That equality is an essential part of justice – or even that justice just is some kind of equality – has been central to the way many people have thought about equality and justice at least since the American and French revolutions. The idea that all plausible theories of justice are on the same “egalitarian plateau”, or that equality is the “presumption” when it comes to justice, has been influential in English-language political philosophy for more than half a century. John Rawls is credited specifically with the conception of justice as fundamentally “distributive”. G.A. Cohen encapsulated that whole era of political philosophy when he said that distributive egalitarians take it “for granted that there is something which justice requires people to have equal amounts of…”
But the way we ordinarily talk about equality is congruent with thinking of equality as either a matter of our having the same amount of something or of our standing in a certain relation to one another. And in the last twenty years relational egalitarians, led by Elizabeth Anderson, have mounted a promising challenge to the distributive paradigm. According to relational egalitarians, social and political equality is a matter of how people stand in relation to each other – and not fundamentally about the distribution of anything.
Anderson points out that most actual, real-world egalitarian social movements have been in response to social oppression and have aimed to overthrow specific social hierarchies, including slavery, class inequality, racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and stigmatization, based on sexuality, disability, and bodily appearance. What people have wanted most is equal treatment. What justice demands, she says, is that everyone should have effective access to enough resources to avoid being oppressed by others, to function as an equal in civil society, and to foster, develop, and maintain egalitarian relations.
It seems to me that the best theory of justice will have both distributive and relational elements. Anderson herself sounds like a distributivist when she says that everyone should have “effective access to enough resources”, for example, and, arguably, Rawls’ (who Anderson counts as relational egalitarian, by the way) has relational elements in his theory – his first principle of justice is that everyone should have equal basic liberties, including positive political rights that are of “fair value” in comparison to the rights of others.
But recently some philosophers have argued that relational egalitarianism can’t adequately address questions of intergenerational justice since we can’t have relationships with people who haven’t been born yet. It’s an interesting challenge on its own, but the more interesting issue it raises is whether relational egalitarianism is about relationships at all. Despite what some relational egalitarians have said (Samuel Scheffler, for example), I believe that we either have to reject the claim that the relational egalitarianism is about egalitarian relationships or give up relational egalitarianism altogether.
Here’s how Jonathan Quong puts the intergenerational objection. Given that “no members of the current generation will overlap with any members of the future generation, they cannot stand in any sort of relationships, egalitarian or otherwise” to each other. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen makes the same argument.
“(I) Intergenerational justice pertains to justice between different generations whose lives do not overlap.
(II) Different generations whose lives do not overlap do not have any social relations.”
(III) Therefore, relational egalitarianism cannot provide a complete account of the requirements of justice.
Lippert-Rasmussen writes “relations”, but he seems to think, as Quong very explicitly does, that relational egalitarianism depends on egalitarian relationships with future generations. But you must be able to be in a social relation to someone without being in a relationship with them or relational egalitarianism is a nonstarter. I stand in certain kinds of social relations to the President of the United States, for example, but I don’t have a relationship with the President. I stand in various social relations with fellow voters, taxpayers, and people who rely on social insurance programs with me; but I have relationships with only a very small number of them.
There are many other ways that people’s lives don’t overlap with others right now – ways very similar to the way that the lives of people from different generations do not overlap temporally. People can lead lives that are not overlapping because of spatial distance, different life-styles, or any number of other reasons, including sheer chance. At a minimum, anyone who I have never had causal influence on, that has also has never had a causal influence on me, is someone with whom I don’t lead an overlapping life. So, given that we can causally influence the lives of future generations, our lives could hypothetically overlap more with the lives of people that we don’t overlap with temporally, than with the lives of the people that we do overlap with temporally but never have causal influence on. And it would seem that we are also not related to many of our temporal peers in ways that would make raise questions about how relational egalitarianism applies between them and us – as much as between us and future generations.
Take the United States. It covers nearly four million square-miles, has nearly 330 million citizens, who speak at least 350 different languages, and live in one of the 5 territories or fifty states, as well as in one of over 3,000 counties (or county equivalents), and mostly in one of the over 35,000 towns and cities. One influential approach to human sociability (Dunbar) suggests that we can have at most 150 friends, 500 acquaintances, and are able to identify by face (at most) 1500 people. There are other more indirect ways for people to causally affect each other, of course. But it seems fair to say that most Americans don’t affect or interact directly with each, know each other, or even know about each other.
If relational egalitarianism is relevant to modern states like the United States, it can’t be the case that the view depends on our lives overlapping in any robust sense. It certainly can’t be the case that we are all in egalitarian relationships with each other – since relationships are reciprocal and, at a minimum, depend on our being able to causally affect each other. What could relational egalitarians possibly mean, then, when they say that justice is a matter of egalitarian social relations?
What if we regard equality as a transitive relation? If X is equal to Y, and Y equal to Z, then X is equal to Z as well. Not all kinds of social relations are transitive, of course. But some are. And if the kind of equality that is relevant to justice is, we are then, each of us, the center of a vast web of relations that ties us to potentially everyone in our political community – maybe, even beyond (which raises different questions).
Relational egalitarianism can be read like this, in other words. We owe it to those around us to establish, foster, and maintain egalitarian relations, and the conditions of egalitarian relations, with them and between us. They owe that obligation to us, as well as to other’s connected to them. And these others owe it to everyone they stand in a relation of justice to ensure that that relationship is, and remains, egalitarian. Such a web will extend out and link us, make us stand in relation to, future generations.
If the justice-relation is transitive and I have children, then I am in that relation not only to them, but transitively to their children, and their children’s children, and so on. And so that isone way I can have relation-based justice obligations to future people. But what if I don’t have children? In a myriad of ways, I still have relations to other people, including those who are now children or will or do have children. I may know and interact with them, teach them, pay property taxes that fund the school they go to, or receive retirement money from a fund that depends on their paying into it.
Justice extends into the future in precisely the way that I think most people would tell you that it does. Our descendants, not just are biological descendants, but also descendants of those who we have other kinds of relations to, are related to us, whoever they turn out to be. They are ours. Our lives are connected with theirs’, without directly overlapping, via a chain of overlapping relations that links us to together.
In other words, I will have social relations with future generations that don’t yet exist via overlapping transitive relations with people that do now exist and with whom I am socially related in various ways, since they will have social relations with that generation and that generation will stand in certain social relations with me as I do with them. (Sorry for the 60-word sentence. But that’s the view.)
But why think the relevant kind social relation is transitive? The claim is not that it is always the case that if X owes something to Y, and Y owes something to Z, then X always owes something to Z. Obviously, that’s wrong. If I owe you money, and you owe someone else money, I don’t owe that third person money.
But if justice is a kind of equality and if I am equal to you, and you are equal to someone else, then I am also equal to that person. That’s just what equality means.
It’s true that we don’t have relationships with people we don’t overlap with. The issue is how we stand in relation to them socially – and to future generations
On the other hand, if I am wrong about this, then the problem for relational egalitarianism is much worse than Lippert-Rasmussen or Quong thinks it is. If relational egalitarianism requires direct, reciprocal relationships in any robust sense, it not only can’t explain intergenerational justice – it can’t explain justice in any society where people don’t have those sorts of relationships with everyone else in that society. Relational egalitarianism cannot, then, be a theory of justice for most actually existing political orders – maybe, none.
Tim Sommers
Tim Sommers has studied at Michigan State, Brown University, and The University of Iowa. He has taught at Georgetown, the Smithsonian, Louisiana State University, and Pace. He has won story-telling events in London, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. He writes a monthly column for 3 Quarks Daily. And was Prince’s bodyguard - for one night.
