PANEL 20 /// INSTITUTIONS FOR A SOCIETY OF EQUALS: SOCIAL STATUS,
EQUAL TREATMENT, AND THE VALUE OF EGALITARIAN RELATIONS
CONVENOR: ALEX OLIVARES (CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY)
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected]
In 1999 Professor Elisabeth Anderson published one of the most cited papers in political philosophy in the last decades: “What’s the point of Equality?”. There, she discusses the desirability of focusing on distributive concerns when addressing the “Equality of What” debate. Anderson argues that social justice is not about the distribution of scarce goods or resources, rather she proposes an alternative: social relations. She argues that social justice should focus on relations among individuals, on whether individuals treat each other on an egalitarian basis, on their equal social status and standing, thus opposing hierarchy and domination. To do so, she lays out her preferred version of egalitarian relations, to wit: democratic equality.
After Anderson’s seminal paper, the literature on relational egalitarianism has gained traction over the last two decades in the political philosophy debate. Contributions to the debate have generated a wide variety of interpretations of the ideal of equality in social relations. Some authors have followed Elisabeth Anderson’s account of democratic equality (Scheffler, S., 2003, 2015 and Schemmel, C. 2012, 2021), while others have argued for an account of relational equality instead (Fourie, C. et al., 2015, 2021, and Wolff, J., 2015), and others have considered that inegalitarian relations constitute a further complexity added to distributional concerns (Arneson, R., 2010). In recent years, some authors have begun to discuss non-egalitarian relational patterns, and both alternatives such as sufficientarian relations (Lippert-Rasmussen, K., 2018, 2021) as well as the role of egalitarian relations to realise individual autonomy (Voig, K., and Stoljar, N., 2021) are gaining attention in the discussion.
Within this framework this panel takes a particular institutional stance in the discussion, aiming at addressing two main challenges: first, whether institutions should promote egalitarian relations among citizens, and if so, how; and second, what are the institutional mechanisms providing the background conditions for egalitarian treatment. Recent developments the literature proposed different answers to those two questions. Contributions to this panel include but are not limited to discussing Sophia Moreau's (2020) proposal of the three conditions that states should comply to fulfil their duty to provide the background conditions to promote egalitarian treatment among citizens; as well as Christian Schemmel’s (2021) perspective of institutions expressing attitudes towards their subjects through policies, which might be analised from the point of view of justice.
Among the questions that we would like to address are the following:
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected]
In 1999 Professor Elisabeth Anderson published one of the most cited papers in political philosophy in the last decades: “What’s the point of Equality?”. There, she discusses the desirability of focusing on distributive concerns when addressing the “Equality of What” debate. Anderson argues that social justice is not about the distribution of scarce goods or resources, rather she proposes an alternative: social relations. She argues that social justice should focus on relations among individuals, on whether individuals treat each other on an egalitarian basis, on their equal social status and standing, thus opposing hierarchy and domination. To do so, she lays out her preferred version of egalitarian relations, to wit: democratic equality.
After Anderson’s seminal paper, the literature on relational egalitarianism has gained traction over the last two decades in the political philosophy debate. Contributions to the debate have generated a wide variety of interpretations of the ideal of equality in social relations. Some authors have followed Elisabeth Anderson’s account of democratic equality (Scheffler, S., 2003, 2015 and Schemmel, C. 2012, 2021), while others have argued for an account of relational equality instead (Fourie, C. et al., 2015, 2021, and Wolff, J., 2015), and others have considered that inegalitarian relations constitute a further complexity added to distributional concerns (Arneson, R., 2010). In recent years, some authors have begun to discuss non-egalitarian relational patterns, and both alternatives such as sufficientarian relations (Lippert-Rasmussen, K., 2018, 2021) as well as the role of egalitarian relations to realise individual autonomy (Voig, K., and Stoljar, N., 2021) are gaining attention in the discussion.
Within this framework this panel takes a particular institutional stance in the discussion, aiming at addressing two main challenges: first, whether institutions should promote egalitarian relations among citizens, and if so, how; and second, what are the institutional mechanisms providing the background conditions for egalitarian treatment. Recent developments the literature proposed different answers to those two questions. Contributions to this panel include but are not limited to discussing Sophia Moreau's (2020) proposal of the three conditions that states should comply to fulfil their duty to provide the background conditions to promote egalitarian treatment among citizens; as well as Christian Schemmel’s (2021) perspective of institutions expressing attitudes towards their subjects through policies, which might be analised from the point of view of justice.
Among the questions that we would like to address are the following:
- What is the value of equal social status and social egalitarian relations?
- What does the relational egalitarian view demand in the political domain? Do institutions have a general duty to promote egalitarian relations among citizens? If they do, how should they display such a duty?
- What role do relational egalitarian concerns play in global justice? Should international institutions, to be just, promote relational, social, or democratic equality?
- Might concerns with relational and social equality such as non-domination, social status and standing, and non-oppression be captured by sufficiency views of relations? If so, what institutional implications follow?
