Equality and Proportionality

Equality and Proportionality

The idea that all people are moral equals enjoys broad support. Practically speaking, there is no doubt that this is a great moral victory. Inegalitarian views are often morally arbitrary, and many have been used to support self-serving and deeply harmful actions and policies. Coming, as it does, on the heels of ideas of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-based superiority, there is no question that the world is a far better place for our commitment to the idea that all (normal adult) humans deserve to be shown equal moral respect or concern.²

That said, neither the currency of this egalitarianism within philosophical and folk moral theories, nor its merit relative to the crude discriminatory ideas it has supplanted, is sufficient to show that it is theoretically justified. For while there are very good reasons to believe that the view that people possess equal moral standing is preferable to many views according to which they do not, it is far from clear that these reasons will also be sufficient to show that such egalitarianism is itself on firm ground, and that it is more justified than every form of inegalitarianism.

This paper explores the prospects of finding an egalitarian response to a challenge that has dogged egalitarianism for many years — namely that, contrary to what egalitarianism seems to require, there is no morally relevant descriptive attribute that people possess equally. The plan is to spell out the considerable force of this challenge, present what I take to be the best egalitarian response, and then spend the bulk of the article discussing the prospects of making this response successful. Along the way, we will see that, in order to avoid prescribing differences in treatment or concern that are disproportionate to the morally relevant differences that exist between individuals, acceptable moral theories must allow that at least some individuals' moral standing varies with their natural attributes. And this, in turn, raises a new, and significantly stronger, reason to doubt that egalitarian convictions can be justified.

I The Inegalitarian's Challenge

The claim that all people are moral equals is a claim about their moral standing. What exactly we are claiming when we say an individual has moral standing is a disputed matter, of course. At the most general level, however, it can be agreed that it is in virtue of possessing moral standing that individuals have moral claims on us and deserve our moral concern or respect. The disagreement emerges when we try to specify what exactly the legitimate claims of those with moral standing are, and exactly what sort of concern and respect they deserve. Some will say that those with moral standing have rights that protect them from certain kinds of interference in the name of the overall good. Others will say that those with moral standing deserve to be treated as ends-in-themselves rather than merely as means. Still others will say that those with moral standing deserve a say in what rules govern social interactions in their community, or in what principles structure the political authority that governs them.³

Despite these differences among theorists in the implications of an individual's possessing moral standing, there is almost universal agreement that an individual possesses moral standing in virtue of possessing some descriptive characteristic. This is no surprise insofar as many contemporary moral philosophers take it for granted that the evaluative must supervene on the descriptive — there can be no evaluative difference between two things without there also being some descriptive difference between them.⁴ Moreover, where there is an evaluative difference, the requisite descriptive difference, or some aspect of it, is typically taken to figure in the explanation of the evaluative difference. So, in the context of moral standing, if the moral standing of two individuals is different, then, it is typically supposed, there must be some difference between them in terms of descriptive properties, and...