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Equality

All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others. George Orwell

Orwell's mocking sentence hits a sore point: hardly any word is so solemnly invoked and at the same time so routinely betrayed as equality. A critical view takes the promise seriously and at the same time distrusts its ideological use. Equality is not a harmless value on which agreement is easily reached, but a contested concept interpreted according to interest.

Most visible is legal equality: before the law all are to be equal, without regard to origin, sex or wealth. That is a historical achievement and yet only the surface. Anatole France already mocked that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges. Formal equality can cover up real inequality when the life situations to which it is applied are profoundly different. With Rainer Forst one can say: legal equality is only an expression of a deeper claim, namely that no one may be subjected to norms for which no good reasons can be given to them.

Equality of opportunity​

Equality of opportunity promises that not birth but achievement decides the course of life. But the race is only fair if all start at the same line, and that is precisely rarely the case. Whoever ignores the unequal starting conditions turns the promise into a justification: the success of some and the failure of others then appear as deserved. The talk of opportunity can thus become an ideological veiling of structural disadvantage. Critical thinking therefore always asks who defines the conditions under which opportunities are distributed.

What value does equality have, and how can it be justified​

But why should people count as equals at all?
Here the philosophical minds are at odds. The pragmatist Richard Rorty advises against grounding equality on a metaphysical essence of the human being that we supposedly only need to discover. There is no neutral rock on which equality rests. Solidarity is not found but invented or made/produced, by gradually widening the "we" to which we count ourselves. Through sentimental education, rather than through arguments, our ability is trained to see in the other a counterpart capable of suffering. In the end everything is grounded on the ability to see in others beings capable of suffering and on the basic principle: to avoid cruelty.

Jürgen Habermas takes a different path and anchors equality in reason itself, more precisely in language. Whoever argues seriously already presupposes that all those affected could agree as free and equal. A norm is valid only if it could find the agreement of all whom it affects. Equality here is not an external ideal but a precondition of every honest understanding. Rainer Forst condenses this into the right to justification: the basic equality consists in the fact that each and every one is an equal authority to demand and to give reasons.

Reciprocity​

With this, reciprocity moves to the centre, both as a value and as a ground of equality. Reciprocity means that I claim for myself no rights that I deny to others, and that I do not tailor my reasons one-sidedly to my own advantage. Forst's criteria of reciprocity and generality make this idea strict: just is what can be justified to all with reasons that no one could reasonably reject. Equality is thus less a scheme of distribution than a relation of mutual recognition.

Equality does not mean making everyone and everything the same​

Precisely for this reason the most common objection is a misunderstanding: that equality aims at grey uniformity, at levelling all differences. The opposite is meant. Rahel Jaeggi reminds us, with her critique of forms of life, that it is not about the assimilation of contents but about the conditions under which people can shape their lives themselves. A relational equality aims at dismantling relations of domination, reification and alienation, so that difference can be freely lived at all. Equality as levelling would be its own betrayal; equality as being on an equal footing is its point.

So Orwell's bitter sentence leads back to the task. The claim that some are more equal is not a law of nature but the result of conditions that must be justifiable or else are not. Equality is not an achieved state but an ongoing practice of demanding and giving reasons, against every power that evades justification.

Sources​

  • Rainer Forst: Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2007 (ISBN 978-3-518-29362-1).
  • English: The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Columbia University Press, 2012.
  • see also Habermas' discourse ethics, especially the principle of universalization (U), according to which a norm is valid only if all those affected could agree to it as participants in a practical discourse. Habermas: Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Suhrkamp 1983.
  • Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989.