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Articles

Equality

Helen McCabe considers problems with different ideals of equality.

If it is indeed self-evident that all people are created equal, as the writers of the US Constitution declared, how then can we justify the inequalities we see in the world today? This question has puzzled philosophers from long before the Founding Fathers drafted their bold claim, but has been of particular interest to political theorists in the last forty years. Much work has been done on what a meaningful and justifiable understanding of equality would look like – not just what an equal distribution of welfare or of the social surplus (resources, wealth, rights, liberties and opportunities) would look like, but also what it would mean to treat people as equals.

Very few philosophers now would advocate what is known as ‘strict equality’, where everyone would receive exactly the same resources, liberties, opportunities and rights. Although perhaps intuitively appealing (the fairest way to divide many things, after all, is to split them into equal portions), this idea seems to fail on several counts: an equal distribution of wheelchairs, for example, either neglects needs and desert (if no wheelchairs get distributed), or is wasteful (too many wheelchairs are distributed), or gives people what they neither deserve nor need (if everyone gets one). Because of problems like this, contemporary political theorists tend to defend different versions of egalitarianism, where some things are distributed unequally, and yet the whole outcome or process could be regarded as equitable.

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