Unconditional Equals

Anne Phillips

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691226163, 9780691210353
• eBook ISBN: 9780691226170
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human “nature” but has to be for all

For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals, political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality.

Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals.

1

Not Yet Basic Equals

WE LIVE IN A PERIOD of reducing inequalities between countries, but increasing inequalities within them, reversing in the latter case what had previously been a more encouraging trend. The twentieth century witnessed what in studies of the United States is termed ‘the Great Levelling’, a dramatic decline in the income share of the richest 1% and associated rise in the share of the bottom half. Wars destroyed much private wealth, the financial crash of 1929–33 led to policies of tight financial regulation, and slower population growth combined with a general shift towards the political left such that lower skilled Americans were able to capture a significantly higher share of total income. In their study of American inequality, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson describe the period from the 1910s to the mid-1970s as ‘a revolutionary fall … unlike anything experienced in any other documented period in history’.¹ Much the same pattern was replicated across all the richer countries of the world, with the share of total income held by both the top 1% and top 0.1% falling significantly up to the 1950s. The trend (if it can be called that, given how short-lived it was) then either levelled out or weakened, and in the English-speaking countries of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, later went into reverse. Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez argue that the reversal is almost entirely accounted for by an ‘unprecedented surge in top incomes’,² but the trend towards reducing gaps between middle and lower incomes also stymied. Since the 1970s, none of the Anglo countries ‘has experienced a narrowing of the income gaps—not among the bottom 90%, not among the top 10%, and not between the two. And most have experienced a widening’.³ The distribution of income is yet again heavily skewed, and the distribution of wealth even more so. An almost inconceivable share of the world’s resources now goes to a miniscule percentage of the world’s population: in one 2019 estimate by Credit Suisse, 1% of the world’s population owns 44% of total global wealth.⁴

Many find the resulting distribution of income and wealth unacceptable. Yet, if we are to judge by the political parties citizens vote for, many more remain untroubled. Despite periodic flurries in the press, when journalists review the latest statistics or muse over the crisis of capitalism, and despite many inspirational moments of activism around the world, there is little sustained evidence of revulsion against current inequalities. This may be less a matter of complacency and more of popular despair about the possibilities for change. My worry is that it reflects something worse than either of these. I fear we are living through a period in which even basic ideas of equality are revealed as lacking power. We know that people disagree on matters of economic equality, that some favour a radical redistribution of resources whilst others consider the current arrangements entirely fair. But as regards the more basic idea of human equality—the idea that, as human beings, we are all in some sense of equal worth—we are supposed to be in general agreement. It is sometimes offered as the defining characteristic of modernity that people today recognise all humans as fundamentally equal; this is said to separate us from the pre-moderns, who continued to think in terms of hierarchies determined by birth. Not who you are, but what you can do: this is supposed to be a defining feature of our age.

It’s a nice thought, but hardly seems a plausible depiction. Nearly eighty years on from the horrors of the Holocaust, when six million people were murdered just for being Jewish, and millions more just for being Polish, Roma, disabled, or gay, people are still being killed, persecuted, criminalised, or stripped of their citizenship because they are the ‘wrong’ kind of person. Genocidal wars target people for their ethnicity; jihadists target them for their religion; and governments also get in on the act, variously employing ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or gender as bases for either denying people citizenship altogether or denying them full citizen rights. In India, celebrated as the world’s largest democracy and founded on a commitment to secularism that was meant to enable people of multiple faiths to live side by side, the recent cultivation of a Hindu nationalism now threatens to make religion a criterion for citizenship. An unprecedented Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in 2019, offered fast-track citizenship to refugees fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, specifying as potential beneficiaries members of virtually every South Asian faith, except Islam. Coming on the heels of a register of citizens in the state of Assam, where nearly two million people were left off the register, and Muslims appealing against their plight were disproportionately declared illegal immigrants, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to redefine Indian citizenship along religio-ethnic lines. In the United States, a series of Presidential Proclamations, dating from 2017, banned entry to the country from certain (mostly Muslim-majority) countries. There was no direct specification of religion in this—that would be illegal under US law—but the proclamations were widely understood as a ‘Muslim ban’. In the UK, Immigration Acts from 2014 and 2016 introduced a requirement for people to prove their citizenship to employers, landlords, hospitals, and banks. When combined with a deliberately ‘hostile’ immigration environment, this had the effect of rendering illegal people who had migrated perfectly legally in the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s, but never troubled to get UK passports. Many of those affected were from the ‘Windrush generation’, Commonwealth citizens who had arrived from the Caribbean to help meet postwar labour shortages, but were now denied employment, evicted from their homes, refused medical treatment, and in some cases deported ‘back’ to a country they barely knew.⁵ Again, there was no direct targeting by race, but the message was pretty clear.

Despite what is expressed in instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1976), or Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1981), many around the world today face officially sanctioned discrimination relating to their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or gender. Most countries sign up to CEDAW, thereby seeming to signal their commitment to gender equality, but they are permitted to sign with ‘reservations’, and generally cite religious or cultural reasons for doing so. Even the Taliban in Afghanistan felt able to sign up to CEDAW. Countries can then avoid implementing elements that ought to be beyond question, like equality rights in marriage or rights to sexual and reproductive health. At the time of writing, to give a different example, more than seventy jurisdictions around the world treat homosexuality as a criminal offence, and some of these make it punishable by death. Neither example generates much confidence in a supposedly shared belief in human equality.

Other countries pride themselves (often justifiably) on their record of anti-discrimination legislation, but wherever in the world people live, they continue to face forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia that veer between the insidiously persistent and the life-threateningly violent. A recent UNDP study of gender norms, drawing on data from seventy-five countries that between them account for more than 80% of the world’s population, found 91% of men and 86% of women harbouring at least one bias against gender equality, agreeing, for example, that ‘it is not essential for women to have the same rights as men’, or that ‘men have more right to a job than women’, or that ‘men make better political leaders’.⁶ There are important variations between countries, but even in Sweden, the country that reports the least bias, a full 30% of the population admits to at least one gender bias, and the proportion of men with no gender bias has been decreasing in recent years. In the UK, 55% admit to at least one gender bias; in the United States, it is 57%. Ascriptive hierarchies, based on assumptions about who we are and the qualities we were born with, continue to exercise their force. It is not only the maldistribution of resources that should worry us. It is also a failure to commit to basic equality.

One might think of this as mere time lag, but this is one of the alibis I reject in this book. It is not, I will argue, just that the world is taking its time in making good on the promise of human equality, but that the conditionalities built into that promise were always going to limit it. Nor can we assume that once societies finally get it together to move from ascription- to achievement-based measures of worth, our fundamental human equality will at last be recognised. What we face today is a combination of startling inequalities of income and wealth, continuing inequalities of gender, caste, and race, and the further ‘achievement-based’ hierarchies of education and intelligence. One of the successes of past decades has been the expansion—in all regions of the world, but particularly Europe, North America, and South East Asia—of access to higher education, and the virtual elimination of the previous gender gap in this. This has been accompanied, however, by a trend towards increasing hierarchies in production, as the differential between the high-skilled well-paid and low-skilled poorly paid widens, and those in the latter group—now often described as the ‘precariat’—have to patch together a living from a mixture of insecure short-term jobs, none of which offers much in the way of self-fulfilment. This is a significant reversal of that earlier ‘great levelling’, and not just a reversal. In a new twist to older stories, differences in intelligence are projected onto differences in social class, generating categories of the ‘smart’ and the ‘stupid’ that attribute social inequalities to individuals’ own lack of ability. Ironically and depressingly, progressive critics of the right-wing populisms that have promoted ethnicised conceptions of national identity or encouraged racist discrimination sometimes buy into this hierarchy, generating strains of a new elitism that despairs of the citizens and wishes them less of a political voice.⁷

In 1958, Michael Young coined the term ‘meritocracy’ to describe a dystopian future in which human worth was measured exclusively in terms of performance in intelligence tests.⁸ The history was purportedly written by a great admirer of meritocracy, just before a female-led ‘populist’ movement against the system, in the course of which he was killed. The author describes how a previous inequality of opportunity had ‘fostered the myth of human equality’.⁹ When opportunities and rewards were distributed according to inherited privilege and nepotism, those at the bottom of the social ladder could always think themselves as good as or better than their social superiors, while those at the top would come across many in lower stations whose abilities dwarfed their own. Once merit, however, supplanted nepotism, and the class system had been scientifically restructured on the basis of intelligence tests alone, there was, in the author’s account, no further room for all that silliness about equality. The successful knew that they deserved their position; the unsuccessful had to face the unpalatable truth of their stupidity. Young’s concerns about this as the possible trajectory of educational and social policy were twofold. First, that it reduced all qualities to a single measure, making ability to succeed in intelligence tests the only skill that mattered; second, that it deprived those who failed the test of alternative bases for self-esteem.

His critique of meritocracy resonates with what Michael Walzer once termed the ‘democratic wager’: the belief that qualities and talents are roughly evenly distributed across the population, such that those who do badly in one sphere of life will be compensated by success in some other sphere.¹⁰ So you might not make it to university professor, or become a world-famous athlete, but perhaps you’re the one who manages to steer her children successfully through the dangers of adolescence, or tells the best jokes, or plays a good game of darts. Meritocracy disrupts this, for it encourages us to think in terms of a single scale of value—you are either clever or stupid, able or unable, with or without merit—and prevents us from appreciating the full range of qualities that characterise human beings. It also encourages us to think that one person genuinely is superior to another, slipping, as Amartya Sen puts it, into personification.¹¹ Instead of treating a particular selection process or incentive system as a convenient way of getting things done to the best advantage of the society (finding the people with the most steady hands to become brain surgeons, for example), it encourages us to think that it is the people selected who have the merit, not their actions, that they are indeed better than the others, and do indeed deserve their additional rewards. A meritocratic principle that perhaps began as an egalitarian challenge to the inequities of a class-ridden, gender-biased, racist system, can then end up destroying the very belief in human equality that supposedly underpins democracy.

We do not live in meritocracies, either of the narrowly IQ-based kind that Michael Young feared, or of the type fantasised over by those who believe in social mobility. As the evidence on global inequality confirms, we live in societies where privilege is still passed down through the generations and rewards to the most favoured far exceed what anyone could claim to merit. We do however live in the ideological shadow of meritocracy, where there is just enough semblance of people advancing by virtue of their own abilities for them to buy into the myths of merit and desert. In this context, differences in educational level and presumed differences in intelligence have added an extra layer to long-standing hierarchies of class, gender, and race. The combination is proving particularly inhospitable to ideas of human equality. There is a flourishing market for pseudo-scientific ideas about innate gender differences or the racial distribution of intelligence, and once discredited- eugenicist ideas are more widely promoted. People write excitedly about the prospects for genetic enhancement that will produce people of superior intelligence and ability—not, in general, with a view to enhancing all people, but those with the money to pay. The notion that our ‘modern era’ is characterised by a belief in human equality looks increasingly absurd.

This is the concern that inspires this book and, in it, I partially retrace what have been shifts in my own thinking. Though I have thought of myself as an egalitarian from as long as I knew what the word meant, I ordered my thinking for many years around what I now see as a misleading distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ equality, misleading because it implies that we have already achieved the former. In the context of the postwar welfare states, it was tempting to make this assumption: tempting to assume an upward trajectory towards increasing equality and think in terms of a developmental paradigm in which the first stages had been more or less completed, but a great deal more needed to be done. I was born in 1950, into a Britain that still held onto much of its colonial empire but was edging at home into what we came to call social democracy. Deference to one’s superiors was still widely taught and practised; women were still encouraged to view themselves primarily as wives and mothers; boarding houses still carried their signs of ‘no coloureds or Irish’. With all this, new ideas of equality were abroad. The election of the 1945 Labour Government ushered in a battle against William Beveridge’s five ‘giant evils’: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. The creation of the National Health Service made health care available to all regardless of income. The expansion of National Insurance to cover pensions, sick pay, unemployment pay, and compensation for industrial injury meant that most adults (more precisely, most men) were guaranteed an income from either employment or insurance benefits. The building of more than a million new homes, mostly to replace those destroyed in the war, provided significantly improved levels of housing and sanitation. The 1944 Education Act had already introduced free compulsory secondary education up to the age of fifteen, though with a pernicious divide that shunted the majority of pupils into poorly resourced secondary moderns, offering more academic education only to those who passed the eleven-plus. This last policy signalled meritocracy rather than equality, but even so, carried some semblance of the idea that all were potentially equals.

My own family was to benefit enormously from these changes. Neither of my parents had been able to progress far with their education: my mother left school at the then standard age of fourteen; my father won a scholarship to continue, but this only financed one additional year. Nobody in the older generations of my family had been to university; I, all three siblings, and a number of my cousins subsequently did. Which is not to say that I was especially impressed by the state of the new society. My parents were Labour supporters, and I recall my father planting a willow tree (an odd choice, perhaps) in honour of the 1964 election that brought Harold Wilson to power, but I was drawn to a more radical socialism, to feminism, and to ideals of participatory democracy. I had read Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, with its disti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Not Yet Basic Equals
• 2. Histories of Exclusion
• 3. Justification Is Still Condition
• 4. Status and Resources
• 5. Equality, Prescription, and Choice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index