Abstract
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.
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Notes
This claim is made by Ian Carter (2011), ‘Respect and the Basis of Equality’, Ethics, 121/3, 538.
R. Dworkin, (1973) ‘The Original Position’, University of Chicago Law Review, 40/3, 532.
J. S. Mill attributes this claim to Bentham. J. S. Mill, (1910), ‘Utilitarianism’ in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent), 58.
R. M. Hare, (1981) Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 20–24.
A. Sen, (1992), Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 17.
Plato, (1941), Republic, tr. F. M. Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 311.
Aristotle, (1921), Politics, tr. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1252
Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 238–9.
T. Hurka, (1993), Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 167–8.
J. J. Rousseau, (1968) The Social Contract (London: Penguin Books), 68.
The phrase echoes John Locke but the major contemporary libertarian is R. Nozick, (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell).
See the useful collection of most of these and many others in L. P. Pojman and R. Westmoreland (eds) (1997), Equality: Selected Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
This phrase is to be found in Rawls, (1980), ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 77/9, 543
Rawls, (1985), ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14/3, 242.
J. Rawls, (1999a), A Theory of Justice (rev. edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press).
R. Dworkin, (1981) ‘What is Equality? Part 1, Equality of Welfare and Part 2, Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10/3, 4
R. Arneson, (1989), ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies, 56/1, 77–93.
G. A. Cohen, (1989), ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics, 99/4, 906–44.
J. Wolff, (1998),‘Fairness, Respect and the Egalitarian Ethos’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27/2, 97–122.
E. Anderson, (1999), ‘What is the Point of Equality?’ Ethics, 109/2, 287–337.
D. Miller, (1998), ‘Justice and Equality’, in A. Mason (ed.), Ideals of Equality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), 21–36.
S. Scheffler, (2003), ‘What is Egalitarianism?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31/1, 5–39.
R. Dworkin,(2003), Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1.
L. S. Temkin, Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 247–8.
T. Scanlon, ‘The Diversity of Objections to Inequality’, Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202–18.
R. Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
G. Cupit ‘The Basis of Equality’, Philosophy, 75/1 (2000), 105–25.
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© 2013 John Charvet
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Charvet, J. (2013). The Strange Neglect of the Basis of Equality in Contemporary Egalitarianism. In: The Nature and Limits of Human Equality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329165_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329165_1
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