The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice

The Equal Society collects fourteen new essays with the general aim of improving the orthodox distributive approach to egalitarianism. It applies it to real-world issues (e.g., poverty-based, gender, racial, educational, epistemic, and workplace inequalities) and connects it with recent currents in egalitarian thought, including African ethics and relational egalitarianism, which takes social relations rather than distributable goods as primary for understanding the nature of equality and the sources of inequality. Fricker (§3) argues that without the capacity to epistemically contribute to one’s community (pp. 75–76), one will be effectively excluded from being an equal participant and, as a result, not safeguarded from relations of domination (i.e., both actual and counterfactual oppression and coercion). In the case of rape (p. 86), for instance, victims’ (and potential victims’) epistemic contributions must be respected both for them to be able to learn and then use the concept rape to make sense of their experiences, and then to have their testimony taken seriously by the police and in court. She argues that it is thus a necessary condition for equality and for respecting the equal standing of fellow citizens (p. 84) that such epistemic capabilities are equally distributed. Putnam (§4) extends this line of thinking by making explicit that epistemic notions such as intelligibility and understanding another’s interests are essential for respecting other persons as persons (p. 108) with interests which must be given their appropriate weight in one’s practical deliberation (e.g., in contexts of civic, and other interpersonal, deliberation). It seems dubious, however, that intelligibility and epistemic capabilities are necessary conditions of equality. It is indeed an unequal community that excludes its members from equal participation on the basis of their inability to epistemically contribute to it, and of course, it is important to give members the opportunity to contribute. But because there are cases where such contributions are impossible or unlikely (e.g., non-human animals, and those physically or psychologically incapable of epistemically contributing), an intelligibility condition seems too strong, and a more fundamentally egalitarian policy would be to treat others with equal respect whether or not they have the capability either to make their lives intelligible to others or themselves.