Treating Others as Equals

Justice as fairness begins with the idea that we should view society as a fair system of social cooperation between participants who are free and equal citizens – that is,

between individuals who we conceive of as having a weighty political-ideal-based interest in the adequate development and exercise of the two moral powers.

Significantly, however, Rawls does not claim that these interests exhaust the political- ideal-based interests of free and equal individuals.38 _{Moreover, at times, Rawls writes as}

if they possess other interests, of the same or a similar kind. Elaborating on the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal individuals, Rawls

writes:

in a society well ordered by the principles of justice as fairness, citizens are equal at the highest level and in the most fundamental respects. Equality is present at the highest level in that citizens recognize and view one another as equals. Their being what they are – citizens – includes their being related as equals; and their being related as equals in part both of what they are and of what they are recognized as being by others. Their social bond is their public political commitment to preserve the conditions their equal relation requires.39

On the basis of this statement, we can identify a third political-ideal-based interest. It is

an interest in being treated as an equal. Like the interest in the adequate development and exercise of the two moral powers, this interest is sufficiently weighty to justify a

basic right, and corresponding duty, to treat each individual as an equal. I shall call this the basic right to be treated as an equal. We can further expound this basic right by

referring to the notion of recognition respect, which, stated in general terms, requires

38 _{Rawls, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’.} 39 _{Rawls, Justice as Fairness,132.}

‘giving appropriate acknowledgement of their intrinsic value in one’s thoughts and actions, which at the very least means acting in ways that are consistent with their

intrinsic value’.40

It may be helpful to add two clarifications. First, in order to explain why each

individual has a basic right to equal recognition respect, we must appeal to the idea of basic equality. Basic equality refers to the fact that each individual is entitled to equal

recognition respect because (i) she possesses some morally relevant capacity – say, the capacity for rationality – within some given range, and (ii) inequalities with respect to

this capacity within this range do not affect her entitlement to equal recognition respect.41 _{Second, in demanding equal recognition respect, this basic right is a distinct}

right, by which I mean that the duty it justifies is not a purely formal duty that an individual automatically discharges whenever she discharges her other duties.42 _The

basic right to be treated as an equal provides independent grounds by which certain kinds of treatment may be unjust.

This right explains what is unjust about an individual holding certain attitudes or having certain beliefs about her fellow citizens.43 _{It explains why it is unjust for an}

40 _{Andrew Mason, ‘Justice, Respect, and Treating People as Equals’, in Carina Fourie, Fabian Schuppert,} and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (eds), Social Equality: On What It Means to Be Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 139. Mason quotes from Stephen Darwall, ‘Two Kinds of Respect’, Ethics, 88 (1977), 36-49.

41 _{Claim (ii) is especially controversial. See Ian Carter, ‘Respect and the Basis of Equality’, Ethics, 121} (2011), 538-71. I should add that it is consistent with this that there may be multiple ranges within which individuals’ capacities may fall. See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 45-7; and Jeff McMahan, ‘Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement’, Metaphilosophy, 40 (2009), 582-605.

42 _{Joseph Raz, Value, Respect, and Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126.} 43 _{For a defence of this claim within the context of discrimination, see Slavny and Parr, ‘Harmless} Discrimination’.

individual to hold contempt for another in virtue of her race or sex, or for her to operate with a demeaning stereotype, for example.44 _{In addition to this, the right also}

explains what is unjust about certain kinds of relationships between individuals. Certain relationships are in themselves, and not because of either their causes or their effects,

inconsistent with the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal individuals. This is a conceptual claim about what it means for one individual

to treat another as an equal.

Jeffrey Reiman offers one plausible characterisation of this claim. When

discussing the wrongness of execution, he notes that there is something awful and morally offensive about ‘the spectacle of one human being completely subject to the

power of another’.45 _{Our unease with this kind of total subjugation partly explains the}

wrongness of slavery and prostitution, as well as the wrongness of others relationships

that share the same property.46 _{Moreover, the injustice of these relationships is}

44 _{Mason, ‘Justice, Respect, and Treating People as Equals’, 141. To be sure, Mason does not say that} these cases involve injustice. Instead, he claims that they are inconsistent with the ideal of social equality, which is distinct from justice. As Mason correctly notes, this disagreement is a terminological matter. See Mason, ‘Justice, Respect, and Treating People as Equals’, 130-1.

45 _{Jeffrey Reiman, ‘Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty: Answering van den Haag’, Philosophy &}

Public Affairs, 14 (1985), 115-48 at 140.

46 _{Reiman, ‘Justice, Civilization, and the Death Penalty’, 140. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a similar view} when discussing the wrongness of slavery. See his The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1762]), 45. Two qualifications are necessary. First, Rousseau is more concerned with renouncing freedom than with relationships between individuals as such. Second, according to Rousseau, in addition to being inconsistent with ‘the nature of man’ in itself, relationships of slavery are also inconsistent with ‘the nature of man’ because of their effects. For illuminating analysis of this dimension of Rousseau’s thought, see Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality

independent of both whether they are entered into voluntarily and their consequences (though it is consistent with this that the relationship is more unjust when it is not

entered voluntarily and/or when it has worse consequences). When one individual enters into a relationship of this kind with another, even when this occurs voluntarily

and is otherwise beneficial to all relevant parties, she fails to treat her as an equal, and thus acts unjustly.

We must determine the content of the basic right to be treated as an equal by elaborating on Reiman’s claim about the wrongness of total subjugation. Which

properties in particular are necessary and sufficient for a relationship to involve total subjugation? I shall not answer this question fully. Instead, I want simply to gesture at

an answer, thereby motivating a concern for the implications of this basic right. We can begin with Scanlon, who plausibly focuses our attention on unacceptable relations

of power and domination that give ‘some people an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others’.47 _{On this view, slavery is unjust, at least in part (though}

perhaps not principally in part), because it creates unacceptable relations of power and domination, of a kind that are inconsistent with the idea of society as a fair system of

social cooperation between individuals regarded as free and equal. Again, this may remain the case even if the relationship is entered into voluntarily and even if its

consequences are entirely benign.

If successful, this argument would justify a duty to arrange and distribute work

so as to prevent individuals from having an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others. This may produce a duty to prevent certain kinds of workplace

relationships that involve a very large inequality in decision-making power. One way in which to achieve this is by refusing to treat the contracts on which these relationships

are founded as morally binding.48 _{Here, I should add two points. First, we do not have}

a duty to prevent all workplace relationships that involve a very large inequality in

decision-making power. Many aspects of a footballer’s life are controlled by her club, including her diet, what she may post on social media, and whether or not she may

smoke, but we are not duty-bound to prevent or not to enforce these kinds of contracts. Presumably, this is partly to do with both their avoidability and, relatedly, to

do with the fact that they are binding for a relatively short period of time only. When this is not the case, such as with an individual who must take on a particular job in

order to survive, it is clearer that there is an injustice involved.49

Second, the plausibility of the claim depends also upon what we deem a ‘very

large inequality in decision-making power’. Whilst it is clear that relationships of slavery satisfy this condition, it is similarly clear that most workplace relationships that involve

some inequality in decision-making power do not satisfy this condition. Where, then, should we draw the line? I fear that there is no more satisfactory way to answer this

question than to appeal to our intuitions about what it means for a relationship to involve total subjugation. Proceeding on this basis, we reach the conclusion that only

very few relationships will be condemnable on these grounds – that is, only very few relationships are in themselves inconsistent with the idea of society as a fair system of

social cooperation between individuals regarded as free and equal. In an important sense, therefore, the purpose of this section is only to draw attention to this conceptual

space within justice as fairness. I do not mean to subscribe to the more ambitious

48 _{Samuel Freeman, ‘Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism is Not a Liberal View’, Philosophy & Public}

Affairs, 30 (2002), 105-151 at 108-15.

49 _{Similarly, Mill writes: ‘The generality of labourers in this and most other countries, have as little choice} of occupation or freedom of locomotion, are practically as dependent on fixed rules and on the will of others, as they could be in any system short of actual slavery’. See Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 367.

claim that the basic right to be treated as an equal plays a significant role in explaining injustices in contemporary job markets (though it is possible that it plays a more

significant role with respect to historical cases).

To conclude this section, I shall comment on the relationship between the

basic right to be treated as an equal and the basic right against relationships of servility. In one way, these two rights are very closely related: both grant protections against

workplace relationships that involve a very large inequality in decision-making power. However, there are also two important differences between them. First, whereas the

basic right to be treated as an equal shows how these workplace relationships can be unjust in themselves, the basic right against relationships of servility shows how these

workplace relationships can be unjust because of their consequences. In this sense, the two rights exhibit a fundamentally different justificatory structure. Second, though it is

contingent upon the empirical data, I suspect that the basic right against relationships of servility will be in one way more expansive than the basic right to be treated as an

equal. This is because, given plausible assumptions about human psychology, there will be workplace relationships that threaten an individual’s sense of justice and thus violate

the basic right against relationships of servility, but are not in themselves inconsistent with the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal

citizens, and thus do not violate the basic right to be treated as an equal.