Conception Of Equality Essay

‘Equality’ is a contested concept: “People who praise it or disparage it disagree about what they are praising or disparaging”. ‘Equality’ (or ‘equal’) signifies correspondence between a group of different objects, persons, processes or circumstances that have the same qualities in at least one respect, but not all respects, i.e., regarding one specific feature, with differences in other features.

The important concept for our politics now, is the concept of equality. Political philosophers have written about equality from both the left and the right. From the Liberal position and and the Conservative position as if it was perfectly clear what equality means. Equality means everybody has the same something as everybody else. Everybody has the same bank account

Dworkin in his presentation in front of the Carnegie Council stated that, "So I want to start rather differently. I want to start with a general account of political obligation of what a state, in particular, owes to its citizens and see what conception of equality follows from understanding politics at that deep a level." He argued that, No government is legitimate unless it meets that condition: the government must treat each and every person over whom it claims dominion with an equal concern, and an equal respect. An equal concern meaning, that social policy must take the fate of each individual to be equally important with the fate of any other. So when deciding on a political policy, it can’t discount the effect on some citizens. Obviously, it can’t do that because of their race. But it can’t do that because of their economic class, either.

In a famous pair of articles and his book Sovereign Virtue he advocates a theory he calls 'equality of resources'. This theory combines two key ideas. Broadly speaking, the first is that human beings are responsible for the life choices they make. The second is that natural endowments