The Demands of Liberal Non-Domination

This chapter develops the specific demands of liberal non-domination. It argues that they cover protection against dominatory groups as well as against power relations which are not mediated by authority, or otherwise public; demonstrates how different choices, such as those falling under the basic liberties, connected to intimate personal relationships, or at stake in resource-intensive programs and policies to enhance life options, call for different thresholds of intensity of protection; and how protection must itself be appropriately respectful of people’s moral agency. It goes on to show how the resulting requirements give a wide policy mandate to combat domination not only through formal institutions, but also by fostering a societal ethos and informal social norms, and argues that liberals should not be worried by this wide mandate. It concludes by analysing in which ways demands of protection against domination can, and cannot, be understood as distributive demands.

Health Inequality

This chapter argues that relational egalitarianism has distinctive, and plausible, implications not only for the goods directly produced by social cooperation, but also for health. First, it yields a clear ordering of the injustice of different kinds of health inequalities: inequalities caused by inegalitarian relations which are independently unjust are more unjust than those caused by other social processes, which in turn are more unjust (unless justified according to the model developed in the preceding chapter) than those not so caused. The resulting requirements fit well with important strands in public health research on the social determinants of health. Second, it also justifies the universal provision of healthcare, and relational egalitarians need not, and should not, be committed to prioritizing patients with socially caused health deficiencies at the point of delivery of treatment. There are other, better ways to justly prioritize the fight against such health inequalities.

Liberal Non-Domination

This chapter develops the fundamental features of liberal non-domination. It connects the expressive perspective (chapter 2) to a liberal framework for social justice, aiming at fair cooperation between free and equal individuals endowed with two moral powers—sense of justice and capacity for a conception of the good—and derives a conception of non-domination from it. Domination consists of the asymmetrical capacity of one agent to arbitrarily interfere in the choices of another; interference is arbitrary when it is not forced to respect others’ prima facie relevant claims arising out of cooperation. This conception improves upon neo-republican accounts of non-domination by showing that domination is a very important, but not the only, requirement of social justice, and by giving a substantive determination to the claims and choices justice requires it to range over. Concluding critical analyses of Lovett’s, Forst’s, and Pettit’s rival conceptions of just non-domination confirm its advantages.

Distributive and Relational Equality

This chapter develops the expressive perspective on justice on which the overall argument of the book for liberal relational equality is based. It shows that the way social and political institutions treat individuals and groups is of irreducible importance to justice, and that this consideration cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by more traditional distributive theories of egalitarian justice, which focus on according individuals equal shares of justice-relevant goods; paradigmatically goods such as resources, (opportunity for welfare), or basic capabilities. It makes a case for the special relevance for justice of the attitudes expressed by institutions in the treatment of those subject to their power, as that expression constitutes its meaning. That meaning is particularly salient where the treatment gives rise to, or shores up, power and status hierarchies between different individuals and groups.

Justice and Egalitarian Relations

This chapter introduces the key features and motivations of liberal relational egalitarianism. It notes that social justice and social equality have mostly been treated as separate values in the history of modern Western political thought, and that contemporary liberal egalitarianism is traditionally thought to require a form of distributive equality. It then argues that weaving social justice and social equality together in an account of relational equality as an urgent and stringent demand of liberal social justice is therefore a novel project worth attempting. It goes on to outline the overall argument of the book and the contribution of each chapter, as well as the different literatures and rival theories it draws on, and concludes by delineating the social scenario it is a theory for: primarily, for a society characterized by a reasonably well-functioning institutional structure capable of organizing social cooperation by enabling and sustaining a complex division of labour.

Social Status, Self-Respect, and Opportunity

This chapter extends the requirements of liberal relational egalitarianism by way of an account of esteem-based norms of social status, analysing three kinds of injustices that such norms can engender or constitute. First, they can enable or aggravate domination. Second, they can harm self-respect. However, a closer analysis of self-respect and its crucial role for individual autonomy reveals that not all inegalitarian status norms can be classified as threats to self-respect without threatening precisely that role. Third, they can be unjust simply by depriving individuals of significant social opportunities, because losing such opportunities due to norm-coordinated, self-sustaining disesteem by others is a threat to one’s equal standing in social cooperation not present when they are foreclosed in other ways. This is an independent rationale for combating these norms which is fully accessible to liberals, and does better at capturing the distinct evil of status hierarchy than rival views.

Conclusion

The Conclusion briefly recapitulates the main argument of the book, and discusses different possible avenues for challenging it. It also comments on how relational egalitarianism, and liberal relational egalitarianism in particular, can be fruitfully applied to policy and institutional questions beyond the ones addressed in the book, in collaboration with empirical social science, and identifies the questions and issues which have to be central for an extension of the theory to matters of international, transnational, global, and intergenerational justice.

Relational Equality beyond Non-Domination

Non-domination is not the only demand of relational equality. This chapter rejects two important attempts to make sense of demands for other kinds of egalitarian relations, based on the goods of community, friendship, trust, and self-respect. The first is a pluralist, free-standing approach, according to which social equality goes beyond, and sometimes conflicts with, social justice. This approach either leads to egalitarian perfectionism, which should worry liberals, or fails to yield a mandate to shape society according to its demands. The second approach extends distributive theories of equality by incorporating fair shares of the various goods at stake in egalitarian relations. The chapter shows how resulting variants of relation-sensitive distributivism either fail to capture what is distinctive about relational goods, or to yield recognizably egalitarian demands. This result confirms the case for the liberal approach, while underscoring the need to extend it to matters of social status and self-respect.

Political Equality

This chapter argues that liberal relational egalitarianism requires, for reasons of both non-domination and equal respect for persons’ sense of justice, a demandingly egalitarian conception of rights to political participation, and that this requirement has to enjoy a qualified priority over other requirements of justice. However, it must, in principle, be open to some restriction, should this be strictly necessary to fulfil such other requirements. The chapter goes on to identify the conditions governing the justification of such restrictions and shows that these are likely to permit special institutional practices such as constitutional review, while ruling out ground-level political inequality between citizens, because egalitarian strategies for improving the quality of citizen input will almost always be available. It concludes by showing how Ronald Dworkin’s account of political rights fails to do justice to the expressive value of political equality. This result strengthens the case against distributive egalitarian theories made earlier.

Distributive Justice

This chapter develops the implications of liberal relational egalitarianism for the distribution of goods produced by social cooperation. It shows that there are not only strong instrumental reasons to set stringent limits to inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity, on grounds of both non-domination and social status, but, contrary to what both many critics and proponents of relational equality argue, strong non-instrumental, expressive reasons to do so, as well: since participants in social cooperation are equals, all inequalities in social goods need to be justified by justice-relevant reasons even where they do not lead to domination or social status inequality. Rightly understood, relational egalitarianism thus requires a concentric attack on material inequality in society as well as on its sources in power inequality, through a plurality of rationales.