individual person. It will maintain the distinction between justice and other social goods that are often hard to distinguish in some versions of a more comprehensive account, such as
authenticity, personal integrity, autonomy, agency, dignity, or freedom.
Clearly being an account of justice is, then, the first requirement for a minimally adequate egalitarian theory of justice. The Justice Requirement can be stated as follows:
(1) A theory meets the justice requirement if that theory only presents principles that reside in and determine the institutions and systems of institutions in a society that are
structured by hierarchical power relations with coercive results, which determine the coordination of benefits, burdens, advantages and disadvantages in that society.
(1.a) A theory fails to meet the justice requirement if that theory presents principles that dictate the ethical obligations of individuals, their conceptions of well-being, and other elements of individual lives that are not within the prescriptive purview of institutions.
particular action on the part of institutions to render some additional, politically relevant aspect of peoples lives equal. If that politically relevant thing is unequal, the society is an unjust one, because it fails to uphold the basic moral equality assumed by most theories of justice. As such, the justification for any principles and policies recommended by the theory must also be
traceable in some way to that inference. Such a theory fulfills the Egalitarian Requirement, which ensures it fits the conception of egalitarianism as it was defined in Chapter 1.
As mentioned, many theorists that are not considered egalitarian (or even who are anti- egalitarian) share the assumption of basic moral equality. John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism counts the utility of each individual as equally morally relevant (Mill [1871] 2002, 105), which implies basic moral equality. However, utilitarianism is set up as the opposition for many egalitarians, including Rawls, since it often leads to rendering things unequal in order to maximize utility.
Even when the utilitarian calls for rendering something equal, it is based on grounds other than people’s basic moral equality. The utilitarian calls for making something equal only when such a policy maximizes utility, and specifically because it does so. Similarly, Thomas Hobbes grounds the motivation for the creation of the social contract and the state in both the natural equality of all humans and a “normative claim that no one is naturally subservient to another” (Wolff 2011, 2). However, the state he prescribes entails great inequality both between the subjects and the sovereign (Brooke 2020, 1408; Hobbes [1651]1996, 115-122) and among the subjects (Brooke 2020, 1409). Even Robert Nozick at least implicitly justifies his Entitlement Theory of justice in terms of basic moral equality. His objection to egalitarian distributive justice is that redistributing goods in order to achieve an equal distribution violates people’s rights such as choice and
freedom (Nozick [1974] 2014, 401). This implies that these are equal rights held by all persons, which would presumably be the result of their basic moral equality. In each of these cases, the
assumption of basic moral equality is held. However, none of them see upholding that moral equality as requiring that something additional be made equal, and so they are not egalitarians in the sense relevant here.
On the other hand, the historical political theories that are often seen as the foundations of egalitarianism as it is known today do share both the assumption and inference that define egalitarianism. John Locke argues that all human beings are born free and equal, and then takes this to entail that certain rights being held equally by all within political society (Locke [1764]
1980, 65-68). Jean Jacques Rousseau argues for the presence of equality in the state of nature, and prescribes various kinds of political, social and economic equality in his social contract (Rousseau 1997, 78). Rawls’ theory of justice is also clearly grounded in basic moral equality in this way, as the principles he argues for are justified on the basis of being what free, equal and rational persons would accept in a situation in which all particularities were removed, (Rawls [1971] 1999, 17) and those principles entail making equal basic liberties, access to certain offices, and opportunity (as discussed in Chapter 1).
In contemporary egalitarian theories, both the justification in the assumption of basic moral equality and the inference to rendering equal manifest in many different ways. Dworkin argues that a legitimate government must be one that “attempts to show equal concern for the fates of all those it governs and full respect for their personal responsibility for their own lives”
(Dworkin 2013, 16). According to him, this can best be achieved through the distribution of resources using a hypothetical auction that leads to a result without envy, and an insurance scheme to protect against brute luck (Dworkin 1981). This achieves a distribution that is equal in a responsibilist sense. Anderson emphasizes that egalitarian political movements oppose
hierarchies of intrinsic worth among human beings as a direct result of their assertion of the
equal moral worth of all persons (Anderson 1999, 312), so that justice requires rendering equal the relations in which people stand to each other (Anderson 1999, 313). Kasper Lippert-
Rasmussen has distinguished between regarding someone as an equal and treating someone as an equal (Lippert-Rasmussen 2018, 16), but both regard and treatment can be seen as things that are made equal in order to uphold basic moral equality. Others, such as Kristin Voigt and Christian Schemmel, have also identified expressing equality as an additional, distinct interpretation of what should be rendered equal (Voigt 2018, 439; Schemmel 2021, 13). All of these different interpretations, as well as many others, fulfill the egalitarian requirement, so long as in each of them it is clear how the theory is grounded in both the assumption of basic moral equality and the inference that justice requires rendering something equal. A theory missing either of these components may still be egalitarian in some sense, but it is not the sense that is relevant to the debates at hand.
This second minimum adequacy requirement then, ensures the theory is really egalitarian, and it can be summarized as follows:
(2) A theory meets the egalitarian requirement if that theory is justified by the fact of moral equality and infers from that fact that the justice of a political system requires it rendering equal something that impacts politically relevant benefits and burdens.
(2.a.) A theory fails to meet the egalitarian requirement if it is or could be grounded in an account of persons that is antithetical to or distinct from all persons having the same basic moral worth, or if it rejects the inference that such basic moral equality requires the political system rendering equal something specific in peoples’ lives.