Giacomo Floris

Many people believe that all and only human beings should be treated with equal concern and respect. In this article, we discuss various justifications for such basic equality in light of the advent of superintelligent robots. Specifically, we have two main aims: first, to examine how specific questions and challenges from the basic equality literature can shape philosophical debates on the moral status of superintelligent robots, including under which conditions, if any, such entities might be considered basic equals. Second, to analyse how the possible emergence of superintelligent robots challenges existing theories of basic equality. A key finding is that almost all accounts of basic equality entail that superintelligent robots could become morally superior to human beings. Additionally, we show that one of the most common justifications for basic equality—the range property view—must be significantly revised if superintelligent robots were to come into existence.

Quali obblighi abbiamo nei confronti delle persone future, se vogliamo davvero realizzare una società in cui tutte le persone siano trattate da libere ed eguali? Affrontare questa question richiede di ripensare sia il dibattito sulla teoria della giustizia che quello relativo alla teoria della democrazia. Per quanto, infatti, possa sembrare intuitivo sostenere che una società giusta non dovrebbe considerare esclusivamente gli interessi delle persone presenti, l’elaborazione di tale intuizione solleva interrogativi complessi: come è possibile garantire che persone future abbiano una voce in capitolo nelle attuali decisioni? È giusto dare peso a questi interessi visto che il futuro è molto incerto? Come possiamo trattare come eguali individui che non solo non esistono qui ed ora ma potrebbero non esistere in futuo? Questa sezione speciale della Rivista di Filosofia Politica si propone di affrontare queste sfide.

Aesthetic appearance is a powerful source of various forms of unjust social relations, such as demeaning stereotypes, discrimination, harassment, and social exclusion. Surprisingly, however, the issue of aesthetic injustice has been largely overlooked in the relational egalitarian literature. This article addresses this gap by examining aesthetic injustice in the context of homelessness. It argues that individuals experiencing homelessness are subject to two distinct kinds of aesthetic injustice. First, they are treated as disgusting elements of the urban landscape that must be rendered physically invisible in prime public areas. Second, they are deprived of the aesthetic resources necessary to control and shape how they present themselves to others. By drawing these two aspects together, this article proposes a novel account of the aesthetic dimensions of relational equality: it shows that achieving relational equality requires not only fostering inclusive and egalitarian social norms of respectable appearance but also enabling individuals to exercise reasonable control over their appearance as equal self‐presenting persons.

According to longtermism, present persons ought to promote the value of the far future. While this view has so far been primarily discussed within a consequentialist normative framework, less has been said about what longtermism entails from a deontological perspective. This paper aims to address this shortcoming. I argue that, from a deontological standpoint, distant future people have a present moral status qua “expected persons”. Therefore, they have at least some present rights qua moral status-holders. But distant future people do not have equal moral status at the present time. Therefore, their present rights are not as stringent as those of present persons, other things being equal. However, I demonstrate that the most fundamental longtermist concerns do not rest on a commitment to intergenerational moral equality: even if distant future people are not our moral equals, respecting their present rights should be a key moral priority of our time.

Aesthetic appearance is a powerful source of various forms of unjust social relations, such as demeaning stereotypes, discrimination, harassment, and social exclusion. Surprisingly, however, the issue of aesthetic injustice has been largely overlooked in the relational egalitarian literature. This paper addresses this gap by examining aesthetic injustice in the context of homelessness. It argues that individuals experiencing homelessness are subject to two distinct kinds of aesthetic injustice. First, they are treated as disgusting elements of the urban landscape that must be rendered physically invisible in prime public areas. Second, they are deprived of the aesthetic resources necessary to control and shape how they present themselves to others. By drawing these two aspects together, this paper proposes a novel account of the aesthetic dimensions of relational equality: it shows that achieving relational equality requires not only fostering inclusive and egalitarian social norms of respectable appearance but also enabling individuals to exercise reasonable control over their appearance as equal self-presenting persons.

It is widely held that entities have moral status if they possess a status-conferring property to a sufficient degree. However, this means that for at least one degree to which an entity can possess the status-conferring property and that grounds moral status, there is some incrementally lower degree of possessing the property that does not ground moral status. Critics maintain that this renders any threshold for moral status arbitrary. In this paper, we reject common responses to this arbitrariness objection, such as that moral status thresholds are not arbitrary but merely vague. Instead, we defend the moderate discontinuity view. This view holds that thresholds denote moderate rather than radical shifts in moral status and that significant shifts in the moral status of entities on opposite sides of the threshold are a function of their distance from the threshold rather than of the threshold itself. Crucially, it follows from this that there is no principled way to reconcile the commitment to the moral equality of persons with the commitment to the moral superiority of persons over nonhuman animals.

Harm reduction is one of the most controversial and widely discussed approaches in public health and social policy, addressing a broad range of pressing societal issues, including drug addiction, sex work, alcohol and tobacco use, and homelessness. Surprisingly, however, harm reduction has received very little philosophical scrutiny. In this article, I aim to fill this gap. First, I provide a systematic analysis of the core features and normative commitments of harm reduction. Second, I propose a novel, relational egalitarian justification for harm reduction. I argue that the provision of harm reduction services is not solely or primarily a matter of mitigating the negative consequences associated with high-risk behaviours. Rather, most fundamentally, it is the appropriate response to the status of vulnerable individuals as equal members of society.

In this article, I develop a novel relational egalitarian theory of social exclusion that explains how society fails to treat socially excluded individuals – such as people experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance use disorders and mental illness and sex workers – as equals. I argue that society places and keeps excluded individuals at the very bottom of the social status hierarchy by treating them as socially invisible, or by rendering them physically invisible, or both. The upshot, then, is that part of what is wrong with social exclusion is that it creates the invisible social class.

The acceptance of the idea of basic equality is widely recognized as one of the most significant achievements of modernity. However, what exactly does it mean to say that we are one another’s equals in some fundamental sense? How can it possibly be true, given that we are unequals in almost every other aspect of our lives? And, who, exactly, is meant to fall within its scope? In this introductory chapter, we outline the most significant challenges that theories of basic equality must face in answering these questions, as well as introducing some conceptual distinctions that clarify important aspects of this debate. This, in turn, provides background for understanding the questions that the essays in this book seek to answer.

Much of the literature on basic equality has focused on the question of what grounds the equal moral status of persons, typically understood as fully competent adults. However, less has been said about what justifies the equal moral status of those human beings who do not hold a wide range of sophisticated cognitive capacities, such as severely cognitively disabled human beings and children. This chapter contributes to filling this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of children’s moral equality. Specifically, I argue that children’s moral equality is entailed by a commitment to a kind of respect which requires providing children with those social conditions that foster their development into well-adjusted adults who hold a proper and stable capacity for moral personality. This is because unequal consideration and treatment precludes, or at least is a significant obstacle to, the provision of some goods that are crucial to the cultivation of a proper and stable capacity for moral personality. Children’s moral equality, then, is a constitutive requirement of what is owed to them qua moral status-holders.

That all human beings are one another’s moral equals is taken by many to be the fundamental premise of contemporary moral, political, and legal theory. It is also the demand of individuals and groups to be treated as equals that drives much of political practice and protest today. However, what does such a claim of ‘basic equality’ between human beings mean? How can it possibly be true, given that we are unequals in almost every other aspect of our lives? And, who, exactly, is meant to fall within its scope? This volume brings together today’s foremost thinkers on basic equality to address these questions. Collectively, they explore the concept in history and critique, encompassing novel efforts to overcome the problem of explanation as well as scepticism about it, and discussion of its implications for inclusion and marginalization.

This paper develops a theory of what a relational egalitarian society owes to individuals whose agential capacities are impaired due to mental health issues. I argue that the social condition of impaired agents generates a tension between the demands of relational equality, and I propose a novel account of respect for persons’ agential capacities that overcomes it. This account offers a coherent and convincing explanation of how the state should express appropriate respect for all persons’ equal standing. Furthermore, it reveals that relational egalitarians must rethink some of their most fundamental commitments: respect for persons sometimes requires passing judgments on their level of agential capacities. And, while this kind of respect often does not violate persons’ status as equals, even when it does, this is not as morally problematic as they commonly believe.

In recent decades, it has often been argued by environmental ethicists that human beings and the natural world ought to be considered as equals in some basic sense. The aim of this paper is to make sense of this view by examining what role, if any, the idea of equality ought to play in environmental ethics. Specifically, we have two aims: the first aim is to identify those environmental claims that are distinctively egalitarian. The second aim is to show these claims do not rest on a principled and convincing justification. Our main contention is therefore that equality has no place in environmental ethics. There are other promising ways to argue that our relationship with the natural environment must be fundamentally revised. By bringing clarity to this debate and dispelling the possibility of equality-based arguments, we hope to contribute to this endeavor.

It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality.

This paper develops a novel theory of the meaning of moral equality. This theory has two original and significant implications: first, it shows—contra what is commonly held in the literature—that adults and children are not always each other’s equals; rather, the former are sometimes inferior and sometimes superior to the latter, depending on the interest at stake. Second, it reveals that human beings’ comparative moral status changes across time, and what matters is that they are each other’s equals at simultaneous segments of their lives.

Hardly anyone denies that (nearly) all human beings have equal moral status and therefore should be considered and treated as equals. Yet, if humans possess the property that confers moral status upon them to an unequal degree, how come they should be considered and treated as equals? It has been argued that this is because the variations in the degree to which the status‐conferring property is held above a relevant threshold are contingencies that do not generate differences in degrees of moral status. Call this the contingency argument for the basis of moral equality. In this paper, I reject the contingency argument. Instead, I develop an attitude‐based account of the basis of moral equality: according to this account, the basis of moral equality lies in a fitting, basic, and independent moral attitude which is owed to human beings qua moral status‐holders, and provides a coherent and plausible explanation for why the variations above the threshold for moral status do not matter.

The question of the basis of human equality has recently gained increasing attention. However, much of the literature has focused on whether persons—understood as fully competent adults—have equal moral status, while relatively less attention has been devoted to the analysis of what grounds the equal moral status of those human beings who are not fully competent adults. This paper contributes to this debate by addressing the question of the equality of moral status between adults and children. Specifically, this paper has three aims. First, it provides a conceptual map of this complex issue. Second, it argues that the challenges that have been raised against standard accounts of persons’ equal moral status are even more forceful when applied to the question of adults and children’s moral equality. Finally, it examines what a commitment to adults and children’s moral _inequality_ entails and what it does not, thereby showing that the justificatory role of the principle of moral equality is not as far-reaching as commonly assumed.

Standard liberal theories of justice rest on the assumption that only those beings that hold the capacity for moral personality have moral status and therefore are right-holders. As many pointed out, this has the disturbing implication of excluding a wide range of entities from the scope of justice. Call this the under-inclusiveness objection. This paper provides a response to the under-inclusiveness objection and illustrates its implications for liberal theories of justice. In particular, the paper defends two claims: first, it argues that both the CMP and the potential capacity for moral personality are bases of moral status. This pluralist account of the basis of moral status can broaden the scope of justice and provide a solid philosophical justification for the common-sense intuition that almost all human beings have a moral status that is different and superior to that of nonhuman animals. Second, contra what is commonly suggested, it contends that potential and actual moral persons have different and unequal rights, other things being equal.

In his recent book, Humanity without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights, Andrea Sangiovanni argues that the principle of moral equality should be grounded in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors insofar as this constitutes an act of social cruelty. In this short piece, I will raise two concerns about the rejection of social cruelty as the basis of moral equality: first, Sangiovanni’s account seems to give rise to disturbing implications as to how those beings that have basic moral status relate to each other. Second, grounding moral equality in the rejection of social cruelty may fail to capture some wrongs qua violation of moral equality.

The principle of moral equality is one of the cornerstones of any liberal theory of justice. It is usually assumed that persons’ equal moral status should be grounded in the equal possession of a status-conferring property. Call this the property-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This approach, however, faces some well-known difficulties: in particular, it is difficult to see how the possession of a scalar property can account for persons’ equal moral status. A plausible way of circumventing such difficulties is to explore another avenue for the justification of persons’ equal moral status: moral equality should be grounded in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors. Call this the relation-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This paper aims at providing some reasons as to why this approach should be rejected and clarifying why the property-first approach still represents the most promising way of justifying our commitment to moral equality. Two objections will be pressed against the relation-first approach: first, grounding moral equality in the wrongness of treating others as inferiors gives rise to some disturbing normative implications; second, relation-first accounts cannot vindicate the idea that a range of beings has equal fundamental rights. This, however, is precisely what an account of moral equality is meant to justify. The paper, then, concludes that the relation-first approach fails to provide a plausible answer to the question of the basis of moral equality. Property-first accounts, whatever problems they encounter, are still more viable in principle.