Abstract
There is an apparent problem in identifying a basis for equality. This problem vanishes if what I call the ‘intuited response’ is successful. According to this response, there is no further explanation of the significance of the feature in virtue of which an individual matters, beyond the bare fact that it is the feature in virtue of which an individual matters. I argue against this claim, and conclude that if the problem of identifying a basis for equality is to be resolved, it is necessary to defend a substantive account of the independent significance of some feature.
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Notes
A brief note about the way the problem is phrased: it is framed to apply to ‘individuals.’ The intention with the use of this term is to leave open different possibilities for filling in what, finally, counts as a condition for inclusion in the group of equals. It might be objected that the problem would more helpfully be reworded so that it applies to ‘humans’ or to ‘persons’ instead of ‘individuals’. However, to do this would be to prejudge, unnecessarily, the scope of the group of moral equals. If that group consists in the group ‘persons’, then this needs to be defended (so I will claim).
A paradigm of the interest-based account of status is the tentative utilitarian argument put forward in Parfit (1986). I do not mean to suggest in this paragraph that interpersonal comparisons of interest-satisfaction are unproblematic; I mean only to say that insofar as an interest-based account of status can get around those problems, it will not count individuals as equals. Some conceptions of interests themselves involve an irreducible reference to a person as a singular entity persisting over time. I leave this aside here, noting that this is a way in which an apparently interests-based account of status can turn out to be dependent upon an intrinsic-value account.
Spelled out fully, the argument in this paragraph is:
1. (Assume for rejection.) It is a sufficient condition of a theory treating an entity as a member of the community of equals that it gives the same weight to each interest of that entity to each interest of each other entity
2. Interest-based theories give the same weight to each interest of each person
3. Therefore (from 1, 2), interest-based theories count persons as members of the community of equals
4. Interest-based theories give the same weight to each interest of each set of persons
5. Therefore (from 1, 4), interest-based theories count each set of persons as a member of the community of equals
6. No two members of the community of equals have different status.
7. Therefore (from 3,5,6), interest-based theories count each person as having the same status as (or as not having different status to) each set of persons
8. This (7) is absurd (or, at best, a trivial sense of ‘status’). Therefore, we should reject (1).
An intrinsic value view might also entail that the scrutiny under which a being can be held responsible becomes more intense as that being possesses the property to a greater degree. Intrinsic value can be cashed out in a number of different ways. It may involve there being certain things no one can do to another, without their consent. But it may also be softer: it may require priority to be given to the individual who is worse off. It may involve the necessity of the rules being justifiable to each. It may even involve a utilitarian principle, justified as the outcome of treating individuals as equals (as in Harsanyi 1975). Each of these views, unlike the interest-based account, involves irreducibly assigning normative status to individuals: on each of these views, unlike the interests-based account, there is a non-trivial sense in which individuals count as equals, that is to say, a sense of equality in which it is also not the case that two count for the same as one.
It is unclear how to fit the practice of positive discrimination into this schema. Williams might say that race can be relevant to a hiring decision, prior to normative considerations, if one takes the hiring decision not in isolation, but as part of a wider social context that includes historical and institutional injustices.
Waldron usefully defines a range property in this way: ‘R is a range property with respect to S if R is binary and S is a scalar property, such that R applies to individual items in virtue of their being within a certain range on the scale connoted by S’ (Waldron 2008, p. 33). This definition gets clear that in saying that some property is a range property, we must also be able to offer the scalar property with respect to which we are claiming it is a range property.
For simplicity, I will continue to discuss scalar properties which have one dimension, with a single threshold. But it is possible to have a multi-dimensional range property, with several thresholds, the passing of any one of which would qualify an individual as possessing the property.
Waldron (2002) finds in Locke an argument that only a theological viewpoint could give an account of basic equality.
We might attribute this position to McMahan (1996). However, in other work, McMahan seems alive to the problems of specifying a threshold, and stops short of defending one (McMahan 2002, p. 253). Also, Allen Buchanan asserts, axiomatically, that the ‘concept of human rights is a threshold concept, not a scalar one’ (Buchanan 2009, p. 357).
Further evidence for this interpretation: Rawls allows that the members of the original position may be trustees or representatives of those to whom justice applies. This severs a possible way in which the basis for equality, and the contractarian apparatus, could be tied together. This is that the contractors must actually be capable of contracting.
Put yet another way: in order to understand why something valuable emerges, it is always necessary to identify some independent value among the things from which it emerges.
This point should arouse our suspicion, but I do not claim it is decisive. It may be objected (1) we have a consistent notion of equality which has a fuzzy or vague border, and that the controversy is explained by this; (2) the existence of controversy does not prove the existence of different practices—there may be agreement on normative ideas beneath apparently intractable debate (see, e.g., Dworkin 1993).
Stephen Darwall (2006) argues that the making of demands of one another—and, derivatively, we might add, our basic equality—is part of the way we understand the world. We do in fact make claims upon one another; in doing so, we make presumptions about the capacity of those upon whom we make these claims to respond to reasons; and we can’t live as we do and conceive of ourselves as we do unless we make such claims. One can doubt that this argument can take us all the way a justification of basic equality. This is because it supposes that the capacity to respond to reasons is a binary property, and we are left wanting an account of where upon a continuous scale of the capacity to respond to reasons the relevant threshold is placed. One could imagine a variety of possible thresholds, or systems of multiple thresholds, that would be consistent with conceiving ourselves roughly as we do.
We sometimes say that someone is ‘extremely competent’ to some task. If competence is a range property, then either ‘extreme competence’ is a play on words; or there is a separate concept of competence at work in that phrase; or when that phrase is used, there is a task involved which has a very high threshold of competence, before an individual can be said to be competent to perform it.
This particular objection concerns the way we understand thresholds, and so does not apply to an intuited non-range property response. However, I would urge that many purported bases for equality turn out to be range properties. For example, the property of ‘being human’ can, as outlined in the following paragraph, be understood as a range property.
For further discussion of the following position, see DeGrazia (1996, pp. 57–61).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank audiences at Exeter, Princeton, and Toronto. For written comments, I am very grateful to John Broome, Rachel Bryant, Ian Carter, Jessica Flanigan, Keith Hyams, and the anonymous reviewer for this journal. For financial support, I thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and for providing a space in which to write this article, I would like to express my gratitude to the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.
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Nathan, C. Need There be a Defence of Equality? Winner of the 2010 Postgraduate Essay Prize. Res Publica 17, 211–225 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9156-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9156-0