"What is the Point of Equality" by Elizabeth Anderson

A comparison between the views of Anderson and Silvers

Sharing numerous arguments with Silvers’ “Formal Justice” is Anderson’s “Democratic Equality”. Similar to Formal Justice, the Democratic Equality conception submits that justice as equality seeks to end socially oppressive relationships. Anderson writes, “Positively, the claim asserts that all competent adults are equally moral agents: everyone equally has the power to develop and exercise moral responsibility, to cooperate with others according to principles of justice, to shape and fulfill a conception of their good.” (Anderson 312) For Democratic Equality, an ideal society has social conditions where everyone’s freedom is secured. Legitimate relationships with fundamental equality, equal respect, and real freedom to participate in democratic self-government are a basic threshold of liberties. Democratic Equality has three central spheres important to its axiom. The first sphere is functioning as a human being. This requires access to sustaining one’s biological existence (food, shelter, clothing health care) and access to human agency such as knowledge of one’s circumstances and options, the ability to deliberate about means and ends, and the ability to think and judge for oneself including freedom of thought and movement.

The second sphere is functioning as a participant in a system of cooperative production. This requires access to education, means of production, and fair contracts. Additionally, the second sphere includes recognition for productive contribution, and the right to receive the fair value for one’s labor. Finally, the last sphere is functioning as a citizen in a democratic state. This requires access to political participation such as freedom of speech and franchise, as goods/services/relationships in civil society, including access to public spaces, access to public accommodations, and the social conditions of being accepted by others. (Anderson 317-318) The societal obstacles mentioned by Silvers, should not exist in society according to Anderson. Holding a similar view to Silvers, Anderson suggests that luck egalitarianism wrongly focuses attention on the distribution of privately owned goods among individuals. The most important matter is equal moral value or equality in human relationships. Democratic Equality guarantees equality across various capabilities, and equal and effective access to all levels in society. Putting Democratic Equality in terms of people with disabilities, it aims to reconfigure public spaces to make them accessible and adapt work situations to the needs of people with disabilities in order to participate in productive activity.

By initially outlining their respective arguments, one can see similarities between Silvers and Anderson. Both offer the same alternative conception of justice. That is, by altering the environment in which disabled people live in,  and restructuring various aspects of society in order to include people with disabilities. Each author lays the foundation for their argument based off of all citizens possessing equal moral value. This is the job of the government in society. The government assures that all citizens have the freedom of participation and association, i.e. free of social barriers. As seen in the last sphere of Democratic Equality, the goods/services/relationships that civil society calls for are the exact same things Silver asks for when she says, “principles and practices” that “should be constructed to be neutral in respect to whether person are normal, or impaired” (Silvers 16), as referenced before.  Justice should only assure a basic capability threshold. Silvers says this is all disabled people want (a basic threshold), while Anderson goes further stating that justice should be unconcerned about the life after that threshold is established. Both authors argue against distributive equalizing methods as the primary resource for incorporating disabled people into society. Both build off of the claim that it is morally bad if people are badly or worse off through no fault of their own.

What Silvers calls distributive justice, Anderson calls this “Luck Egalitarianism”. Anderson has one criticism of “Luck Egalitarianism” that aligns with Silvers’ philosophy. It is that: 1)It is that Luck Egalitarianism takes the distribution of goods and resources to be morally important in its own right, but the concern of social justice should be the quality of human relationships The connection with this criticism is fairly clear. Both authors contest the idea of giving handouts in order to equalize. With Distributive Justice, happiness for the population is the end goal, but it should not be. Freedom of equality should be the objective.

Another similarity emerges from Silvers and Anderson’s respective philosophies. Silvers uses the concepts of institutionalism, devaluation, and guiltiness to support her claim. Similarly, Anderson uses a comparison between pity and. compassion to justify herself. Beginning with Silvers, disabled people have been institutionalized because the social institutions treat disabled people as dependents. This leads to their devaluation in society, thinking of them as deficient, needing “special benefits, entitlements, and exemptions to sustain them in their exclusion from the mainstreams of commercial and civic life.” (Silvers 138) This notion leads to a final step where nondisabled people feel guilty for both a disabled person’s situation, and the fear of insensitivity. Analogous with this claim is pity for Anderson. Pity similarly balances the suffering in the relationship. Anderson writes, “Pity, by contrast, is aroused by a comparison of the observer’s condition with the condition of the object of pity. Its characteristic judgment is not ‘‘she is badly off’’ but ‘‘she is worse off than me.’’ (Silvers 306-307) Compassion instead relieves the suffering. Both concepts allude to the same fundamental concept of not justifying a disabled person’s position by means of equalization, in this case, by artificial emotional support.

The similarities shown above show that Silvers and Anderson offer the same alternative conception of justice. The only negligible differences are: 1) The slight change in language and 2) That Anderson goes farther in her claims, making larger assertions. With these points made however, neither Silvers nor Anderson’s theories are persuasive. For starters, it is very difficult for equalizing “distributive” policies to be neatly separated from purely formal antidiscrimination. In other words, by the nature of policies, the resulting consequences will most likely produce this indirect effect of distribution, which leads to discrimination.  This result can be through tangible and intangible resources. If one seeks to only to alter the environment, nondisabled people will still feel guilty and possess a sense of pity because of the inherent differences that cause disabled people to live non-normative lives. While the resources may be tangible, they still are visible and apparent. There is legitimate proof, that a form of aid is going toward disabled people. Whether the aid is actually helpful….. is another debate.

References:

Elizabeth Anderson “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 no 2 (1999) 287-337