On Egalitarianism

New Planet | Konstantin Yuon | 1921

The egalitarian agenda must be contextualised within the pre-existing persisting inequalities, such that egalitarian policy must be able to account for these without justifying these inequalities in relation to meritocracy, nor be based in welfarism due to the implausibility of perfect preference satisfaction. Hierarchies are shown to not be wrong in themselves, but dependent on historic conditions of oppression, such that distribution cannot be explicated from production, and that this is morally justifiable on multiple grounds.

There must be an initial diagnosis of the conditions in which inequalities exist, wherein inequality is not considered to be bad in itself, such that, therefore, hierarchies need to justify themselves, and distribution cannot be separated from production. General equality is of a conditional nature, not inherently good or bad, such that some forms of hierarchy, the product of inequality, whether in talents or efforts, or wealth or status, may be justifiable. There is a burden of proof placed on the hierarchy to justify itself in order for it to continue to exist unobstructed, or at the minimum, continue to exist in a state of regulation. In regards to such, Chomsky provides an example wherein ‘if [a grandparent is] taking a walk with [their] grandchildren and they dart out into a busy street, [they] will use not only authority but also physical coercion to stop them’. This parental authority constitutes a form of hierarchy insofar as it allocates a sense of authority to the parent relative to the child, yet this justifies itself on the basis of saving children from death, which is surely a good. However, historical discriminative forces, derivative of the attribution and protection of private property rights, fails to justify its hierarchical nature, such that a counter-hierarchical force is necessary, like affirmative action programs in the United States, where college admissions probabilities for otherwise equally qualified students are adjusted according to such. In the United States, slavery, segregation and the attribution of second-class citizenship, concerning African Americans, has produced persisting, compounding intergenerational disparate outcomes relative to white Americans, such that access to education and wealth is relatively more difficult to attain, meaning that such programs are a moral necessity under the egalitarian agenda. Such a countervailing force is found in the egalitarianism of Marx and Engels, whereby Marx repudiates distribution ‘according to need’, and ‘equal distribution’ when detached from production. For Engels, ‘the materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production, and with production the exchange of its products is the basis of every social order; that in every society which has appeared in history the distribution of the products, and with it the division of society into classes …, is determined by what is produced and how it is produced, and how the product is exchanged’. The mode of production, and therefore, the mode of distribution, will vary with the ‘productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained’. Thus, the equalisation of the mode of production, that is the socialisation of the ownership of the means of production, produces an egalitarianism on the basis of labour, reducing the capacity for existing inequalities to impose themselves, and distort the social order, ‘recognis[ing] no class differences because every worker ranks as a worker like his fellows, but … tacitly recognis[ing] unequal individual endowment, and thus capacities for production, as natural privileges’. This, however, does not imply any ‘ideal distribution’ wherein preferences are perfectly met, but there is the erosion of recurrent manifestations of the anarchic order of ‘continuous succession … of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on’, which plague distribution, and therefore, the meeting of preferences. Through this egalitarianism, one’s respective power is diminished, constrained by the polity, such that democratic equality becomes feasible, freed from the fetters of social inequality; a reproducing doctrine in which the democratic agenda is reinforced by the egalitarian agenda, which then reinforces the democratic agenda, and so on. Thus, the aim of egalitarianism is not the equalisation of outcomes, nor talents, efforts, and individual character, but the socially imposed oppression which permeates throughout society, not oriented toward the question of whether one deserves something, but to foster a community in which people ‘stand in relations of equality to others’. In the construction of such, democratic equality ‘integrates principles of distribution with the excessive demands of equal respect’, guaranteeing people with ‘effective access to the social conditions of their freedom’, and justifying the distribution necessary for this guarantee through ‘appealing to the obligations of citizens in a democratic state’, in which ‘citizens make claims on one another in virtue of their equality’. This democratic equality, therefore, ensures the realisation of Berlinian negative liberty. For Berlin, negative liberty refers to ‘freedom from’, that is, ‘the absence of constraints on the agent imposed by other people [and institutions]’, whilst positive liberty refers to ‘freedom to’, that is, ‘the ability to pursue and achieve willed goals; and … autonomy’. This democratic equality, derivative of distributive egalitarianism, conceives of justice as a matter of obligation independent of the satisfaction of individual preferences, ensuring that rights do not depend on arbitrary variations in preferences, and not afforded without accepting corresponding obligations unto others, applying judgements of justice to human arrangements rather than the natural order, such that one is able to identify that the natural diversity of humanity is manipulated into hierarchy socially, not naturally.

There must also be a consideration of different forms of egalitarianism, and what these different forms imply, considering what material basis they are concerned with, and whether this egalitarianism is instrumental, or non-instrumental. Egalitarianism does not necessarily indicate that one desires for the state in which people’s conditions are made the same in any, or all, respects, or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect, but may refer to one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals, as possessing equal basic worth. Given information regarding people’s conditions, one may hold that the state of affairs in which the desired equality obtains is morally valuable, either as an end, or as a means, or both. Therefore, egalitarianism may be of an instrumental nature, where one values equality as a means to some independently specifiable goal, as for example, one who believes that equality in a group is desirable for its fostering of solidarity and community. Conversely, egalitarianism may be of a non-instrumental nature, where one values equality in itself, as an end, or partly constitutive of an end, as for example, one who believes that equality is a component of justice, and thus morally required. On an opportunity-based egalitarianism, any social position that confers special advantages should be universally accessible, with the eventual occupant selected by merit. This infers an equalisation of conditions such that ‘any individuals in society with the same native talent and ambition should have the same prospects of success in competition for positions that confer special benefits and advantages’, necessitating significant redistributions to counter intergenerational accumulations. However, this doctrine remains inegalitarian insofar as it focuses on redistribution in order to support the ‘deserving poor’, but does little to remedy the lack of talents and ambitions in those otherwise. Thus, it may be said that this doctrine is unable to adequately deal with existing inequalities in relation to merit. On a welfare-based egalitarianism, any social position that confers significantly lower welfare on its occupant should be only open to those who freely choose to occupy it. However, disparities in preferences exist, such that some people are content with less, getting equal welfare from an unequal distribution of goods, when they have the right to demand more. Moreover, some people hold irrational preferences, such that a society concerned with sustaining equality of welfare would be worse-off if worse-off individuals consistently squander their resources. However, this doctrine escapes the difficulties which concern the opportunity doctrine, as the notion of meritocracy in relation to existing inequalities isn’t inferred. On a resource-based egalitarianism, nobody is precluded from access to a ‘bundle’ of resources that is equivalent in subjective preference to everyone else’s if they choose. Escaping the preference dependence of welfarism, and the existing inequalities of opportunism, resource egalitarianism shifts the understanding of equality from one of the equalisation of the involuntary conditions people find themselves subject to, to that of the equalisation of the forces which shape these involuntary conditions, that of distribution, and therefore, production. How resources are expended is a matter of individual responsibility, the realisation of Berlinian positive liberty. This is evidently anti-welfarist; the welfarist would reject a system in which resources are allocated to those wasteful of such. Through equalised distribution, an allocation of ‘bundles of resources secures equivalence if nobody would prefer to exchange their bundle for another’s’, that is, the subject society is in a ‘no-envy’ allocation. Therefore, under certain conditions, this constitutes a Pareto optimal state, where A is a Pareto improvement over B if, and only if, somebody prefers A to B, and no one prefers B to A, such that A is morally better than B, and A is Pareto optimal if, and only if, there is no outcome that is a Pareto improvement upon such. Whilst the simplified version of this view is implausible, not everyone can be allocated the same goods, since not everyone can make use of the same goods, as for example, a farmer cannot make use of a boat, if resources are to enable choices, subsequent inequalities in outcomes due to variations in talent and effort do not matter. Resource egalitarianism aims to ensure that everyone has the appropriate resources so that no one is worse off because of bad luck; people are only worse off because of bad choices, such that this doctrine is able to deal with meritocracy’s relation to inequality.

This equality of resources through resource-based egalitarianism, is justifiable on Kantian deontological grounds, and on Rawlsian grounds. Kant’s supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, a measure of rationality, is treated as an ‘objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle that [one] must always follow despite any natural desires or inclinations … to the contrary’, such that a morally permissible, or rational, maxim upon which to act, is that which fails to ‘contradict itself once made into a universal law of nature’. On the categorical imperative, the justifiability of resource egalitarianism would be based in the maxim that one ought to equalise, or socialise, production, and therefore, distribution. Thus, the Kantian argument for equality suggests that if everybody treats everybody else as morally inferior, that is, does not afford them adequate resources, independent of preferences, talents, and effort, society enters a relativist deadlock in which two people may deem the other inferior without any objective moral code to determine who is inferior, if such inferiority exists, such that notions of inequality come into meaninglessness. By everybody treating everybody else as equal, society enters into a state in which people universally treat each other with equal worth, from which no contradiction is inferred. Therefore, one ought to equalise distribution on the basis that it provides this equality. Resource hierarchy may also be said to violate the Kantian ‘ends-in-themselves’ formulation, in which people should be treated as ends-in-themselves, not merely as means. By function of treating another as inferior, one puts oneself into a position of relative power, treating the other as a means to their end; whereas under egalitarianism, one treats others as equal ends-in-themselves, without any imposition of relative power. The Rawlsian original position aims to move from the abstract questions of justice into determinate principles, constructing a method of reasoning that models abstract ideals about justice to combine onto the choice of principles, asking one to consider a situation in which ‘each real citizen has a representative, and all of these representatives come to an agreement on which principles of justice should order the political institutions of the real citizens’ from a position in which ‘each citizen is represented as only a free and equal citizen: each representative wants only what free and equal citizens want, and each tries to agree to principles for the basic structure while situated fairly with respect to the other representatives’. Thus, one will provide formulations of moral justice on the basis of the veil of ignorance: one aims to construct principles from which one, born into the world without knowing their gender, class, natural endowments, racte, etc., nor the system into which they are born, such that one will make a rational agreement, with each representative offering principles which satisfy whom they represent, such that since the parties are fairly situated, the agreement they reach will be universally fair. From the original position, one prescribes morality according to this universal justice, such that people are granted equal moral worth, and the capacity to flourish by pursuing their passions, and given equal opportunity to do so, through egalitarian distribution, where people are given sufficient resources to pursue such. Thus, the rational agent, or the citizen of the polity, ought to engage in an egalitarian agenda that seeks to equalise resources across society, such that people are given the instruments to sustain themselves and pursue their passions.

The egalitarian should seek equality in the distribution of goods, independent of outcomes that follow from such, wherein people are treated as of equal worth, and there is some equalisation of the fundamental conditions of one’s existence, through the equalisation of production, and therefore, distribution. This resource egalitarianism is neither welfarist or opportunity-based, but allows the guarantee of democratic equality, and is therefore able to accommodate for meritocracy’s relation to existing inequality, and somewhat rejects the preference satisfaction doctrine. This is shown to be morally justified on variant moral bases, whilst hierarchies are shown to not be wrong in themselves, but must be self-justifying in order for their continued existence.

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