Should states naturalize long-term irregular migrants residing in their territory? Scholars such as Carens and Rubio-Marín have defended their naturalization by drawing on a theory of social membership. However, some have argued that the social membership account falls short of requiring the granting of citizenship to irregular migrants. Others, such as Brock, Ochoa Espejo, and Hosein, have attempted to defend a right not to be deported. I argue that relational equality can provide a defense for granting irregular migrants citizenship rights (...) – their complete naturalization – which avoids the limitations of both approaches: it provides a more solid grounding for granting citizenship to irregular migrants, and shows why a right to stay still leaves irregular migrants in a morally troubling position. Irregular migrants are subjected for long periods of time to the laws of the state they reside in without having any power or influence over them and face significant difficulties in leaving the country, which results in objectionable social inequality. I argue that such concerns about inequality of status override the right of the demos to determine its membership and concerns about irregular migrants’ original breaking of the law. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians argue that workplace hierarchy is wrong or unjust. However, even if workplace hierarchy is morally deficient in one respect, the efficiency of hierarchical cooperation might vindicate hierarchy. This paper assesses the extent to which relational egalitarians must make concessions to workplace hierarchy for the sake of efficiency. I argue that considerations of hierarchy provide egalitarians with reasons that make workplace hierarchy tolerable despite being unjustified, and, moreover, that under a predominantly hierarchical status quo, the practical import of egalitarian (...) reasons is unlikely to be undercut. This can be the case even if social hierarchy sometimes constitutes social cooperation. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. In this paper, I ask the question: can equal relations be unjust according to relational egalitarianism? I argue that while on some conceptions of relational egalitarianism, equal relations cannot be unjust, there are conceptions in which equal relations can be unjust. Surprisingly, whether equal relations can be unjust cuts across the distinction between responsibility-sensitive and non-responsibility-sensitive conceptions of relational egalitarianism. I then show what follows if one accepts a conception in which equal (...) relations can be unjust, including why it provides a reason to grant some people less political power than others. (shrink)

Construed as a theory of justice, relational egalitarianism says that justice requires that people relate as equals. Construed as a theory of what makes democracy valuable, it says that democracy is a necessary, or constituent, part of the value of relating as equals. Typically, relational egalitarians want their theory to provide both an account of what justice requires and an account of what makes democracy valuable. We argue that relational egalitarians with this dual ambition face the justice-democracy dilemma: Understanding social (...) relations in such a way that renders relational egalitarianism plausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable comes at the price of understanding social relations in a way that makes it less plausible as a theory of justice, and vice versa. We also argue that there is no easy way out of the dilemma and that relational egalitarians, who want relational equality to provide both accounts mentioned, may simply have to set their ambitions lower on behalf of relational equality. (shrink)

In “Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation,” I argue that blacks should reject racial integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. Integration will intensify the self-worth harms of stigmatization and phenotypic devaluation by leading blacks to more fully internalize their devaluation, and while the integrating process itself might reduce the former, it may well leave in place the latter. In this paper, I reply to the challenges to these arguments presented by Sharon Stanley, Andrew Valls, Elvira Basevich, Michael Merry, (...) and Ronald Sundstrom. (shrink)

According to the relational egalitarian theory of justice, justice requires that people relate as equals. To relate as equals, many relational egalitarians argue, people must (i) regard each other as equals, and (ii) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that, under conditions of background injustice, such relational egalitarians should endorse affirmative action in the ways in which (dis)esteem is attributed to people as part of the regard-requirement for relating as equals.

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. The theory applies to those who stand in the relevant social relations. In this paper, I distinguish four different accounts of what it means to be socially related and argue that in all of them, self-relations—how a person relates to themselves—fall within the scope of relational egalitarianism. I also point to how this constrains what a person is allowed to do to themselves.

This dissertation identifies and responds to a problem for liberal relational egalitarians. There is a prima facie worry about the compatibility of liberalism and relational egalitarianism, concerning the requirements of equality in informal social life. Liberalism at least involves a commitment to leaving individuals substantial discretion to pursue their own conceptions of the good. Relational equality is best understood as a kind of deliberative practice about social institutions and practices. Patterns of otherwise innocuous social choices (e.g., where to live, whom (...) to befriend or marry) can create emergent, severe differentials in power, status, and influence, and when they do they can threaten relational equality. If relational equality required individuals to subordinate personal choices to egalitarian considerations, it would run into conflict with liberal commitments. In response, I defend the value of accepting an imperfect realization of relational equality. What I call fair relational equality demands that members of society treat some informal social norms and practices as part of the basic structure of society, in need of justification. Three practices are required to meet that demand. First, the relational-egalitarian society must develop institutional strategies to preempt or mitigate tendencies toward emergent inequality as they are identified. Second, members of society must engage in broad social deliberation about the norms and expectations of informal social interaction. Third, they must be willing to reform social practices where doing so does not impinge on important personal projects and values. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism is a theory of justice according to which people must relate as equals. In this article, we develop relational sufficientarianism – a view of justice according to which people must relate as sufficients. We distinguish between three versions of this ideal, one that is incompatible with relational egalitarianism and two that are not. Building on this, we argue that relational theorists have good reason to support a pluralist view that is both egalitarian and sufficientarian.

It is widely believed that immigrants, after some time, acquire a claim to naturalize and become citizens of their new state. What explains this claim? Although existing answers (may) succeed in justifying some of immigrants' rights claims, they cannot justify the claim that immigrants are owed the opportunity to naturalize because these theories lack a sufficiently rich account of the purpose of citizenship. To fill this gap, I offer a novel egalitarian account of citizenship. Citizenship, on this account, partially protects (...) immigrants against social hierarchy by realizing social equality in a publicly accessible manner. This explains claims to naturalize. (shrink)

This article argues that blacks should reject integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. It distinguishes two aspects of black devaluation: a ‘stigmatization’ aspect that has to do with the fact that blacks are subject to various forms of discrimination, and an aesthetic aspect (‘phenotypic devaluation’) that concerns the aesthetic devaluation of characteristically black phenotypic traits. It identifies four self-worth harms that integration may inflict, and suggests that these may outweigh the benefits of integration. Further, it argues that, while the integrating (...) process may reduce stigmatization, there is less reason to think that it can do the same for phenotypic devaluation. (shrink)

Several democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the ideal of equal political power (“political equality”) by tying it to the non-derivative value of egalitarian relationships. This chapter critically discusses such arguments. It clarifies what it takes to vindicate the ideal of political equality, and distinguishes different versions of the relational egalitarian argument for it. Some such arguments appeal to the example of a society without social status inequality (such as caste or class structures); others to personal relationships among equals, (...) like friendship. Each strategy faces problems. After discussing what social status consists in, the chapter argues that social status equality does not require an equal distribution of power, but only that unequal distributions are not justified on grounds incompatible with the citizens’ fundamental equal moral standing. By contrast, personal relationships among equals do require equal power; but establishing that their norms apply to our political community is challenging. (shrink)

Many find that the objectionable nature of paternalism has something to do with belief. However, since it is commonly held that beliefs are directly governed by epistemic as opposed to moral norms, how could it be objectionable to hold paternalistic beliefs about others if they are supported by the evidence? Drawing on central elements of relational egalitarianism, this paper attempts to bridge this gap. In a first step, it argues that holding paternalistic beliefs about others implies a failure to regard (...) them as equals in terms of their moral agency. In a second step, it shows that the fact that we should regard others as equals in this sense raises the threshold for sufficiency of evidence for paternalistic beliefs to be epistemically justified. That is, moral reasons of relational equality encroach on the epistemic. However, these reasons are not decisive. In cases where others are about to jeopardize critical goods such as their lives, mobility or future autonomy, relational equality sometimes calls for paternalistic action and, by extension, the formation of beliefs that render such action rational. The upshot is that in order to meet demands of relational equality we have a pro tanto reason to not hold paternalistic beliefs about others. (shrink)

When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but they are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations (...) of political power are incompatible with democracy, and with a commitment to social equality more generally, when they consist in some having greater arbitrary power to influence decisions according to their idiosyncratic preferences. A novel account of the relationship between power and social status clarifies the role of social equality in the justification of democracy, including a representative democracy in which public officials have more political power than ordinary citizens. (shrink)

Basic income policies have recently enjoyed a great deal of discussion, but they are not a natural fit with views of distributive or social justice endorsed by many moral and political philosophers. This essay develops and defends a new view of social justice, called relational sufficientarianism, which is more compatible with a universal basic income. Relational sufficientarianism holds that persons in a just society must have sufficient social status, but not necessarily equal social status. It argues that this view offers (...) a more plausible account of just social relations than relational egalitarianism, a better account of the threshold for sufficiency than distributive sufficientarianism, and can serve as a more suitable theoretical backing for a universal basic income than either of these other views, or distributive egalitarianism. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that much theorizing about the value of equality, and about justice more generally, has focused unduly on distributive issues and neglected the importance of egalitarian social relationships. As a result, relational egalitarian views, according to which the value of egalitarian social relations provides the grounds of the commitment that we ought to have to equality, have gained prominence as alternatives to more fundamentally distributive accounts of the basis of egalitarianism, and of (...) justice-based entitlements. In this paper, I will suggest that reflecting on the kind of explanation of a certain class of our justice-based entitlements that relational egalitarian considerations can offer raises doubts about the project, endorsed by at least some relational egalitarians, of attempting to ground all entitlements of justice in the value of egalitarian social relationships. I will use the entitlement to healthcare provision as my central example. The central claim that I will defend is that even if relational egalitarian accounts can avoid implausible implications regarding the extension of justice-based entitlements to health care, it is more difficult to see how they can avoid what seem to me to be implausible explanations of why individuals have the justice-based entitlements that they do. To the extent that I am correct that relational egalitarian views are committed to offering implausible explanations of the grounds of justice-based entitlements to healthcare, this seems to me to provide at least some support for a more fundamentally distributive approach to thinking about justice in healthcare provision. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the collected volume. In the first section, we aim to provide background on important themes in social egalitarianism and to set the context for understanding which significant questions the chapters in this book pose and attempt to answer. In this section we focus especially on what could be said to characterize socially egalitarian relationships, on which relationships are of concern, and on what might make social egalitarianism distinct. In the second section, we provide (...) a brief explanation of the structure of the book and each of its chapters. (shrink)

Critics of luck egalitarianism have claimed that, far from providing a justification for the public insurance functions of a welfare state as its proponents claim, the view objectionably abandons those who are deemed responsible for their dire straits. This article considers seven arguments that can be made in response to this ‘abandonment objection’. Four of these arguments are found wanting, with a recurrent problem being their reliance on a dubious sufficientarian or quasi-sufficientarian commitment to provide a threshold of goods unconditionally. (...) Three arguments succeed, showing that luck egalitarians have good reasons for assisting ‘negligent victims’ on account of changes that may occur in an individual between the time of their choice and their subsequent disadvantage, bad option luck, and doubts about free will and responsibility. Luck egalitarianism is therefore shown to offer strong support for public insurance. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that aim to counteract the distributive effects of luck. This article explains luck egalitarianism's main ideas, and the debates that have accompanied its rise to prominence. There are two main parts to the discussion. The first part sets out three key moves in the influential early statements of Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen: the brute luck/option luck distinction, the specification of brute luck in everyday or theoretical terms and the specification (...) of advantage as resources, welfare, or some combination of these. The second part covers three later developments: the democratic egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism, the luck egalitarian acceptance of pluralism, and luck egalitarian doubts about the significance of the brute luck/option luck distinction. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians claim that a situation is just only if everyone it involves relates to one another as equals. It implies that relational egalitarians believe the ideal of “living as equals” (for short) is desirable, and furthermore, necessary for justice. In this paper, I distinguish three accounts of the desirability of the ideal: the instrumental value account, the non‐instrumental value account, and the non‐consequentialist account. I argue that the former two accounts cannot provide satisfying reasons for being a relational egalitarian. (...) Instead, the ideal of “living as equals” ought to be understood as fundamentally a moral requirement in a non‐consequentialist sense. In addition, a pluralist (though fundamentally non‐consequentialist) approach is welcome. (shrink)

Egalitarians often claim that well-off states’ immigration restrictions create or reinforce objectionable inequality. Standard defenses of this claim appeal to the distributive consequences of exclusion. This article offers a relational egalitarian defense of more open borders. On this view, well-off states’ immigration restrictions are problematic because they accord the citizens of well-off states a troubling form of asymmetric power over the disadvantaged. This creates an objectionably unequal relationship between affluent states’ citizens and disadvantaged immigrants. I show that this argument offers (...) a compelling diagnosis of a central problem with border control, defend the argument against objections, and explore its implications. (shrink)

In the past few decades, there has been a growing literature on relational egalitarianism. Relational egalitarianism is a view on the nature and value of equality. In contrast to the dominant view in recent debates on equality—distributive egalitarianism, on which equality is about ensuring people have or fare the same in some respect—on the relational view, equality is a matter of the terms on which relationships are structured. But what exactly does it mean for people to relate as equals? And (...) why are relations of equality valuable? Relational egalitarians have offered quite different answers to each of these questions. In this article, I draw attention to some key issues that underlie these disagree- ments, and I offer a taxonomy of different viewpoints that have emerged in the recent literature on these matters. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo analiza la fundamentación normativa de un tipo de políticas de alivio contra la pobreza comunes durante los últimos años en Latinoamérica, a saber, las transferencias monetarias condicionadas. Se mostrará que la justificación típica de las transferencias monetarias condicionadas es ilegítima en una comunidad política democrática. A través de la indagación de las razones por las que la carga de la prueba se coloca del lado de las transferencias incondicionadas, se mostrará que se apela a una noción controvertida (...) de responsabilidad individual que cristaliza relaciones desiguales y que se basa en un diagnóstico empírico cuestionable.: This paper analyzes the normative foundations of conditional cash transfers, a kind of poverty relief policy which has been massively implemented during recent years in Latin America. I intend to show that the conditional cash transfer’s typical justification is illegitimate for a democratic political community. After reviewing the reasons why the burden of proof falls on unconditional transfers, I argue that the typical justification appeals to a controversial conception of individual responsibility that crystallizes unequal interpersonal relations and is based on a shaky empirical diagnosis. (shrink)

Public insurance is commonly assimilated with redistributive tools mobilized by the welfare state in the pursuit of an egalitarian ideal. This view contains some truth, since the result of insurance, at a given moment, is the redistribution of resources from the lucky to unlucky. However, Joseph Heath considers that the principle of efficiency provides a better normative explanation and justification of public insurance than the egalitarian account. According to this view, the fact that the state is involved in the provision (...) of specific insurance is explained and justified by the greater efficiency of the state, in comparison with markets, in addressing market failures such as moral hazard or adverse selection. Our argument is that while insurance, intrinsically and idealistically, may diverge from a redistributive scheme, it is nevertheless difficult to deny that insurance has nothing to do with equality. More precisely, we argue that insurance may be understood as an egalitarian tool if our understanding of equality is broadened to include relational equality. Our paper aims to briefly recap the debates surrounding public insurance as a redistributive tool, advancing the idea that public insurance may be a relational egalitarian tool. It then presents a number of relational arguments in favor of the involvement of the state in the provision of specific forms of insurance, arguments that have been overlooked given the domination of luck egalitarian approaches in these debates. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 55-74, February 2022. Many find that the objectionable nature of paternalism has something to do with belief. However, since it is commonly held that beliefs are directly governed by epistemic as opposed to moral norms, how could it be objectionable to hold paternalistic beliefs about others if they are supported by the evidence? Drawing on central elements of relational egalitarianism, this paper attempts to bridge this gap. In a first step, it (...) argues that holding paternalistic beliefs about others implies a failure to regard them as equals in terms of their moral agency. In a second step, it shows that the fact that we should regard others as equals in this sense raises the threshold for sufficiency of evidence for paternalistic beliefs to be epistemically justified. That is, moral reasons of relational equality encroach on the epistemic. However, these reasons are not decisive. In cases where others are about to jeopardize critical goods such as their lives, mobility or future autonomy, relational equality sometimes calls for paternalistic action and, by extension, the formation of beliefs that render such action rational. The upshot is that in order to meet demands of relational equality we have a pro tanto reason to not hold paternalistic beliefs about others. (shrink)

Sufficientarian theories of distributive justice are often considered to be vulnerable to the ‘blindness to inequality and other values objection’. This objection targets their commitment to holding the moral irrelevance of requirements of justice above absolute thresholds of advantage, making them insufficiently sensitive to egalitarian moral concerns that do have relevance for justice. This paper explores how sufficientarians could reply to this objection. Particularly, I claim that, if we accept that the force of the aforementioned objection comes from relational, and (...) not distributive, inequalities, different strategies are open for sufficientarians in order to be sensitive to these concerns. Drawing on recent literature about the relation between distributive and relational egalitarianism, and the possibility of reducing one to the other, strategies of ‘internalizing’ and ‘externalizing’ relational egalitarian concerns to a distributive sufficientarian framework are explored. In turn, I suggest that both strategies fail in their standard versions, but argue that a particular ‘hybrid view’ about justice is an attractive candidate for the sufficientarian theorist. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism says that moral equals should relate as equals. We explore how moral unequals should relate.

Many social gradients in health appear steeper for men than for women. I refer to this as the “Steepness Puzzle.” This paper explores the ethical implications of this Puzzle. First, it identifies potential explanations for the Steepness Puzzle, including methodological problems. Second, it highlights two harms associated with the methodological explanation: the consequences of biased epistemic practices and the marginalization of women. It also demonstrates how attempts to flatten the gradients in health could disproportionately favor men or reinforce troubling gendered (...) norms. Finally, I suggest ways to address the methodological problems underlying the Puzzle. (shrink)

In societies with a history of racial oppression, present-day relations between members of different racialised groups are often difficult, tense, prone to escalate into open hostility. This can partly be put down to the persistence of racist beliefs and sentiments. But it is plausible to think there are also non-racist ways in which societal relations between members of different racialised groups go seriously wrong. This is not to downplay the extent to which racism persists: rather, the point is that there (...) exist forms of race-based interaction which, though not racist, are objectionable in their own right. Social equality theory—which understands the ideal of equality not distributively but relationally—can help us to identify and delineate some of these. Taking a social egalitarian approach, I argue that one can identify at least three types of distinctively race-based social inequality, besides racism, which need to be overcome before a society of equals can be realised: ‘racial stigma’, ‘rac... (shrink)

There is a deep divide amongst political philosophers of an egalitarian stripe. On the one hand, there are so-called distributive egalitarians, who hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members enjoys an equal share of the community’s resources. On the other hand, there are so-called social egalitarians, who instead hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members stands in certain relations to other members of the community, such non-domination and lack (...) of oppression, for example. In this paper, we have three aims. Our first aim is to cast doubt on the helpfulness of characterizing the debate in this way. Our second aim is to reconstruct this debate in alternative and more precise terms, so that disagreements between advocates of either side are easier to evaluate. Our third aim is to advance a hybrid account that integrates element from both views. (shrink)

The republican ideal of freedom as non-domination stresses the importance of certain social relationships for a person’s freedom, showing that freedom is a social-relational state. While the idea of non-domination receives a lot of attention in the literature, republican theorists say surprisingly little about equality. My aim in this paper is therefore to carve out the contours of a republican conception of equality. In so doing, I argue that republican accounts of equality share a significant normative overlap with the idea (...) of ‘social equality’. However, closer analysis of Philip Pettit’s account of ‘expressive egalitarianism’ (which he sees as inherently connected to non-domination) and recent theories of social equality shows that republican non-domination – in contrast to what Pettit seems to claim – is not sufficient for securing (republican) social equality. In order to secure social equality for all, republicans would have to go beyond the ideal of freedom as non-domination. (shrink)

Social egalitarians hold that one fundamental requirement of the ideal of social equality is that people should stand in relations of non-domination to one another. In the light of this, they reject luck egalitarian principles of justice as incompatible with a society of equals, because the former violate the non-domination requirement. I call this the domination objection. In this paper I examine its force against Dworkinian resource egalitarianism. There are two reasons why equality of resources might be thought to be (...) vulnerable to it. First, Dworkin has been interpreted to maintain that as long as people’s preferences are authentic, people should be consequentially responsible for the choices that flow from such preferences. However, Dworkin’s view on when people’s choices should be considered to be authentic does not rule out that the latter are sometimes influenced by norms and processes that are the outcome of domination and oppression, and so holding people fully consequentially responsible for choices that are the outcome of such preferences is itself unjust. Second, equality of resources objectionably permits bad-option-luck victims to become vulnerable to domination. I argue that Dworkinian egalitarianism is not susceptible to either of the two parts of the domination objection and defend the view that it is—contrary to the social egalitarian criticism—faithful to the social egalitarian demand for non-domination. (shrink)

In any normal population, health is unequally distributed across different age groups. Are such age-based health inequalities unjust? A divide has recently developed within egalitarian theories of...

“One person, one vote” is wedded to the idea of democracy to such an extent that many would hesitate to refer to a system, which deviated from this, as a democracy. In this paper, I show why this assumption is hard to defend. I do so by pointing to the importance of baseline in justifying a system of “one person, one vote.” The investigation will show that the reasons underlying the most prominent views on democratic inclusion cannot justify “one person, (...) one vote” robustly. This ultimately means that democrats should be less confident in their judgment that 1P1V is a necessary part of democracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider what one might call a negative-critical turn in egalitarian political theorizing, according to which egalitarians should not begin with a positive account of how a society...

What, if anything, is wrong with high executive compensation? Is the common “lay reaction” of indignation and moral outrage justified? In this paper, my main goal is to articulate in a more systematic and philosophical manner the egalitarian responses to these questions. In order to do so, I suggest that we take some insights from recent debates on two versions of egalitarianism: a distributive one, according to which no one should be worse off than others because of unfair distributions of (...) goods and resources, especially ones based on matters of luck or arbitrary factors, and a relational one, which maintains that egalitarian justice requires members of a society to relate to one another as equals. Drawing on recent attempts to highlight the tricky nature of managerial authority, I argue that high inequalities in pay are not simply a distributional matter but should also be analyzed through a relational lens. I also attempt to show that relational egalitarians are well-equipped to question the now dominant “incentives” view of CEO compensation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: What kinds of markets, market regulations, and business organizations are compatible with contemporary egalitarian theories of justice? This article argues that any thoughtful answer to this question will have to draw on recent developments in political philosophy that are concerned not only with the equality of the distribution of core goods but also with the requirements for equality of status, voice, and so on, in the relations between individuals and within organizations. The dominance of theories of distributive justice in (...) egalitarian political philosophy since Rawls may have contributed, on the one hand, to the oft-recognized gulf between these theories and their theorists and, on the other, to discussions of corporate governance and business ethics. The main purpose of this article is to introduce business ethicists to some of the less-familiar features of recent relational theories of justice and equality, and to suggest that some of these notions may help bridge the gap between business ethics and political philosophy more generally. (shrink)