Equality And Inequality Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Ideas about equality have played a central and controversial role in political discourse from a very early time. Plato ridiculed the notion of equality in The Republic, and Aristotle, a student of Plato, was similarly critical. Indeed, the weight of tradition in political thought leaned heavily against the view that human beings should be thought of or treated as equals until at least the eighteenth and arguably the twentieth century—although it is important to bear in mind that most of that tradition sprang from or was supported by people who belonged to elite social strata and that dissenting traditions have always existed, from the ancient Stoics and Epicureans to the seventeenth-century Levellers and beyond. For many centuries, Christianity was the principal source in Western political thought of arguments that cast the idea of equality in a favorable light. Yet Christianity was always committed to the view that human beings should be concerned more with life after death than life in this world, especially political life, so Christian thinkers seldom argued for, and often argued against, claims that human beings should be considered equals in any politically meaningful sense. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the idea of equality in this world acquired vigorous intellectual champions. By the end of the eighteenth century, it became a real force driving major legal, political, and social reforms.

We can distinguish politically significant ideas about equality into five families, each of which may be usefully thought of as united by a distinct concept of equality. Some of these families coexist on highly congenial terms; others stand in relations of competitive tension with one another. Some, too, are internally divided by rival conceptions.

The first family is united by the idea of the equal worth of human beings. Against a historical background, the concept of equal worth is controversial. Aristotle forcefully and influentially denied that human beings are equal in worth by nature: some people are intended by nature to be slaves and accordingly have both different abilities and lesser worth than those who are intended by nature to be free; women are by nature inferior in both capabilities and worth to men. Christianity rejected this view with the argument that all human beings are equal in worth because they are equally the creations of a single God. Seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, too, disputed Aristotle’s assumption. Indeed, he rejected the idea of intrinsic worth altogether and argued that political associations should be founded on an agreement by all their members to regard each member of the association as equal in worth by nature to every other member. The differences between Hobbes’s claim and the Christian view are considerable—the Christian view endorses the idea of a naturalistic foundation of human worthwhile asserting a universalistic claim about the equality of that worth, while Hobbes adopts a view of human worth that is conventionalist and therefore at least potentially particularistic—but these differences pale in comparison with their common quarrel with Aristotle, whose opinions were shared by many later thinkers. Neither the Christian nor the Hobbesian conception of equal worth entails equality of any of the more robust kinds discussed below. Nevertheless, the concept of equal worth is critically important in political thought, for it underpins virtually every other concept of or argument for equality of any significance.

A second cluster of ideas is united by the concept of equality under law. The societies of early modern Europe were divided into different orders that were subject to different legal codes and judicial institutions that conferred legal privileges selectively. For example, recognized clergymen enjoyed a privilege called “benefit of clergy” that ensured that those who were accused of crimes would be tried only in ecclesiastical courts by other clergymen rather than in civil courts by laymen. Members of the aristocracy enjoyed similar privileges. A consequence of this patchwork system of legal privileges was that ordinary people were subject to much greater legal jeopardy than those who enjoyed those privileges. If a layperson were accused of a crime against a member of the clergy, the layperson was subject to prosecution in an ecclesiastical court by clergymen, but if a clergyman were accused of a crime against a layperson, the clergyman would be tried only by his peers—by other members of the clergy—who would be likely to sympathize with his defense. The central point of appeals to equality before the law was to reject this kind of privilege, replacing it with the presumption that within any politically defined territory, all persons should be subject to a single, uniform body of laws that are applied in the same manner to all. This concept was embodied in legal reforms that followed the French Revolution (1789–1799) and spread through Europe and beyond in its aftermath.

The concept of political equality ties together the third family. According to the most widely accepted interpretation, political equality entails that political decision makers—those who wield principal legislative and executive power—should be chosen by elections in which each member of the electorate casts one and only one vote, all votes are given equal weight, and the candidate with a majority or a plurality of the votes cast wins. The degree of political equality achieved in political systems can then be said to vary in extent and depth, where the extent of equality is a function of the extensiveness of the franchise (or conversely of the extensiveness of groups that are denied effective voting rights) and its depth is a function of the importance of voting as a determinant of political decisions. However, voting and elections are not the only processes that embody the concept of political equality. One alternative employed extensively in the classical Athenian democracy was the selection of officeholders by lot. During the English revolution of the 1640s, the Levellers were vigorous advocates of political equality, albeit of limited extent. Democratic transformations that began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be seen in retrospect (much as nineteenth-century French political philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville saw them at a relatively early stage) as the beginnings of a long-range era of growth in the extent of political equality on a worldwide scale. Growth in the depth of political equality during the same period has arguably been far less consistent.

A fourth family of ideas is bound together by the concept of equality of opportunity, which emerged as a political force some two centuries ago in conjunction with the early development of market societies. The principal lines of division within this family are drawn between more and less robust interpretations of the concept, with a general pattern in which increasingly robust interpretations have emerged in succession over time. At the less robust end of this continuum lies the idea that offices and positions that are sources of income should be allocated to applicants based on their aptitudes or skills without regard to their social origins or to any other attributes that are unlikely to affect their performance. According to this interpretation, the concept of equal opportunity applies only at the point of potential entry to a career or job. More robust interpretations apply the concept to earlier stages in the life trajectories of persons, especially to the earlier stages in their formal education. The most robust interpretations insist that access to educational resources and other sources of advantage be equalized for all, and the most radical of these would seek to equalize even those advantages that originate in institutions that are often exempted from political scrutiny and criticism, such as families. The term formal equality of opportunity is generally used to denote the less robust interpretations of the concept, while substantive equality of opportunity denotes more robust interpretations.

A fifth and final family comprises a set of interpretations of the concept of equality of condition. This concept has played an important role in political thinking at least since 1839, when French political writer Louis Blanc formulated the famous principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In the recent literature, three rival interpretations of this concept have competed for primacy. Equality of welfare exists when the value to each person of the things that contribute to that person’s welfare (whatever these things may be) is equal to the corresponding value of things to other persons. Discussions of this view usually assume a subjectivist interpretation of value like that which has dominated the literature of economics since the late nineteenth century. By contrast, equality of resources exists when the resources available to each person are identical or equal in value to those available to other persons (where the value of resources is determined in some objectivist or otherwise uniform manner).These two interpretations are likely in some cases to lead to widely discrepant judgments about equality of condition because people’s values vary considerably. The idea of equality of capabilities constitutes a third interpretation. According to this view, two or more people are equal when the values (or sizes) of their capability sets are equal, where a capability set consists of all the functionings—the activities and states of being—a person is capable of achieving. Each of these interpretations is subject to various objections from both egalitarian and ant egalitarian quarters.

The concept of equal worth is compatible with each of the other concepts of equality sketched above; indeed, most versions of the others presuppose or incorporate this concept. Political equality, too, is compatible with equality of the various other kinds both at the conceptual and the practical level. However, significant tensions exist between the idea of equality of condition on one hand and the ideas of equality under law and equal opportunity on the other, at least when these ideas are considered potential aims of institutional design. The idea of equality under law is a specific version of the more general notion of equal treatment, as is the idea of equality of opportunity. In both cases, equal treatment can be expected, usually, to lead to unequal results, just as competitors in a game that is governed by uniform rules fairly applied usually finish with different results. Yet equal results are just what equality of condition entails.

While each of these five concepts of equality has been controversial at one time or another, some are now far more hotly disputed than others. The claim that all persons should be regarded as equal in natural worth appears to be widely shared, notwithstanding the fact that many people also support the notion that some persons deserve to be much better off than others because of earned differences in worth. The idea of equality under law, too, enjoys widespread general approbation even though many people in the most developed countries, where it is most firmly entrenched as a norm, do not want to extend its reach to immigrants or to other marginalized groups. The idea of extensive political equality is also now widely accepted, whereas the notion that political equality might also be deep—that the principal decisions affecting a political association should be determined through processes that are essentially democratic rather than through (say) bargaining among elites, many of whose authority has little or no democratic foundation—does not appear to be widely understood. The idea of equality of opportunity, at least of the less robust, more formal kind, is widely esteemed in market societies, where it provides ideological support for labor mobility, a major factor in the efficiency of production. Some of these societies appear quite resistant to more substantive interpretations of equality of opportunity—despite the fact that these interpretations may be even more supportive of productive efficiency—because they challenge social privileges that remain deeply entrenched. The notion that political associations should seek strictly to equalize the conditions of their members is not widely held today. However, a related notion—the most controversial of the politically significant ideas about equality in recent times—that is widely held and indeed has been achieved at least approximately in some places, most notably some of the countries of northern Europe, is that inequalities of condition should be limited rather sharply.

Why should inequality of condition be a cause of concern? The major arguments can be divided into two classes, political and moral.

Political theorists have long argued that sharp inequalities of condition pose a threat to both the stability of political associations and their capacity to sustain a sense of common purpose among their citizens. If some groups perceive that they are consistently at the losing end of competition for resources and other advantages, they may be tempted to “shuffle the deck,” as Hobbes puts it, in an effort to improve their chances of success. More positively, some have argued that people who believe that they enjoy an equitable share of benefits will be relatively willing to take the public good seriously and to make sacrifices to sustain it when they are called on to do so. Political philosophers have sometimes argued in response to these considerations that inequalities of condition should be limited so that no citizen possesses more than four times the wealth of any other citizen. However, limitations on inequality of condition are not the only means available to address these concerns. If a society maintains equality of opportunity in a form that is sufficiently robust to sustain significant social mobility—or if it maintains the appearance that significant mobility is realistically achievable—that may be sufficient to maintain a strong sense of loyalty to an existing political and social system, even if that system results in a high degree of inequality in outcomes.

From a moral point of view, two arguments suggest reasons for concern about inequality of condition. One argument is essentially humanitarian, based on the worry that great inequalities of condition would leave some people without sufficient means to lead decent lives. As Harry Frankfurt points out in his 1987 article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” this argument actually entails only that each person should have enough; no necessary implication about the degree of inequality that is morally acceptable follows from it. Another line of argument, which has been most highly developed by twentieth-century American philosopher John Rawls, originates in the idea that society should be conceived as a fair system of social cooperation. Rawls’s thought, borrowed from eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, is that the principal factor enabling a society to generate large amounts of wealth is its division of labor, which is a collective rather than an individual creation. If that is the case, he reasons, then it follows that the products of that creation should be distributed equitably among all those who play a role in the division of labor.

Many writers have objected to the idea that inequalities of condition should be limited. Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume suggested, in contrast to Hobbes, that attempts to render a society more equal would be disruptive of order by calling into question established entitlements, which he saw as the basis of social order. Nineteenth-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer believed that goods should accrue to persons in proportion to their desert, without regard to the degree of inequality to which this principle might lead; American political philosopher Robert Nozick argued similarly that any attempt to redistribute goods for the purpose of reducing inequalities would violate individuals’ rights. Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek and others have argued vigorously that attempts to implement social justice—to limit inequalities or to bring the distribution of income or other sources of advantage into line with any centrally enforced pattern—necessarily lead to unacceptable concentration of power and ultimately to despotism.

The last of these arguments is the most disturbing. If inequalities of condition could be limited only through great concentration of power—concentration considerably greater than would otherwise be required to maintain effective national defense, to sustain an effective government, to support a productive economy, and to enforce laws—then we would, paradoxically, achieve reduced inequality of condition at the high cost of increased inequality of power. It is reasonable to regard the threat to liberty that would result as unacceptable.

Although many modern writers have accepted the assumption that limits on inequality of condition could be achieved only through considerable concentration of power, this assumption is not compelling. In many cases the degree of inequality can be affected by variations in laws that have no discernable impact on the concentration of power. For example, in the late eighteenth century, nearly every state in the new United States of America adopted legislation repealing primogeniture and guaranteeing the equal division of estates among lineal descendants in cases of intestate succession. The aim of this change was to decrease inequality in property holdings, yet the change involved only the replacement of one law of succession with another, not the imposition of new laws where none had existed before. Similarly, although laws that are designed to mitigate inequalities in bargaining power between contracting parties are sometimes decried as unacceptable intrusions by the state on freedom of contract, the reality, as nineteenth century English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill pointed out, is that the expectation by private parties that the state will enforce contracts itself constitutes a call for state intervention into private affairs. No increased intervention is entailed by state regulations that determine which contracts should be enforced.

Some ideas about equality, then, are now widely accepted; others remain highly controversial and in some cases poorly understood. Even those ideas that are most widely endorsed and deeply entrenched fall considerably short of realization in practice, at least to a degree that corresponds to their acceptance in theory. In the United States, for example, the idea of equality under law, which is endorsed by an inscription over the entrance to the building that houses the U.S. Supreme Court, is compromised by the fact that wealthy defendants in criminal and civil trials are able to hire teams of highly skilled legal counselors, while indigent defendants are often deprived in practice of effective legal representation. Even if we were to set aside controversial claims about the injustice or politically adverse consequences of extreme inequality of condition, much remains to be done to achieve the equalities about which we ostensibly agree.

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