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BOOK LENGTH PROJECTS
Equality & Personality
Partial Draft Available
In recent decades, there has been fruitful investigation of myriad, apparently distinctive forms of inequality. The investigations, though grounded in varying concrete conditions of injustice, are unified in a framework that has been called relational egalitarianism. The relational egalitarian holds that the morally relevant form of equality in social and political life consists in a certain kind of relationship, standing as equals, rather than merely in a patterned distribution of goods. This program was most clearly and popularly proposed by Elizabeth Anderson, in an essay entitled “What is the point of equality?” An essay that cleared away the prior, emphatically distributive paradigm of considering justice, and suggested in its place a more thoroughgoingly democratic conception. If readers were left at all wanting, it was only at this point: her countersuggestion of “democratic equality” appeared then underdeveloped as a doctrine of general principles. But, after all, the program emphasizes the need to begin with an analysis of startling, actually-existing conditions of injustice, and only then to wrest from those conditions some more general principles, if there are such things.
This suggests a method of negatively determining the meaning of relational equality. To come to an understanding of what it means to stand as equals, we identify and critique myriad inegalitarian kinds of relations, e.g. domination, exploitation, sexual objectification, segregation, infantilization, demonization, and so on. It is in the spirit of pluralism to suggest that these forms of inegalitarian-relating are in some sense irreducibly distinctive—that they are not mere species of a single or universal form of straying from relational equality. This is not my spirit. I contend that these distinctive forms of relating are all expressions (in differing actual and communicative contexts) of a failure to appropriately respect or estimate one’s personality—depersonalization. An egalitarian relation, so-determined negatively, is a relation in which one stands to the other thoroughgoingly as a person, as the object that is always at the same time subject. We stray from relational equality when one party is treated or regarded as less or more than a person—and as the person is here understood as the unity of subject and object, the two fundamental forms of this straying consist in objectification (when one is unduly reduced to the status of an object) and subjectification (when one is unduly elevated to the status of a subject). Objectification and subjectification, that is, are the two fundamental forms of depersonalization; more concrete relationships (e.g. domination…) are species of either objectification or subjectification, and so species of depersonalization. I suggest that this is the unifying account we best offer, if we are to make good on the promissory note of wresting general principles from an understanding of the real struggles of people.
Forms of relation that may be egalitarian or inegalitarian are relations between persons. When persons relate equally, they relate to each other thoroughgoingly as persons (that is, the character of their relation is one which fully appreciates the parties’ personalities). This is the true order of things—we are all as a matter of fact persons. When persons relate unequally, a person relates to another as something less (or more) than a person. This gets things wrong—morally and matter-of-factly. One must always assume oneself a person, and another stands to one as something less than an equal when another stands to one as something less than a person.
This is, in my view, the ultimate meaning of relational equality, and it is most clearly seen, as Anderson knew well, through careful yet impassioned engagement with what it is not. Having undertaken a program of critiquing inegalitarian modes of relating, I think it is time to suggest more substantially what unifies them, and so what exactly is at stake in the play of equality and inequality—personality.
E Pluribus Unum
Dissertation
Political philosophy involves thinking about the obligations of the society to each of us and the obligations of each of us to it; it involves thinking about the rights each of us has against society, and the rights society has against each of us. Political philosophy, of the non-anarchic variety, involves thinking about our obligations to institutions and the rights we may claim against them, and their obligations to us and the rights they may claim against us.
Despite this being a widely accepted formulation of a central, if not the central, part of political philosophy, a question that has all too often been neglected concerns a crucial condition that in the first place makes this formulation possible: what would it take for the society, or for its institutions, to be the kind of thing that we can really stand in that sort of relation with? What would it take for the society or its institutions to really be capable of bearing rights and duties in the first place? Calling a group a ‘bearer of obligations and rights’ is, in the most general sense of the term, calling the group a person. Thinking about group and institutional personhood (the latter as a special case of the former) is thereby essential to political philosophy (at least of political philosophy so-formulated). This dissertation contends that when we do so clearly, when we identify the necessary conditions of group and institutional personhood and the functional roles these notions play in our politics, we find that it entails profound consequences concerning the legitimate and ideal structures of social organization, and thereby suggests a certain method by which we can deduce those consequences.
In a social order resembling anything like our own, we need to treat some groups as persons, and among those groups are some essential to our form of social organization, e.g. States and firms. If what it takes to be a group of that kind, e.g. a State or a firm, is to be a person, and what it is to be person is constituted by certain determinate conditions, then what it takes to be a group of that kind is constrained by the conditions constitutive of personhood. If States or firms must be persons, then the notion of personhood will delimit the kind of thing a State or firm may be.
This dissertation belongs to a tradition of thinking about personhood that takes its constitutive conditions to be related to the capacity for autonomy—a capacity to act in accordance with laws (or principles of action) that one gives oneself. On the premise that institutions of a certain kind must be persons, they must have this capacity. Applied to such institutions, the condition might yield a structural or procedural constraint concerning how the laws (policies, principles of action) of an institution are authored. If self-legislation consists in part in a certain legislative structure, institutions of this kind must conform to the structure of self-legislation, whatever it is. The dissertation contends that the structure of self-legislation is democratic, in nature. And it thereby argues that those institutions to whom we must attribute personhood (e.g. States, firms), for this attribution to be sensical, must be democratized.
The dissertation is divided into two parts: the first, historical, and the second, positive. The historical discussion will explore a tradition that I already take to involve the general shape of the method above: the social contract tradition. Three figures will be primarily discussed: Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. The positive discussion will provide a self-standing treatment in the spirit of this tradition, attempting to offer a position of its own among these alternatives, in light of important clarifications concerning our general concept of the person, and having the virtue of over 200 years hindsight. The positive discussion aims to contribute to important dialogues in contemporary political philosophy, especially as concerns democracy, the organization of production, and international relations. In general, the dissertation hopes, by way of recovering an important insight about the nature of previous political-philosophical systems, to showcase a method, today neglected, for making novel contributions in social contract theory. A method based on the assertion of the primacy of the person in political philosophy.
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