what is equality?

tldr: a state of affairs of morally-relevant sameness between group members

Whenever you claim to care about equality, typically someone will ask you, “But what kind of equality do you care about?”. This will almost certainly happen if you’re hanging out with philosophers, anyway!

The further questions philosophers might ask include, “Are you more of a liberal type of egalitarian or a socialist?”, and “What relevance do you afford to luck?”. Whereas, if there’s an economist in the room, then they might start off with something more like, “Do you mean income equality, wealth equality, or consumption equality?”. No matter what, however, there’s bound to be someone nearby who’s keen to hold forth on the over-done difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

A standard view, therefore, seems to be that ‘equality’ pertains to many different things. That there are, in other words, many matters of equality. In this piece, I’m going to consider what it might be — if anything — that neatly ties together all these matters. And I’m going to consider this in order to help me to advance an argument about what equality is.

Tim Scanlon tells us that egalitarian reasons are “reasons for objecting to the difference between what some have and what others have, and for reducing this difference”.¹ This seems like a useful starting point for my inquiry. That is, mightn’t all the different matters of equality pertain to reducing differences between the things that different people have?² I’m going to make five responses to this idea.

1) The significance of sameness

First, we can’t be talking about any old reduction here, can we? That is, if we were to accept that all matters of equality were to do with ‘reducing differences’, then we’d have to ask how far these differences needed to be reduced. This is mainly because ‘reducing differences’ is not the same as making things equal. I mean, you can clearly make things ‘more equal’ — in the sense of making them ‘closer to equal’ — without equalising them!

Okay, implying that ‘equality’ is about ‘equalising’ does seem a little bit like cheating. But I’m going to bite the bullet and accept from the off that ‘equality’ is related to the term ‘equal’ in the sense of having some kind of focus on ‘sameness’. I’ll discuss below the kind of focus on sameness that I think is particularly significant. But for now, I’m happy to go with the general relevance to equality of ‘sameness’ over the relevance to equality of ‘a reduction in difference’.

I’m not going to accept, however, that equality is necessarily about equalising. This is mainly because, as with reducing, ‘equalising’ implies action — even intervention. Whereas, it seems clear that there are at least some matters of equality that pertain only to the first part of Scanlon’s claim. Some matters of equality, that is, pertain only to “the difference between what some have and what others have”, and not to the reducing (or equalising) of these differences. Most obviously, this is because some matters of equality are descriptive matters. I mean, we surely don’t want to rule out, per se, the relevance of equality to descriptive matters like “Jane is richer than Jenny”, or “People in Malawi have worse access to legal representation than people in America”.

Beyond that, however, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. What I mean by this is that it wouldn’t help us, over all, if the answer we gave to the question ‘what ties together all of the matters of equality?’ were, in itself, to include an answer to the downstream question of ‘how should we address inequality?’. Minimally, this would confuse things. But also it really isn’t necessary!

Rather, we can simply conclude that matters of equality all pertain to some kind of ‘sameness’ obtaining, without baking into this conclusion any additional commitments around how to go about making non-same things the same, or which kinds of non-same things should get this treatment! After all, my goal here is to work out what equality is, not when and how we should try to bring it about.³

2) The significance of morally-relevant sameness

But what kind of ‘sameness’ are we talking about? Here, I want to introduce the idea of ‘thinner’ matters of sameness, and ‘thicker’ ones. An example of a ‘thinner’ matter of sameness would be two people having the same height. Whereas, an example of a ‘thicker’ matter of sameness would be two citizens having the same legal right to political participation. What makes the second matter ‘thicker’ here is that it is more morally imbued — that there is a clear ‘should-ness’ element in play. In other words, if we discover that the two citizens do not have the same legal right to political participation, then we should clearly ask, well, should they?

We should consider the reasons, that is, why these two citizens don’t have the same legal right to political participation — in order to conclude whether something morally wrong is going on. If one of the two is a baby and the other is an adult, for instance, then we won’t have much cause for concern!

Whereas, in almost all instances, we simply won’t get on to these ‘should’ questions when we’re considering the fact that two people are of different heights. Exceptions here, of course, would include an instance in which the two people in question had lived their lives under a political regime that limited certain children’s access to food. But the reason this instance would be an exception is that the information about childhood access to food opens up the possibility that one of the two is shorter owing, at least in part, to having suffered morally-wrong behaviour.

The point I’m working towards, therefore, is that we tend to reserve the term ‘equality’ for instances of sameness that have some moral valence. I mean, even though we talk ordinarily of the four sides of a square as having equal length, it would be really odd to bring the term ‘equality’ into such a discussion!

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should exclude all naturally occurring samenesses and differences from considerations of equality. As implied above, for instance, many philosophers are interested in the moral relevance of luck. And even if you end up concluding that luck is never morally relevant, you will likely still think that the question itself is morally relevant — in a way you likely wouldn’t think about the question of whether the equal length of the four sides of a square is morally relevant!

Why is this, however? The best explanation I can offer is that matters of human equality all hinge on the moral relevance of certain basic samenesses that are shared by all human beings. These samenesses tie us together as instances of the same kind of thing — samenesses, for instance, that relate to our shared capacities, such as agency and consciousness; and samenesses that relate to our shared needs, such as sustenance and shelter. To this end, these samenesses play an essential role in shaping the content of the human good. They also underpin an especially fundamental matter of human equality: the equality of moral status.

As I wrote recently on the Pursuit of Liberalism:

“By ‘equality of moral status’, I’m referring to two foundational liberal ideas. First, the idea that all human beings, regardless of circumstance, share a fundamental equal status, as a matter of moral truth. This kind of equality is grounded in features particular to being human, including the capacity for free agency.

Second is the idea that there’s a different but overlapping basic moral status held by all members of a legitimate political society. This second idea depends on the first, but comes with additional demands to behave towards each other in certain ways. It overlaps with the discussions of ‘relational equality’ you can find in the work of Elizabeth Anderson.”

One way of looking at all this, therefore, is to conclude that this especially fundamental way of being the same forces us to question the moral relevance of all other differences between us.⁴

3) Should we allow some space for ‘being’ as well as ‘having’?

I now want to turn to Scanlon’s focus on ‘having’. That is, Scanlon talks about the “difference between what some have and what others have”. Yet some matters of equality seem to fit outside of this. Matters of equal status, for instance, seem to be more about ‘being’ than ‘having’. Sure, you can say things like, “We have equal status”, but this seems like a locution-type solution to the problem. This is because what we’re really talking about when we talk about ‘equal moral status’ is the way each of us ‘is’, rather than the things each of us ‘has’.

Okay, if we’re tying ‘equal moral status’ to the sameness of things like capacities and needs, then again we do typically say that we ‘have’ such things. Nonetheless, Scanlon’s talk of “the difference between what some have and what others have” seems to me best suited to ‘having’ the kinds of things that aren’t inherent to being human. These are things like apples rather than minds, and things like skills rather than fundamental capacities. They are the kinds of things, in other words, that we come to possess, rather than the constitutive features that tie us together.

Again, this is bolstered by Scanlon’s additional focus on “reducing the differences”. This is because a focus on difference reduction applies most cleanly to the kinds of ownable things that are switchable between owners. I mean, you can’t ‘reduce the difference’ between a person’s capacity for free agency and a rock’s lack of such a capacity! Even though, of course, you can ‘level down’ two people’s opportunity to exercise such a capacity by knocking both of them unconscious.

4) It’s not always about pie!

The relevance of ‘having’ brings us to the question of shares or portions. That is, people often talk about equality in terms of ‘slices of the pie’. And, whether or not you acknowledge the valuable option of ‘increasing the pie’, all this talk of pies implies that matters of equality are to do with having some part of a larger set. Whereas, it seems clear that some of the most significant kinds of things that humans ‘hold equally’ are not shares of larger sets. These things include equal freedoms and equal moral rights, as well as equal moral status.

Equal moral status is the most straight-forward of these examples. I mean, what possible work could a pie metaphor do in explaining how or why each of us holds this kind of status, equally? There is no pie required here!

But I also want to emphasise that you and I hold certain moral rights ‘equally’ simply in the sense that these are the kinds of moral rights that all human beings hold. The right not to be tortured, for instance, is one of these rights. There are certain freedoms we all hold in this way, too. And, while equal rights and equal freedoms are multiple, and therefore countable in a way in which equal moral status is not, we don’t hold these things ‘equally’ in the sense that we each have some determinable portion of some particular larger whole. It simply doesn’t come down to an ‘amount’ in this sense! There is no pie, in other words, to determine the ‘size’ or any otherwise quantifiable extent of each of our equally-held rights and freedoms.

5) Comparisons between any numbers of group members

Finally, I want to note that Scanlon’s reference to “some and others” seems overly confining. That is, he talks of “the difference between what some have and what others have” — and yes, equality is clearly a comparative matter. Indeed, I’m happy to accept that all matters of equality involve evaluations across groups. As discussed above, these groups can be as big as the whole of humankind! But we surely have to include instances in which there is only one group member on one or both sides of the equation!

So, what is equality?

I’ve already concluded that equality has to do with morally-relevant sameness. But what kind of a thing is equality? When, for instance, I’ve thought about freedom in a similarly analytical kind of way, I’ve concluded that I’m broadly happy to think that ‘being free’, in its most fundamental sense, is ‘being able to do things of your own accord’. We can take this as meaning, therefore, that I’ve concluded that freedom, at heart, is a capacity.

But it would seem very odd — generally, and in the context of what I’ve argued here today — to conclude that equality is a capacity! Rather, it seems to me as if equality, in the sense of the morally-relevant thing that obtains in particular instances, is a state of affairs. Therefore, I’m happy to conclude, for now, that equality is a state of affairs of morally-relevant sameness between group members.

In this context, instances of inequality are instances in which equality doesn’t obtain: states of affairs of morally-relevant non-sameness. And, in this context, all possible matters of equality can be assessed and addressed from the starting point of asking the following two questions: 1) what is the sameness or non-sameness that obtains between the group members in question? 2) is this a morally-relevant instance of sameness or non-sameness?

Then, and only then, can we turn to the hard work of determining whether any particular morally-relevant non-sameness that we’ve identified — any particular inequality, that is — is the kind of thing that can and should be intervened upon.

1. See the beginning of Scanlon’s Why Does Inequality Matter? (2018). I wrote about this book here recently.

2. I know that Scanlon isn’t presenting a definition of equality here, per se. And I know there are good objections that could be made in response to me having turned his talk of egalitarian reasons into such a definition. But this is a useful starting point for my purposes, so I’m happy to press ahead, nonetheless!

3. In this context, it’s worth noting that assessing matters of both ‘equality of outcome’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ involves assessing existing samenesses, even though only the former is primarily taken to be an ‘end-state’ matter. This is because you can’t consider whether ‘equality of opportunity’ obtains within some particular group without evaluating the level of ‘sameness’ of the opportunities that the group’s different members each currently have.

4. I don’t think, however, that concluding such a thing means that I also have to conclude that there are no equality-type questions that pertain to differences between humans and non-human animals. Rather, I think I can conclude that relevant to all such questions will be the fact that humans and non-human animals are different kinds of things! But I’ll return to this further problem some other time.