We are now able to see the myriad ways in which ER and EO might conflict in practice, and we are also in a position to understand better the reasons that explain this conflict. ER and EO conflict insofar as they are targeted at distinct ends: The end of ER is to treat persons as they are independent of their social roles, I.
The reason that a vigorous pursuit of EO may ultimately frustrate ER is that our notion of respect is itself prima facie inconsistent: on the one hand, we accord, and desire to accord people respect simply in virtue of their being people; on the other hand, one of the specific aspects of persons to which we accord respect is their capacity for achievement. He is a former student of Dr Geoffrey Klempner. You are commenting using your WordPress.
You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Cambridge University Press Basic Equality in Social and Political Philosophy. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index.
Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy. Configure custom resolver. Whence the Demand for Ethical Theory? Respect and the Basis of Equality. So far, the respects in which people can be counted alike — the capacity to suffer , the need for self-respect — has been negative i.
However, people are also thought equal in certain positive respects i. This notion is problematic because there are no purely moral capacities. Some capacities are more relevant for the attainment of virtue — the capacity for intelligence as opposed to, say, the capacity to lift heavy objects, for instance — but such capacities can also be exercised in non-moral matters — in an examination, for instance.
And in such non-moral matters, such capacities would be understood as differing from one person to the next just like other natural capacities. There are some who contend that moral worth has nothing to do with natural capacities as these capacities are are unequally and fortuitously distributed. All other contingent and empirical capacities of natural excellence or lack thereof are irrelevant.
Kant makes this detachment of moral worth from contingent and unequal natural capacities workable at a great cost: by making the rational moral agency of the person a transcendental characteristic independent of the unequal natural capacities that people have. Yet, even if we reject the transcendental basis for the notion of respect, the notion need not be rendered meaningless.
For, there is certainly a difference between treating a person from a technical point of view and from his own point of view. To illustrate, one could look at a plumber or a person who has spent his life trying without success to invent a certain machine and pass the technical judgment that both are failures. The plumber might be doing his job out of desperation or because he wants to be one.
This does not mean, of course, that the more fundamental view that should be taken is in the case of everyone the same: on the contrary. But it does mean that everyone is owed the effort of understanding, and that in achieving it, people should be abstracted from certain conspicuous structures of inequality in which we find them.
In passing this injunction, it is being assumed that people are beings who are necessarily and to some indeterminate extent conscious of themselves and of the world they live in. This social element is what makes the considerations relevant for issues of political equality. One could, I think, accept this [injunction] as an ideal, and yet favour, for instance, some kind of hierarchical society, so long as the hierarchy maintained itself without compulsion, and there was human understanding between the orders.
In such a society, everyone would indeed have a very conspicuous title which related him or her to the social structure; but it might be that most people were aware of the human beings behind the titles and found each other for the most part content, or even proud, to have the titles that they had.
So far, the considerations have been about cases where people have been understood to be equal. But the idea of equality is invoked even in cases, especially with respect to distribution of or access to goods, where people are agreed to be unequal.
In such cases, a distinction may be drawn between inequality of need and inequality of merit. There is a competitive element to the case of merit and as such, we have to consider not just the distribution of the good [in this case, a university education] but also the distribution of the opportunity for achieving that good which might conceivably be distributed equally.
This is the idea of the equality of opportunity. In both cases of need and merit, the matter of the relevance of reasons for needing treatment, or getting admitted to a university appears. Lets take the case of need to illustrate. Ill health a necessary condition for getting medical treatment. But in many societies, ill health is not a sufficient condition with money serving as a further requirement.
The notions of equality and inequality have to be now applied to the rich ill and the poor ill and not just the the well and the ill as we should. A society owes respect to the integrity of all of its members equally. But not all goods can or ought to be distributed equally. Some goods, such as health care, should be distributed according to need; it would be weird to distribute health care equally.
Other goods, such as higher education, are distributed according to merit; it should be offered to those who are more capable of using a higher education before it is offered to those who are less capable.
Here the relevant facts are about the nature of goods. Health care is for curing illness; university education for learning. The egalitarian political project that follows from these facts is one that tries to make the distribution of goods line up with what they are for: need in the case of health care or merit in the case of higher education.
In particular, the aim of egalitarian political reform is to remove wealth as a condition for receiving these things. In this way, you get something interesting out of the apparently vacuous starting point that there has to be some reason for unequal treatment. The essay ends with an interesting discussion about how the different aspects of equality collide with one another Williams , Equal opportunity requires inequality.
It makes sense only if there is competition for goods that only some can merit. The goods that are distributed unequally according to merit are desirable and important. Because this is so, one strand of our thinking about equality pushes us to favor equal opportunity: everyone should have the same realistic chance to develop the talents and skills that would enable them to compete for the merited goods.
That sits uneasily with the thought that some people should get the desirable and important merit goods because they are more talented or successful. Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen.
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