Equality and Proportionality

Contemporary moral egalitarians hold that all people have equal moral standing and that we deserve this standing in virtue of satisfying some descriptive criterion. These two claims appear to be in tension, however, as none of the proposed criteria are attributes that all people possess equally. Many egalitarians have hoped to eliminate this tension by holding that the descriptive criterion of moral standing is a "range property" – that is, a property one either possesses fully or not at all. I argue that the prospects of this strategy succeeding are not good. The problems I raise stem from the vagueness of the egalitarians’ descriptive criteria. Appealing to what I call the moral ideal of proportionality, I show that this vagueness forces us to allow that moral standing can be possessed to finely differentiated degrees. But once this is granted, it is difficult to see how the claim that all people are moral equals can be justified. The idea that all people are moral equals enjoys broad support. Practically speaking, there is no doubt that this is a great moral victory. Inegalitarian views are often morally arbitrary, and many have been used to support self-serving and deeply harmful actions and policies. Coming, as it does, on the heels of ideas of racial, ethnic, religious and gender-based superiority, there is no question that the world is a far better place for our commitment to the idea that all (normal adult) humans deserve to be shown equal moral respect or concern.1 * For their comments on versions of this paper and discussions about the topics it addresses, I am grateful to Larry Temkin, Bill Throop, Jeff McMahon, an anonymous referee for this journal, and, especially, John Arthur. 1 Throughout this discussion, I will be taking the word “people” to refer only to normal adult humans. It is worth mentioning that the consequent modesty of the egalitarian thesis I will be analyzing is significant in several respects. First, the restriction to normal adults insures that the claim that all people are moral equals enjoys particularly broad support, as no controversial claims about the standing of, say, human fetuses or humans in vegetative states are being taken for granted. Secondly, the problems I will raise for this rather weak form of egalitarianism are That said, neither the currency of this egalitarianism within philosophical and folk moral theories, nor its merit relative to the crude discriminatory ideas it has supplanted, is sufficient to show that it is theoretically justified. For while there are very good reasons to believe that the view that people possess equal moral standing is preferable to many views according to which they do not, it is far from clear that these reasons will also be sufficient to show that such egalitarianism is itself on firm ground, and that it is more justified than every form of inegalitarianism. This paper explores the prospects of finding an egalitarian response to a challenge that has dogged egalitarianism for many years – namely that, contrary to what egalitarianism seems to require, there is no morally relevant descriptive attribute that people possess equally. The plan is to spell out the considerable force of this challenge, present what I take to be the best egalitarian response, and then spend the bulk of the article discussing the prospects of making this response successful. Along the way, we will see that, in order to avoid prescribing differences in treatment or concern that are disproportionate to the morally relevant differences that exist between individuals, acceptable moral theories must allow that at least some individuals’ moral standing varies with their natural attributes. And this, in turn, raises a new, and significantly stronger, reason to doubt that egalitarian convictions can be justified. 1. The Inegalitarian’s Challenge The claim that all people are moral equals is a claim about their moral standing. What exactly we are claiming when we say an individual has moral standing is a disputed matter, of course. At the most general level, however, it can be agreed that it is in virtue of possessing moral standing that individuals have moral claims on us and deserve our moral concern or respect. The disagreement emerges when we try to specify what exactly the legitimate claims of those with moral standing are, and exactly what sort of concern and respect they deserve. Some will say that those with moral standing have rights that protect them from certain kinds of interference in the name of the overall good. Others will say that those with moral standing deserve to be treated as ends-in-themselves rather than merely as means. Still others will say that those with moral standing deserve a say in what rules govern social interactions in their community, or in what principles structure the political authority that governs them.2 likely to be only a subset of the problems many actual egalitarians must confront. For instance, most egalitarians believe that infants and young children are owed the same respect and concern as normal adults are. But it is notoriously difficult to justify this claim without committing oneself to extending the same standing to all sentient animals. And the moral equality of most of the animal kingdom is more than many egalitarians are willing to accept. 2 There is one influential analysis of egalitarianism’s normative upshot that I will not discuss directly here: namely, that when any two people share the same kind of interest to the