“What We Owe to Each Other (1998), develops and defends a distinctive approach to interpersonal morality, known as contractualism.”
“Scanlon’s ideas about equality are philosophically significant. They also have the potential to inform how we ought to approach day-to-day politics.”
“To see how, it helps first to return to a long-running intellectual dispute over the value of equality and the meaning of egalitarianism. Before I crossed the Atlantic, I studied at Oxford, where, in the 1990s, two important figures of recent political philosophy, G. A. Cohen and Ronald Dworkin, found themselves pitted against each other. The sticking point was the nature and substance of egalitarianism.”
“In the debates between Cohen and Dworkin, it had somehow come to seem obvious that, whatever else might be said of egalitarian views, equality demanded equal distribution of something. The core question for egalitarians of this stripe was formulated with great clarity by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in 1979: “Equality of What?””
“Dworkin’s answer was equality of resources.”
“The philosopher Richard Arneson, in contrast, endorsed equality of opportunity for welfare. His idea—which was later labelled “luck egalitarianism”—was that individual welfare levels should be a matter of distributive concern for egalitarians.”
“Cohen, like Arneson a proponent of a form of luck egalitarianism, went in for a kind of hybrid objective or equilisandum—“access to advantage,” which combined elements of some of these other views.”
“But my secure sense of confidence, widely shared by political philosophers of my background and training, ran aground against the rocks of Scanlon’s understated resistance to the assumptions of the Oxford view. He argued that the concern with inequality is not some abstract interest in a particular kind of distributive pattern.”
“There is, on Scanlon’s view, a great deal more to the normative significance of equality. We don’t just want to see equal distribution of some thing. We want to live together, on terms of equal recognition, in ways that avoid interpersonal domination, prevent the emergence of stigmatizing differences in status, allow people to retain the self-respect that comes with seeing themselves as equal to others, and preserve the kind of background equality that can be a precondition for fair competition in the political and economic domains.”
“equality as embedded in the character of social relations”
“An egalitarian who only cares about the distribution of one “master good”—e.g., welfare or resources—might say that we can then compensate workers for the welfare deficit they experience at work by appropriately increasing the level of their wage subsidy. What matters is just how well off people are left overall.”
“By contrast, a view such as Scanlon’s, emphasizing the irreducible egalitarian significance of people’s status and self-respect and their protection from social domination, will be much more reluctant to collapse everything into a calculus of overall economic outcomes. A more respectful work environment might therefore be a demand of equality, even if it incurs some cost in terms of economic efficiency.”
“The distributive approach to equality fits with a model of egalitarian public policy that is essentially compensatory in nature. It may be seen as just a brute fact that, in the economic arena, many people lack opportunities or suffer indignities and harm to their sense of standing and self-respect. A state concerned with promoting greater equality could then come along after the fact and redistribute goods or welfare toward those who have lost out in economic life.”
“But, on the social egalitarian model that Scanlon advances, ex post compensation is not good enough. Instead, a state concerned with equality must ensure, from the start, that people are able to pursue lives of robust, individual agency within the economic domain, with a secure sense of their standing as equals among others.”
“Instead of being concerned only with redistribution, egalitarian public policy should incline toward predistribution, which aims to reshape economic institutions so that they foster egalitarian social relationships, as well as more evenly distributed economic rewards.”