3.4. Elizabeth Anderson: Democratic Equality
3.4.1. Is Anderson’s Account Minimally Adequate?
With Anderson’s candidate now clear, it is time to test it against the six adequacy requirements.
Her account is deeply institutional and she embraces the two core elements of an egalitarian theory, so it passes the Justice Requirement and the Egalitarian Requirement. Although her use of the capabilities approach may cast some doubt on her ability to avoid problematic
perfectionism, I do not think her relational theory is dependent on that distributive currency.
43 Lippert-Rasmussen presents a different characterization of this piece of Anderson’s account. He describes what he calls “the relationendum” of Anderson’s democratic equality as “expressing equal respect” (Lippert-Rasmussen 2018, 70). Although the expression of respect is an important element, it is important because of what that respect enables citizens to do. Furthermore, as Daniel Putnam points out, “respect” is a vague concept that Anderson does not spell out, and its content can vary depending on the underlying normative account (Putnam 2016, 31-32). I think that he is correct if the idea of expressing respect is taken as an entailment approach, but to do so misses important
More importantly, the relations of equality she requires are narrow enough and have enough of a focus on institutions tied to the very purpose of a state that she can successfully fulfill the
Avoiding Problematic Perfectionism Requirement. The Relational Requirement is also met, as she focuses on the system of relations that forms a society and the irreducibly relational nature of participation in those systems. It is the other two requirements that pose more of a problem, and must now be addressed in depth.
(4) The Real World Requirement: Is Anderson’s account able to address real world egalitarian movements?
This requirement is where I think Anderson’s theory runs into the biggest problems. The requirement is only fulfilled if the theory is able to inform and be informed by the particular issues and cases that real world social justice movements with valid claims consider instances of inequality and injustice. Unfortunately, there are several groups and issues at the center of contemporary social justice movements that Anderson’s theory cannot account for as cases of injustice, simply by nature of her focus on democratic citizenship and her explicit emphasis on law abiding citizens.
For example, one of the most vocal movements in social justice activism in the last couple of years has been the prison abolition movement and the movement to defund the police.
The activism of both is at least in part based on claims of injustice against those who have committed crimes by the institutions which are meant to uphold the law. However, Anderson is quite explicit that most of the guarantees her account establishes are conditional on the person being a law abiding citizen and not committing crimes (see Anderson 1999, 289, 313, 314, and 327). As a result, it seems that her account cannot explain an injustice against someone who is considered a criminal by the state.
Similarly, many contemporary activist groups in Western countries are concerned with the unjust treatment of immigrants and visitors to their countries, both legal and illegal. Since these are not citizens, the harmful experiences of such people cannot be conceptualized in terms of injustice within Anderson’s theories, even if they would be understood as such if those same experiences were had by a citizen. Justice seems to apply only to citizens of a state, as only they can participate in the democratic processes Anderson’s whole account is focused on enabling.
This puts Anderson’s theory of egalitarian justice out of sync with the justice claims that arise out of the realities of both contemporary and historical human migration between and within states.
Finally, it seems that those who are unable to fully participate as citizens due to severe intellectual disabilities would also be abandoned by Anderson’s account of justice, and unlike Schemmel she does not explicitly address this concern. Jeffrey Brown has discussed how a relational theory such as Anderson’s could provide an account of the injustices that are experienced by people with mild to moderate intellectual disability. However, even he is skeptical that it can give an account of injustice against those with what he calls “radical cognitive disability” (Brown 2018, 25-26). As Brown points out, at a certain point, radical cognitive disability raises questions about the nature of justice and cognitive status that are beyond the scope of both his project and mine (Brown 2018, 25). However, it is worth noting that participating as a democratic citizen presents a higher bar of cognitive ability for being a subject of justice than the metrics presented by other theories, such as those that only require sentience. This means that if one considers the treatment of people with such disabilities to be a concern of justice and equality, as many of the social justice movements that focus on disability do, in its current form this account fails to address those claims.
None of these three movements movements are, at this point, fringe movements within the activist community. They are prominent enough that when a relational theory of justice seems to rule out their claims of injustice through its definition of justice alone, it raises some questions about that definition of justice. The theory’s inability to account for these cases is not, of course, a reason to completely reject Anderson’s democratic equality. It is possible that the claims of injustice by some prominent social justice groups could prove to be unsound, or that the same claims to harm could be better accommodated using other moral concepts. However, these examples give reason to question the adequacy of Anderson’s theory, especially because the attention to real world social movements is supposed to one of the benefits of her account.
(5) The Dialectic Requirement: Is Anderson’s account dialectically robust?
It is difficult to determine whether Anderson is able to meet this requirement, since the main source of Anderson’s theory is the 1999 article that was the catalyst for relational egalitarianism coming to prominence as an alternative to distributivism in the first place. As such, there was no other literature on what it means to relate as equals for her to engage with, besides proto-
accounts from other theorists critiquing distributivism such as Young (1990) and Wolff (1998).
Although she discusses Young in some depth, she does not engage with Wolff’s work from around the same time at all, which is noteworthy since he was levelling a related critique against many of the same theories.
It also is likely that her own account is vulnerable to some of the criticisms she levels against luck egalitarians. The concerns outlined in the previous section about the ways in which democratic equality may abandon those who break the law, those who are not citizens, and those who are cognitively unable to participate as citizens open up the possibility of a “harshness”
critique similar to when she accuses luck egalitarians of abandoning those who are imprudent (see Anderson 1999, 298 for the original critique of luck egalitarianism and Tan 2008, 676 for how it applies to democratic equality). Each of these is a small flaw in the dialectical robustness of Anderson’s theory, which could possibly be addressed with ease from within it. However, taken together they result in a weakness when it comes to the dialectic requirement that undermines some of the theory’s plausibility.
Although Anderson’s account clearly fulfills three of the requirements, she fails at least one (the Real World Requirement) and has questionable results when it comes to another (the Dialectic Requirement). She also runs into some conceptual problems, as she seems to be making the questionable assumption that democratic participation (and the capabilities needed to facilitate it) is sufficient for egalitarian justice. I will discuss this problem in more depth in Section 4.1., as it does not relate directly to six adequacy requirements I am discussing here.
Despite the requirements that it does not meet, Anderson’s account has many virtues. It is clearly an egalitarian theory of justice, and it gets at something about relations of equality that all three of the other theories miss. Relations relevant to justice are not a two place or even three place relationship between individuals. They are instead complex systems of relating that are embedded deeply into the very structure of society. Due to the adequacy requirements it does not fulfill, an alternative to Anderson’s account is desirable, but that new account needs to retain and build on these insights. That is the goal of the next chapter.