A Philosophical Study Of Equalitarianism

When talking about equality, a lot of people associate it with distribution. Contemporarily, many egalitarian scholars of western political philosophy focus their attention on devising the best system of distributive theory. They concern themselves with and argue two main questions: what is the most important for people and, generally speaking, should be distributed equally among all of us( equality of what) and what factors can justify the unequal distribution of this kind of equalisandum. For the first question, those scholars provide us with totally different answers, including welfare, equal opportunities for welfare, resources, capabilities, advantages, and so on; for the second, all of them seem to agree that those factors people can be held responsible for can justify unequal distribution, and regard individual voluntary choices, including effort, taking a risk in terms of all the related information as those factors, thus if an individual chooses to work longer, or prefers investment to consumption and succeeds at last, he or she should get more than those not choosing to do that, and this unequal distribution is just. Because those scholars pay their theoretical attention on distribution, we can call them distributive egalitarians, and their theories are distributive egalitarianism.There are also many other egalitarian scholars in the field of contemporary western political philosophy, who object to the ideas just mentioned and put forward a new egalitarian view- relational egalitarianism. This theory holds that the egalitarian focus is not on what distributive states or outcomes are realized among all the people, but on what relations between an individual and another or a group and another are formed, and that the latter has more important moral meanings that the former. So it believes that we should consider equality not as a distributive pattern of benefits but as a social idea of status or relation equality among all the people. Compared with distributive view, relational egalitarianism has more theoretical advantages, because the structure of social members’ relationship determines social distributive outcome, and it’s more fundamental. So we can’t find the essence of equality if we just emphasize the importance of distribution. Egalitarian theories are also anti-inegalitarian theories. Distributive egalitarianism objects unequal, or put it more precisely, unfair distribution of benefits, but relational egalitarianism takes unequal social relations or hierarchies that rank people as superiors and inferiors as its attacking target. So we can see the defects of distributive egalitarianism: just demanding diminishing the unequal or unfair distribution while making the unequal relational structure untouched is not an effective strategy, because the latter equality will reproduce the former after a period, and even if we keep distributive equality and fairness for long, the oppressions between one group and another resulting from certain hierarchies may still exist, and some social members may still lack “the social bases of self-respect”( Rawls). So some unequal phenomena in human society, such as exploitation, marginalization, and social discrimination should not be treated just as the problem of distribution, and we should explore their forming grounds in the relational structure between one individual and another or one group and another.Relational egalitarianism not only figures out the essence of equality, but also identifies itself with the basic ethos of social egalitarian movements in the past and present. Those movements objected to all kinds of social hierarchies, including slavery, serfdom, debt peonage, feudalism, monarchy, oligarchy, caste and class inequality, racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and stigmatization based on sexuality, disability, and bodily appearance( Anderson). In addition, relational egalitarianism corresponds to Marx’s discussion of capital exploitation. Marx always argued against the proletariat’s demand of “fair distribution” and opposed exaggerating the importance of wage equalization. He believed that just like claiming freedom on the basis of slavery, claiming fair salary on the basis of the system of capitalist wage labor was also very hard to realize, and that the crux of the matter was “to eliminate the system of capitalist wage labor”, namely the capitalist unequal class relations.Relational egalitarianism pulls the focus of equality theory back to the social relations between an individual and another or a group and another, but this doesn’t mean that it drops the study of distribution. Concerning this problem, it doesn’t just talk about distribution itself, but considers it under the ideal of a society of equals. So it gets this kind of conclusion that the limited inequality of distribution not contrasting with this ideal is allowed, and the huge inequality of distribution which may cause stigmatizing status difference must be objected to.Several famous academic papers as the foundation of relational egalitarianism were published in the 1990 s, and we can treat this period as the phrase of birth. So this theory has just developed for no more than 20 years. Although lots of materials emerge continuously, there are no books analyzing and explaining this theory systematically. In terms of domestic academic circles, those scholars studying foreign ideas of equality pay more attention to distributive( luck) egalitarianism, and the writings on relational egalitarianism are rare. While introducing new foreign ideas of relational egalitarianism broadly, this paper deeply concerns and analyzes the difference between it and distributive egalitarianism in order to show its theoretical characteristics. This paper makes the first preliminary attempt to elucidate the basic ideas of relational egalitarianism systematically, and for domestic academia, it’s also an relatively complete introduction of this theory. Now that this paper aims to be systematic and complete, it also has some new views for the purpose of making the influential but loose thoughts of equality more smooth.The main content of the chapters in this paper is as follows. The first chapter concerns the basic questions about equality-“what’s equality” and “why do we want equality”- and excludes three theories of inegalitarianism from so-called “egalitarian plateau”( Will Kymlicka) basing on our conclusion. Then it outlines the basic standpoints about distributive and relational egalitarianism. Starting from the argument of egalitarian “currency”, the second chapter detailedly introduces distributive egalitarianism and lays more emphasis on the problems of its theory logic. These problems make it clear that distributive egalitarianism fails the fundamental test every egalitarian theory must pass: to show equal respect and concern for all the citizens. The third chapter elucidates the fatal shortcomings of distributive egalitarianism, namely the dislocation of egalitarian focus- paying much more attention to what an individual get instead of how people’s relational structure is. This chapter manifests the inequality that egalitarianism should target refers to a variety of hierarchies, and this corresponds to the fundamental views of relational egalitarianism. The fourth introduces the interpretation of equality for relational egalitarianism and the contractarian justice view which supports this theory’s standpoints, and this view shows that this theory returns to the Rawlsian theory which distributive egalitarianism strays from. This chapter also introduces the coping strategy of relational egalitarianism about necessary inequality of social relationships. Addressing the familiar criticism that egalitarianism encourages irresponsible acts, the fifth chapter firstly analyzes the coping strategy of distributive egalitarianism and shows that this theory absorbs the disadvantages of conservatism while trying to use its advantages. Then it explores the more suitable coping strategy of relational egalitarianism( responsibility factor is the essential factor for building equal society, but is not the only essential one) and demonstrates this strategy through the introduction of relational egalitarianism’s distributive requirements. The last chapter elucidates the theoretical value of relational egalitarianism through the proximity between it and socialism, and analyzes the situation of social relationships in contemporary China and the best route to bring about the ideal of a society of equals.