Devon Cass

In recent years, a distinction between two concepts of equality has been much discussed: 'distributive’ equality involves people having equal amounts of a good such as welfare or resources, and ‘social’ or ‘relational’ equality involves the absence of social hierarchy and the presence of equal social relations. This contrast is commonly thought to have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between equality and justice. But the nature and significance of the distinction is far from clear. I examine several accounts of this issue and argue none are entirely satisfactory. In turn, I offer an alternative proposal. Relational equality, on my account, involves a concern with each person having an equal 'civic status'. I characterize this concern and show it has distinctive and normatively significant positional and temporal aspects.

(This book, in Portuguese translation, is an accessible introduction to the philosophy of equality and social justice, with a focus on contemporary theories, especially relational egalitarianism.) O que significa para uma sociedade ser igualitária? A igualdade é amplamente reconhecida como valiosa, seja por cidadãos, políticos, juristas ou filósofos. Ademais, a ideia de igualdade desempenha um papel de grande relevância em muitos movimentos sociais do passado e do presente. Há bastante discordância, porém, acerca de como, exatamente, devemos compreender a natureza e a importância da igualdade. O presente ensaio examina estas questões e apresenta um panorama sumário das mais centrais e influentes abordagens filosóficas à igualdade no quadro de diferentes teorias da justiça, concentrando-se, em particular, na ideia de justiça baseada na igualdade de relações sociais.

Several philosophers argue for the ‘convergence thesis’ for positional goods: prioritarians, sufficientarians, and egalitarians may converge on favouring an equal (or not too unequal) distribution of goods that have positional aspects. I discuss some problems for this thesis when applied to two key goods for which it has been proposed: education and wealth. I show, however, that there is a variant of the thesis that avoids these problems. This version of the thesis is significant, I demonstrate, because it applies to a person’s status as a citizen, which I suggest is the central concern of social or ‘relational’ egalitarianism.

The distinction between ‘relational' and ‘distributive’ equality has come to play an important role in discussions of equality and justice. But the nature of the distinction is not as clear as we might hope. In this regard, Juliana Bidadanure makes an interesting and important proposal: the two views involve differing kinds of temporal concern. The distributive approach, she suggests, is concerned with equality over people’s complete lives (diachronic equality), whereas the relational approach is concerned with egalitarian social relations at each moment in time (synchronic equality). I argue that this suggestion, while insightful, is not entirely satisfactory. Both relational and distributive equality, I demonstrate, have diachronic and synchronic aspects. Nonetheless, they do so in distinctive ways. So, while the diachronic/synchronic distinction does not provide a clean cut between relational and distributive equality, examining the temporal aspects of each approach helps to illuminate their distinctiveness.

This paper examines the following distinctive republican claims: (1) goodwill and virtuous self-restraint are insufficient to realize freedom; and (2) suitable law is constitutive of freedom. In the contemporary literature, these claims are commonly defended in connection with the conception of freedom as nondomination. This account, however, is often rejected on the grounds that freedom as nondomination is moralized and impossible to realize. In response, I propose that the point of protecting people from domination is better understood not as realizing freedom, but instead as giving persons a civic status as equals. Giving persons a civic status as equals, I claim, realizes an important form of social or 'relational' equality, and I distinguish this aim from giving persons a 'status as nondominated’, as some republicans require. I argue that this account vindicates alternative claims about the insufficiency of goodwill and constitutive importance of suitable law—understood in terms of equality rather than freedom—while avoiding the moralization and impossibility objections. I conclude by suggesting some further advantages of the proposed account versus the standard republican view.

John Rawls’s thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two ‘moral powers’; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts successfully establishes 1) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties, on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or ‘relational’ conception of equality.