. Pointless inequality is a serious risk in hierarchical decision-making. More often than not, pointless functional inequality is not just useless: it also leads to the underestimating of precious contributing capacities among subordinates. It can lead to the administration’s (or organization’s) being unable to benefit from detailed knowledge of contexts and from useful alerts when important standards aren’t met. To one extremity, it can pave the way to objectionable subjection. A number of topics of major concern in today’s world and more specifically in organizational culture, such as the future of employee voice in the workplace, or the problem of the cover-up of significant frauds in firms, can be considered evidence of the problem. Crises can be reminders of the importance of initiatives which transcend the kind of inequality which is nurtured by hierarchies. For example, during the Fukushima accident, the initiatives of the nuclear plant’s director and of employees seem to have been partly misaligned with the guidelines from TEPCO’s top management, in a way which has been beneficial to the continuity of operations and to responsible decision-making at various levels (Travadel and Guarnieri 2015, p.305).

In a collective setting, both the efficient mobilization of hierarchically organized capacities (in answer to social needs, say) and the limitation of hierarchy to avoid abuse and inefficiency are structured by the collective acknowledgement of publicly stated general principles which have ethical content (and often also legal content). Alternatively, constitutive values which play a prominent role in certain activities are given prominence and offer a frame for collective action. Either way, matters of interpretation will play an important role: how do we clarify and defend the meaning of general principles? How can we preserve their substance when it turns out to be necessary to apply them to unexpected situations which, clearly enough, were not taken into account at the time the principles were first formulated? Can we identify a set of core values which is immune to the differences in the ways to endorse the constitutive values which provide guidelines in action?

In the face of serious inequalities, commitment is all-important in a dynamic perspective, be it at the personal level or at the level of offices and corporate responsibilities. But you need to know what you commit yourself to. In a collective world where public principles and values play a core role in the identification of duties, responsibilities, accountability and legitimate ambitions, interpreting the principles or the values is not just a cognitive activity: it is followed by various ways to arrange and re-arrange the respective responsibilities of administrative or corporate agents in the light of the principles or values as they are interpreted. Interpretative matters are also practical matters, in some sense. This should not be viewed as a purely technical affair: it also has to do with the personal endorsement of responsibilities, hence with the self-identification of agents endowed with particular missions. No doubt some variability in interpretation is in order, especially when the cherished principles or values are very general in character—and they usually are, at least when they have ethical plausibility. This variability, however, must be dealt with somehow. For example, guidelines for reasonable interpretations can be discussed, elaborated and proposed. Administrative or corporate dialogue can be organized to some degree, ideally on a regular basis and in a spirit of openness which makes it possible to hear the voices of all those concerned, and indeed encourage reactions about the merits or problems of the implemented decisions and procedures. Keeping the format of reactions as free of possible is then important, and this may reflect democratic ideals in the open-ended quest after equality, grounded in ordinary life and challenges (Laugier and Ogien 2014, see also Rousseau and Laugier 2023).

In present-day reflections about the risks of populism, however, some expressions of dissent are portrayed as dangerous and it is arguable that respect for hierarchy offers an escape route. This may be relevant for the kind of hierarchy which is implied by representative democracy (a special kind of democracy, as recalled by Manin 1995). This kind of respect is correlated with the centrality of common interests, which places limits on the political importance of a competitive aggregation of antagonistic interests or values (Mansbridge 1980, 2010). It is not automatic, however, and strong disagreement often prevails, as well as entrenched conflicting interests. In such common situations, the fears about populism and the timely analysis of the populist transformations of representative democracy (Urbinati 2010) should perhaps not distract our attention from the necessity to hear dissent and take it into account, not least because dissent sometimes helps characterize the misuse of hierarchical structures by those who have responsibilities in them.

Morever, the problems of inequality are not to be forgotten in this respect. As suggested by Green (2017), the growth in inequality is a cause of political unrest, and causes a crisis in the role of representation, in the countries which have been massively influenced by liberal ideals; and this calls for virtue in office holding in the name of the general interest. Characterizing the crisis, however, is a matter of degrees because the conditions of the workability of representative democracy are subject to intense controversy; a “crisis “ does not mean that the system doesn’t work at all, Green recalls (p.270).

As Bell and Wang (2020) remind us, there can be bad effects of the fight against inequality; combating the privileges of the "elite" can lead to very bad populist results. But the bad choice of means in populist hands is no evidence that the end is wrong. What’s wrong with populism is clearly not the lack of reverence for inequality, but the risks of increased inequality (possibly in tyranny) that are associated with, and sometimes caused by, populism itself. The occasional use of an anti-elite rhetoric by populist leaders (who take no rational view of existing constraints, of the positive traits in existing social functionings nor of the dangers of radical—possibly brutal—political change) says nothing against the validity or invalidity of anti-elitism. It only exemplifies the dangers of unbalanced political rhetoric in irrational political discourse.

A progressive mind is not necessarily connected with siding with the weak, the way populists pretend they do. It is more plausibly directly connected with equality as such, rejecting the notion that some of us should be considered "weak" on social grounds. Crisis situations (in war times or times or oppression for example) reveal how ordinary persons in seemingly subordinate ranks of society prove stronger than others in the defense of shared superior interests, such as freedom, democracy and national independence. Cultural conventions about the “low” positions in society are themselves to be examined critically: they might nurture condescendent attitudes which help deepen inequalities.

Even though “communism” has often been blamed for its propensity to encourage hierarchical subjection, there is no analytic association between this abuse of hierarchy and the ambition to set up a more or less “communist” structuration in society. Non-communist states face important challenges in the same respect. In capitalist societies, the concentration of corporate power in big (usually multinational) oligopolistic firms and the problematic concentration of public power in market-regulation and market-organization functions give rise to legitimate fears. In the age of big data and giant information-technology networks, with strong winner-takes-all effects, the concentration of power and wealth in private hands has reached new heights. The political influence of corporate leaders is stronger than ever in OECD countries and this is a threat to the principle of equality.

The excessive concentration of power in a few hands is an example of structural constraints on the ability of individual and group actions to yield desired results. Hierarchical inequalities are part of the frameworks which make action possible, but their abuse hinders fruitful action. In the face of dangerous inequalities, personal virtue is not enough or, to state it in a more precise manner, it is only in a social setting (usually a partly hierarchical one) that personal virtue fully manifests itself and flourishes in the fight against arbitrary inequalities. The threats to social justice or equality usually materialize in collective actions, contractual arrangements and corporate strategies. Seeing to it that such threats are effectively prevented from hurting societies to a significant degree involves collective, corporate and administrative plans—for example, organizational guidelines to develop the awareness and signaling capacities in connection with oppressive situations, such as religion-related bias, sexist or racist attitudes, etc. This can benefit from models of social cohesiveness (Guibet Lafaye 2009) because they must certainly not be disruptive themselves, and must, on the contrary, help social life overcome its own disruptive tendencies. Organized reactions are needed and they are hierarchically structured, as a rule. It is arguable that ideal economic and ethical models of equality can play a role in the guidance of such collective action (Kolm 1996). This general perspective proves especially important in capitalist societies, because economic processes and profit-making opportunities are in no way insulated from the other aspects of social life: profit-making standards (in corporate governance) and expectations (among shareholders) are a continuing source of initiatives which pose a threat to justice in social life. The normative challenges posed by capitalist aspirations are better understood, then, in the perspective of their co-existence with collective capacities – especially public ones – which provide real, timely and relevant counterpoises.

In France, for example, the collective ability to draw a line between properly conceived education and the reign of money has long been a pillar of social justice, especially with respect to the equality of opportunities, or fairness in the distribution of the abilities to let one’s talents flourish with good consequences at personal and collective levels alike. However, the limited national efforts in the field have made it difficult for the public system of education to fulfil the wishes of families, pupils and students. Correlatively, new opportunities to develop original projects and (occasionally) make money in the educational sector have kept emerging at a rapid pace. They have been seized by aspiring private schools which provide the private tutoring of pupils, the engineering of parallel private training systems which complement the traditional university or higher public schools curricula, the design of costly curricula which complement the education provided by public universities in the format of a « joint» diploma (for example a double Bachelor degree organized by a public university and a local private school), etc. They also provide business education (business schools are not uncommonly set up by profit-making educational companies), curricula in private schools of journalism, communication or health services, and numerous kinds of vocational training in other significant avenues of life. In France, the national Banque publique d’investissement [Public Bank for Investment] has provided support for privately driven initiatives in this domain.

Consequently, as analyzed by Thomas Piketty (2014), the egalitarian logic associated with a predominantly public service of research and higher education (which has co-existed with strong meritocratic values and institutions) is facing difficulties and money-based social division in higher education is a real threat, with a double dimension (success differentials which are explained by parents’ investment and money-based separation of groups of students, and groups of careers, in several types of institutions). Serious inequalities are to be feared, with consequences for social cohesiveness, for merit-based individual expectations, for the quality of curricula, for the lack of an individual experience of diversity, etc. Positive prospect do exist, in terms of innovation in education, or better response to perceived needs in society (for example when tycoons Bernard Arnault and Xavier Niel create the Albert School in France in order to let a generation of technology-minded businessmen and businesswomen emerge), or strategic advantages for the nation (in the case of enhanced public academic recognition of diplomas and research initiatives – especially in association with public universities—for highly ranked private business schools for example). However, the existence of good reasons isn’t a reason to forget everything about the rival reasons; in this case, major risks do exist for the equality of opportunities and for social cohesiveness, and looking for a better understanding of the possible consequences of private initiatives, and a more serious collective control of the evolutions, is a major challenge. The French example is by no means a unique one and similar questions must be addressed in similar circumstances in different countries.

Keeping the public system alive, strong and ambitious—as it still is in France for example—requires personal and collective efforts which go beyond a blind trust in the alleged benefits of a competition between public and private institutions. For example, it seems useful to develop a collective reflection about the ability of public-sector institutions to keep pace with changes in the aspirations of the general public. This is by no means obvious and it requires a serious attention to emerging needs and ambitions, to the shortcomings in the existing public system with respect to the acquisition of desirable abilities, to the existence of public and affordable alternatives in all cases and also to the internal resources and strengths of institutions. Letting private initiatives emerge and occasionally helping them through public action and funding is a possible strategy, consistent with definite ideological orientations, but it is by no means the only one. Its drawbacks can foster the interest we take in alternative courses of action, particularly in the public sector. This can motivate, for example, the development of new collective capacities for vocational training periods which complement traditional curricula, and renewed strategies of information and communication about education and abilities, for the mutual benefit of students and companies.

Challenges like this have a cultural dimension, of course, given the importance of a commitment to shared experience and collective progress, as opposed to the predatory logic of individual “human capital” investment, which is expected (only expected, by the way) to materialize in future gains in “society”. The underlying vision of “society” has some importance: is it envisaged as a source of multilateral personal profit? Or is it a political community or a nation which has its own history of difficulties and progress? This connects up with conceptual issues about the very notions of vocational training and education. Vocational training and academic learning can hardly be separated out from “education” completely, unless we give up important humanistic ideals.

The “human capital” approach has been so influential in democracies in the West and especially in the wrongheaded views of the “knowledge-based society” (which portray it in terms of making money through education, not making society innovative through knowledge). It claims to rely on individual preferences and calculus, but it proves fully compatible with the frustration of those individual aspirations in social life as it is. This may happen, for example, because the understandably falling credit given to marketized curricula and diplomas accounts for bad individual financial results at the individual level in the end. Still more importantly, the inappropriate description of education in purely individualistic terms has damaging consequences for the framing of the social responsibilities of (and in) education and training. This makes it necessary to pay attention to the potentially anti-humanist consequences of evolutions in the world of education (e.g. as in Nida-Rümelin 2016, part 5).

Without a spirit of commitment and ambition in the civil service, there is no way to resist the forces of the market and the erosion of the prerogatives and achievements of the public sector. Indeed, the challenges are intrinsically dynamic and interactive. Insofar as profit opportunities do exist, it isn’t relevant to complain about the existence of entrepreneurial initiatives which are framed as national virtues in capitalist or half-capitalist states. The real issue is the ability of collective action and rules to face the induced challenges, and inhibit the adverse consequences for inequalities. Personal virtue is precious but it won’t be sufficient: institutional authority must act in such a manner that the public administration can fulfil its function and be faithful to its missions. This presupposes that the framing principles or the constitutive values of authority, which give meaning to these missions, are being interpreted and implemented in fully relevant ways. Principles and values must not boil down to series of words with void content (a constant threat in institutional life to be sure).

For example, the use of the language of “rights” creates a valuable linkage between moral issues which relate to autonomy, freedom and choice on the one hand, and political or administrative priorities on the other hand. This plays a major role in the dynamics of rights, in a way which reflects the reasons at work in liberalism and their evolutive equilibrium with various values and constraints, rather than stable liberal values (Picavet 2011). Nevertheless, the concrete reliance on “rights” in decision-making is often marred by the very abstract character of the rights which are put forward. Thus, giving a high normative status to the “right to a housing” (as in the case of the “droit au logement” understood as an individual, effective right in France) provides little guidance for helpful administrative action, especially when it comes to letting housing considerations take precedence over a number of other concerns in a controversial way.

Making the priorities clear and precise with a view to given, typical circumstances appears to be needed if concrete actions are to be taken in the light of the guiding principle. This is a matter of interpretation, and the importance of the practical issues in the field provide strong reasons for initiatives to move ahead in the direction of organized hermeneutic tasks. Indeed, such tasks must be taken up unless the guiding principle of a “right to housing” is reduced to the status of void speech, in countries where the economic mechanisms lead to persistent disequilibria, with a quantitatively significant homeless population.

Of course, it may be occasionally rewarding, from an individual career perspective, to make efforts in directions which are hardly conducive to the ambitious development of the public service, although they have their own degree of recognized legitimacy. For example, in higher education again, the development of evaluation schemes (as favored in the continuity of the «Bologna process» in the European states), the design of complex private–public partnerships within the framework of traditional public universities or vocational schools, the supply of expensive short-term training sessions or degrees and even the private-sector externalization of traditional capacities of public institutions (such as foreign-language tests) may be highly valued by administrative hierarchies and by politicians for ideological reasons or because these are fashionable developments in some corporations. The career benefits of causing changes along these paths may be high in some cases. However, the public benefits are low, inexistent or even negative.

Such career developments, in the West, are usually inspired by the presupposition that something is wrong with putting too much emphasis on equality (especially financial equality) among students. The “old” world of equality concerns is portrayed as superseded, by and large, by the “new” world of speedy and “efficient” responsiveness to (often imprudently) hypothesized global changes. Nevertheless, this familiar contrast has no understandable content whatever. It is by no means clear that equality is a drawback in any respect. It is indeed very likely that this kind of preconception is largely the reflection of an arbitrary and worryingly anti-humanist and anti-progressive celebration of the strong and the wealthy because they are strong and wealthy. In a country like France, for example, a republican tradition of equality in education is important, it has a strong support and it is still influential. Nevertheless, it is directly endangered by the (fashionable) exclusive emphasis on efficiency in the delivery of training services. With this in mind, it is of course easy to forget about equality of opportunity and about the intrinsic value, for students and faculty alike, of the historical experience of inclusion in a public service of higher education.

These observations should not be understood as a way to state that institutional change is dangerous in itself; it is indeed necessary in many respects. However, nurturing a culture of equality in social and institutional life makes it necessary to check that valued institutional developments and the correlated personal careers are not dependent on values or principles which are contrary to equality ideals.

In the field of higher education, it is indeed the case that many proposed or effective developments and activities rely on conceptions of education which aren’t really amenable to full compatibility with an ambitious view of the responsibility of the collectivity in promoting access to higher education and success in the system in a way which meets equality standards and, in particular, neutrality with respect to financial resources. This has been made possible by a concentration on the individual dimensions of education, and misgiven conceptual developments have been involved in the setup of “efficiency” standards which (such as the ones which are epitomized in the obscurantist, heavily biased “rankings” of universities). But the value of education is by no means purely individual in character and conceptual error must be treated as error, not as a particular worldview. The value of education materializes in a shared historical experience and equality (of opportunities and beyond) is among the factors which account for the quality of this shared experience.

Social justice if thus dependent on authority relationships which are expected to be adequate because they are immune to abuse and subjection, on the one hand, and also, on the other hand, because they are so designed that they can provide the collectivity with adequate response to change, to ambitions, to profit-making schemes, etc. This makes it important to foster a culture and practice of resistance to unjust pressures so that social life and authority relationships remain acceptable over time, once they are indeed acceptable for good reasons. This gives relevance to a notion of conservation, which does not depend on conservative views about society as a whole. There exists something like the valuable « conservation» of social structures, institutional mechanisms, or states of affairs in social life. “Conservation” pertains, in a perspective of sustainability, to features of the social world (not just to natural-world characteristics, like landscapes, and remarkable objects or monuments). Equality-related desirable features of social life, which undergo constant attacks under the pressure of change-friendly ideologies (such as the will to promote competition at all costs), certainly rank among the things to be preserved over time through the continuous and negotiated adjustment of collective action and institutional resources and mechanisms in the required directions.

4 Balancing the Possible Benefits of Hierarchical Authority and the Wrongs of Hierarchy-Related Inequality

The preceding development has stressed the importance of concepts, and concepts are not immune to ideological manipulation. In the recent decades, one of the major ideological upheavals has been the rise of the anti-equality and anti-social state propaganda in the authoritarian, so-called (and badly termed) « neoliberal» current of thought and political orientation (as witnessed in the criminal regime of Pinochet in Chile, then in Europe and North America under the influence of the radical political agenda of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, now also in other countries). Owing to the popularity of the derivative pro-market « new left» ideology, a number of the historically important left-wing political parties in the West—such as Britain’s Labor Party, Germany’s SPD and France’s socialist Party—have been conquered to various degrees by attitudes of complacency towards inequality, or even by tendencies to praise inequality as such.

Consequently, the political awareness of the wrongs of substantial social inequality has faded away, by and large, although the topic has remained lively in academic contributions. Our moral perception of the real challenges they involve has been blurred for ideological reasons. By and large, this has taken place in a context of quickly increasing inequalities, and ideology has been a factor of this increase. Critics of so-called « neoliberalism» can therefore be induced to develop an all-embracing criticism of complacency towards inequality. The absence of a more precise focus, however, is likely to make such a criticism pointless for all practical purposes. Moreover, analytic needs deserve attention in their own right, irrespective of political or militant agendas.

On the one hand, the hierarchical features of social life are inevitably part of the processes through which the benefits of social surplus and the social division of labor accrue to real-world, unequal societies, even though there is little or no evidence that inequality per se contributes in the least to overall welfare or to the collective ability to make the best of contrasted roles and complex coordination structures. On the other hand, hierarchy in general is a possible source of social inequalities which help misguided feelings and attitudes to exert a pervasive influence in social life. Individuals, families or groups (not just social roles or functions) are possible victims of unjust treatment as a result.

In contemporary societies, following successive waves or privatization and competitive deregulation, differences in wealth and revenue play a critical role in the development of self-effacing attitudes in society, which lead to a subordinate status (the kind of subordinate status the comparatively poor do not have in a social world which is structured by strong public capacities and public industrial capital, high-quality and non-marketable public facilities and democratically chosen rules and priorities, as in the classical and highly successful European models of social democracy and mixed economy). Thus, social and economic inequalities become really worrying inequalities which morally matter—a concept which is studied from various perspectives in contemporary research (Phillips 1999; Picavet 2013; Nielsen 2018).

Consent to hierarchical differences may be pathological, in particular when it follows from unjust treatment by hierarchical powers themselves, and from overall social injustice. To be sure, obedience, self-effacing attitudes, economic self-sacrifice and the renunciation to legitimate social claims are ambivalent attitudes. They are easily caricatured as illustrative of the kind of self-effacing, possibly irrational lifestyle which is likely to result from a poor representation of oneself, from the lack of self-esteem which often reflects (at the individual level) a structurally unjust social system, and from a worrying self-adaptation to the harshness of life on the underprivileged side of unequal societies.

The same attitudes, however, are sometimes acclaimed as laudable ones, possibly to be ranked among the most brilliant examples of moral merit. This typically applies to situations of great collective peril (in wartime for example). It may surface up whenever some kind of visible proof of personal disinterested attitudes proves helpful, or even necessary, especially with a view to claiming the continuing importance of a collective entity (such as a nation). For example, resistance to Nazi occupation of European countries during the Second World War has led many people to leave tolerably comfortable ways of life and to endure the hardships of strictly disciplined and hierarchy-bound clandestine action, in order to try and restore a dignified nation, amidst the disastrous consequences of Nazi aggression; national gratefulness has of course been morally and politically important in the sequel. Valuing self-effacing attitudes is also frequent in connection with safeguarding a valuable collective order or system (such as representative democracy or a rights-honoring political system, or an equality-friendly society), or a tradition or culture (such as a time-honored religion or cultural heritage), or a valued social entity (such as a respected company, association, school or research institution). It could also be a matter of humanity as such, or humane attitudes (especially when humanity is endangered by tyranny, oppression or cruelty).

Sacrifice-related attitudes are thus ambivalent to the core. As positively valued attitudes, they rank among the possible consequences of the institution of legitimate authority. Nevertheless, they do not automatically follow from the consent to (external) political and administrative obedience. They involve something more, which has to do with what individuals think in foro interno, not just with deeds in foro externo. Indeed, something like trust or sincere deference is required for the purposes of deliberate, meaningful commitment to the service of the others, or to the service of the institutions or cherished collective entities. Otherwise, sacrifice runs the risk of being meaningless or irrational.

Sacrifice and commitment to the service of those who occupy higher ranks in a hierarchical structure can be part of meaningful lifestyles and valuable cultural traditions. In Pei and Wang (2020), a meaningful connection of social organization to valued features of collective life is key to “just hierarchies”, defined as “morally justified rankings of people or groups with respect to valued social dimensions”. None the less, let us take notice of the fact that these authors stress the defeasibility of hierarchies (the fact that they shift over time) and this is a possible indication that their argument is primarily concerned with collective choices of hierarchical structures for specific goals and occasions.

They value the flexibility of hierarchies. For example, the sexist components in some of the traditional Shandong province meal arrangements (in China) are said to be simply put aside in academic life in the province. But real culture-based hierarchy is not like this, insofar as it is grounded in the reverence of people for a world-order view. You typically can’t put aside what you do not like.

Adapting tradition to present-day expectations can only be the result of a collective choice, and this collective choice has normative value only insofar as it gives an equal role (in dialogue, deliberation and choice) to all the participants. Its justification is further dependent on the ability of the collective choice to lead to a social situation in which individuals benefit from social progress. There is no denying that tradition usually provides a rich repertoire of interesting possibilities for social and institutional design. In design tasks, however, the choice dimension is more important than anything to do with following a tradition.

In Bell and Wang’s defense of hierarchy, a tension surfaces up between the intrinsic interest for the traditional values which give color and interest to life (and which are admittedly protected by deference to hierarchical arrangements in some cases at least) and a functional perspective which makes it possible to say that hierarchies are useful to the participants (otherwise they can be criticized and reformed). The first set of concerns might induce excessive reverence for inherited traditional arrangements. The second one makes choice and deliberation among equals the predominant benchmark. Characterizing the possible cultural benefits of a hierarchical order sometimes makes sense from the point of view of the individuals themselves, including those on the lower degrees of the hierarchy; but it should be attempted with a clear mind about the separation between the universally understandable benefits which accrue to individuals and the impact of hierarchies on the expectations of individuals in life. The exercise is likely to be a difficult one because living in hierarchical structures impacts personal expectations and the image of oneself.

Hierarchy entails definite risks for the relational quality of social life, which endanger substantial aspects of equality among human beings. Insofar as equality is recognized as a guiding principle, this motivates, for the members of hierarchical structures, an examination of the mechanisms which enable functional hierarchies to remain faithful to general-interest aspirations and equality-relative values, taking processes and relationships into account, not just results or states of the world. Functional hierarchies are sources of inequalities and, possibly, in specific contexts, one of the sources of worrying social divisions which foster a culture of contempt and objectively unequal treatment, either in institutional treatment or in the proceedings of ordinary life. Following Walzer (1983), we may have good reasons to look for the conditions of a maintained and open pluralist kind of equality, where inequalities in given domains are not transferable to other domains, there being no general inequality between the persons (see also Lazzeri 2000). Against this background, the way individuals behave towards one another in society does matter because it might cause worrying and uncontrolled transfers of inequality from one sphere of interaction to the next one. In particular, hierarchical positions which give the prerogative not to pay attention to the point of view of other persons might be misused in such a way that they nurture attitudes of contempt or authoritarianism. This, in turn, can lead to the incapacity of some individuals to develop their agency-related virtues in a satisfactory way, owing to the resulting lack of self-confidence. It might also result in the development of social prejudice against given groups of individuals. For these reasons, the relational side of the use of authority in hierarchical structures appears to be important for the preservation of equality generally speaking.

Can the problems associated with hierarchy-related inequalities be alleviated by the legitimacy of authority, provided it is fully acknowledged by the individuals themselves? To be sure, the hierarchical character of institutional functions has deep connections with efficiency in collective action, hence with the recognizable legitimacy of public action. Hierarchy makes it possible for collectively fruitful plans or decisions to be carried out in an effective manner. From an encompassing perspective, then, there is a presumption that a degree of legitimacy is warranted by the connection of hierarchy to social efficiency. This kind of justification, however, has a very generic character; the concerned individuals may well find this insufficient, given the particulars of given situations. The identity of function-holders and their respective talents or ability, as well as various parameters of legitimacy or prestige in decision-making must sometimes be brought into the picture.

It should be stressed that the ability of administrations or corporations to let subordinates exercise their best judgment and share it is a requirement of efficiency, no matter the variations in the moral assessment of its being a duty. Corporate bodies must be able to react to information flows and novelty in contexts. They must be able to rely on a sound understanding of concrete practical challenges, and they must identify those causes and mechanisms which play a critical role in the endorsement of responsibility, in the relevant explanations which give substance to accountability, and in the recognition of missions to make things better. Of course, occupying an eminent position in a hierarchy gives no assurance than the knowledge and reactive capacities of subordinates are redundant (any more than being the “principal” prevents the “agent” from having more relevant information in the principal-agent models of economic theory). Thus, a clever administration or organization must, of necessity, value knowledge and reactive capacities at all levels if it must achieve efficiency in its missions.

This organizational requirement gains additional importance through technology and routines. Indeed, our heavy dependence on partly automated information-processing and decision-making procedures gives much importance to our own control of such procedures. To avoid major problems in the delivery of services, for example, we must make sure that the encountered difficulties are swiftly handled in a way which makes use of the awareness of human agents. In short, we should care about the ability of designed systems to react to significant human values. Such values have a normative component inasmuch as they are guideposts for appropriate action and cooperation. Hierarchies are part of routines: they materialize in the habit to give orders while no discussion is organized. Giving orders is itself an often routinized activity, when the persons in charge follow rules which they endorse. The legitimacy which is conferred upon this decision-making structure by hierarchical organization has its limits. It does not prevent the possible “responsibility gaps” which make it difficult to assess who should act, and when. Our socially situated freedom in organizations is thus a major dimension of the responsible and efficient design of institutional mechanisms and processes.

5 Conclusion

The embeddedness of unequal authority in social and institutional structure makes it difficult for criticism to have its way in the usual circumstances of social life. In the details of social organization and institutional design, however, there are many opportunities for critical deliberation about the appropriateness of hierarchical arrangements. Finding an equilibrium between the possible benefits of functional hierarchy and the inequality-related induced drawbacks should not be envisioned as an occasion of ideological conflict; it is a valuable task for analysis and for practice-oriented investigations. Notwithstanding the daunting difficulties involved in the subject matter, a number of principles can provide guidance in the midst of a definite cluster of problems. They are open to criticism but this is not necessarily to be considered a drawback. Criticism testifies to the vitality and existence of contrasted aspirations, which must be taken seriously.

One of the most challenging issues about the conjunction of hierarchy and equality concerns is to find a way to reconcile the effective alleviation of collective problems and the alleviation of individual and relational problems in a normative and institutional order. A major analytic challenge is the identification of acceptable connections between paying attention to needs and being committed to the good development of the social and historical process of their recognition. Indeed, the recognition of needs, with all its predominant normative importance, cannot be left to individual or corporate attitudes only. It involves communities, the political collectivity and public action. A direct expression of the structure of needs in hierarchical functions and collective capacities is deeply connected with social progress and justice. What institutional agents should do thus emanates from what is to be done, to formulate it succinctly.

Enabling serious interests to play a role in the elaboration of social compromises is yet another institutional-design requirement. Individuals and groups should escape meaningless “hard choices” between contradictory duties or social expectations, which can result in a weakened social structure or institutional order. Many sufferings associated with inequality and unequal treatment originate in unacceptable choice situations which can be remedied through public action. The culture of hierarchy thus appears legitimate only insofar as it is constitutive of those collective-action capacities which help human persons to escape unacceptable choice situations which testify to morally serious inequalities.