Social Equality: Then And Now, Jonathan Wolff

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Jonathan Wolff, who explores how ideas of relational equality have developed in the past 100 years.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Good evening, everybody. Usually you all fall very obediently silent at exactly quarter to the hour, so it's probably my terrible timekeeping from last week that has caused you to lose your customary self-discipline. Welcome to the second last in this centenary series of London lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Now I've successfully avoided beginning the evening with housekeeping remarks because they're so boring, but I've got to make one this evening, otherwise I'll forget. And this is that next week, which is the last in the series, we're not in this room. For reasons I don't know. We are back in Swedenborg House, which is an elegant building on Bloomsbury Street, not very far from here. So please don't arrive at room 348 or whatever room number this is. Swedenborg House next week, Peter Hacker on Wittgenstein. Okay, well it's a great pleasure to introduce our speaker for this evening, Joe Wolfe. Joe is a political philosopher. He did, I think, pretty well every phase of his academic career very, very near here at UCL, an undergraduate student, a graduate student, a member of the faculty, and then he rose to be dean of the School of Humanities until he became the Alfred Landaker Chair of Values and Public Policy at the Bavatnik School of Government in Oxford, a post he occupied until last year. Among his many honours, he's a Fellow of the British Academy, and if I I hope he thinks of this as an honour, he's also the president of this institute, the Royal Institute of Philosophy. And among his many works, his book, Why Read Marx Today, and Ethics and Public Policy, a Philosophical Inquiry, very much characteristic of the engaged mode of philosophy in which he has distinguished himself. And tonight his talk is entitled Social Equality, Then and Now. Joe, over to you.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Okay, very good. Yes, that is the title. Excellent. We both remembered correctly. So very, very pleased to be here. I love this room. Normally my memory of being in this room is in some administrative function sitting around a table, because this is Senate House, after all. So it's uh wonderful to be here giving a talk. And as you can see, uh my talk is called Social Equality Then and Now. And I'll explain in a moment what I'm going to do. But I want to start off with a quote from, in fact, a biologist, Leonard Hill, in a paper called The Philosophy of a Biologist, that was published in a journal called Journal of Philosophical Studies in 1930. So those of you who know the history of the society will know that is the name that philosophy, our journal, started as. So the first few volumes are the Journal of Philosophical Studies, and then some marketing mastermind decided philosophy was a much better name, but changed its name, and I think every public library's been buying it ever since. But Leonard Hill wrote: the number of the stars in the whole of the two million nebulae is such that if stars were grains of sand, the grains would cover the whole of England, hundreds of yards deep. Our Earth is one millionth part of one such grain. And we bother ourselves over questions of social rank. So I love this quote. It plays no further role in his paper, which is about the state of the sciences and how the sciences are more like an art than people think they are. But I think it's very fitting that a paper from one of the first years of the journal picks up this idea about us bothering ourselves over social rank, which is really the topic of my talk. Alright, so what I'm going to do in this talk is talk quite a bit about this man, or at least one of his books. So this is R. H. Tawney, Richard Tawney. He was well known as a historian and a political theorist. He was also an activist and advocate for adult education, which fits in very well with us in the Royal Institute. But I'm going to talk quite a bit about a book he wrote called Equality, published in 1931, based on lectures he gave in 1929, set almost a hundred years ago, almost at the start of the Institute's history. And the reason I'm going to do that is partly because of these two people, Ronald Walkin and Elizabeth Anderson. Now, those of you who know the debate, the current debates about equality in political philosophy, will know that there's a division between two broad approaches. One is a type of distributive view, which suggests that equality is about the distribution of something. So the most famous statement of this is by my former teacher at UCL, Jerry Cohen, G. A. Cohen, who said he takes for granted that equality requires the distribution of something. And that the task for the philosopher is to find out what that thing is. Is it money? Is it happiness? Is it capabilities? Is it need satisfaction? So, on that view, an equal society is one that shares something out equally. The alternative view, known as relational egalitarianism, also known, I've tended to call it social egalitarianism rather than relational egalitarianism, says that's the wrong way about thinking about equality. And an equal society isn't one that shares something out equally, but it's one in which people treat each other as equals. And so on this relational view, equality is not a relation between objects, but rather a relation between people. You can probably tell by the way I'm explaining these views which one I'm more sympathetic to. I have been an advocate of a social egalitarian view. But if we have these two broad approaches, a distributive view and a social relational view, I'm very much in the social camp. And one of the things I have done in my writings is appeal to Tawney's work as a way of supporting or providing examples of an earlier theorist who also believed in social equality, and claiming also that over the tradition of the 20th century, social equality had been more important than distributive equality. Not that that's an argument for anything in itself, but to say that there is a longer tradition of thinking about social equality. Now, these are claims I've made on the basis of rather thin scholarship in the past, I have to admit. And people who know what they're talking about have said I have overdone the distinction in Tawney and in others between distributive and social equality. And so I thought this would be the right time to take a look at that in a bit more detail and to look at what Tawny said in more detail and compare it with the sorts of things that relational egalitarians say today. Which is not a simple matter because there's not one thing that they all say. There are many different things that different people say, but I think you'll get the gist of what I want to do. What I want to do first, though, is to set up what I thought of as the contemporary debate, until I showed a draft of my paper to someone who said that your contemporary debate actually starts in the first half of the last hundred years. That is Royls and Nozick from the 1970s, incredibly for me, because these are people who had just published new books when I was an undergraduate, they fall into the first 50 years of the last hundred years, 1971 and 1974. I'm going to start with Nozick. And the key point from Nozick, I would say, for these purposes, from his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is this. So Nozick is a libertarian. Libertarianism in the 1970s was very much a fringe view. Now one might say it's an establishment view, certainly in some establishments. At the time, Nozick wrote there were probably no libertarians in active politics, or they wouldn't have said they were, and very, very few in academia anywhere. I think it's still true about academia. Active politics is rather different now. What was it that made a view like Nozick, or what was his view, what made it so prominent? Okay, so step back a little bit further. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, one of Nozick's targets is a paper by Bernard Williams on equality. And Nozick picks out a line from Bernard Williams where Williams says it's a necessary truth that the proper distribution of health care is based on health need. Okay, so this is a necessary truth. It's a proper distribution of health care should be for health need. And I can see some people nodding in this room, I read it, that seems right. It's like an old platonic argument that activities have a proper function. Well, Nozick says, well, what about the doctors? Don't they have a say in who gets their services? Why shouldn't the doctors just sell their services to the highest bidder? And he goes on to say, if that's the necessary truth, then why isn't it a necessary truth that the proper distribution of hair care services shouldn't be hair care need? And which society does that? Monks might do it, prisons they might do it, but generally we don't think that we should compel hairdressers to give free services to those in the greatest need. Okay. Now I'm not saying that this doesn't have an answer, but you know, just as Kant talked about Hume breaking him out of his dogmatic slumbers, Nozick broke a lot of egalitarians out of their dogmatic slumbers. And the key idea, I think, is this that people on the left, people who are egalitarians, have looked at distribution, but they haven't really looked at production and non-production. That is, they've assumed that these goods exist just in a big social pot, as Nozick says, but they come into existence through people's efforts. Some people are responsible for creating things, some people are not responsible. Where is responsibility in this egalitarian theory? So if you go back to Rawls, 1971, Rawls is famous for the difference principle. The difference principle says we should make the worst off as well off as possible. You can immediately, I think, make the libertarian reply for yourself here. Doesn't it matter how they got to be worst off? If people are worst off because of their own negligence and bad choices, is that the same as someone who's badly off because of the way they were born or they were in an accident that couldn't be predicted, and so on. So libertarians want to say people on the left have completely ignored responsibility. That they want to subsidize people who maybe could work or choose not to. And in the literature, um, you know, because we're talking about analytical philosophy, rather than look at actual cases, what people do is make up their own cases. And so the literature is full of stories of the ant and the grasshopper, Aesop's fable. Okay, they didn't make that up, but they use it. But also an example, I think, that Kenneth Arrow, the economist, introduced into the literature, which is of someone who spends all day surfing off Malibu instead of working. That's the surfer. And the question is, should the surfer be fed at public expense? Now, if you look at Rawls's difference principle, the surfer has less money than anyone else, so the difference principle says we should tax other people to subsidize the surfer. Nozick says, no, we shouldn't. And a lot of people are sympathetic to him. One person who wasn't was the uh philosopher, political theorist Brian Barry. So uh Nozick, you can see in his not exactly surfing gear, but his um rather racy sporting gear there. I don't know actually what that is, just a t-shirt, I suppose. Uh, you have the bearded Brian Barry in a very early review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. So uh Barry was uh socialist, uh egalitarian. Barry says, Nozick is articulating the prejudices of the average owner of a filling station in a small town in the Midwest who enjoys grousing about paying taxes and having to contribute to welfare scroungers.

SPEAKER_03 14:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

So that was meant to be a devastating put down of Nozick. The way things have turned, he's just speaking for everyone now. That pretty much everyone objects to welfare scroungers harvesting their tax dollars when they could work. So this has become part of the, this put-down has become part of a type of political common sense. Now, I'm not suggesting everyone in this room or even anyone in this room follows it, but the recent turn of history is very much more on Nozick's side than it was on Bernard Williams or Brian Barry's or John Rawls. So, what do egalitarians do about this? Well, um, what has happened is that Ronald Walkin, who was on an earlier slide, tried to deal with this type of libertarian challenge by combining a theory of equality with a theory of responsibility. Now, uh it may see it may actually be rather obvious how this goes, but um, it wasn't obvious to talk in, it was wrapped up in two papers of about a hundred pages each. But the basic idea is this. What we should do is distinguish between people's freely made choices and things that are outside their control that he calls their circumstances. And what he says is against a background of equality, we should compensate people for things that are outside their control. So if you're born disabled, uh if you're born with low talent, you should get compensation for that, and he's got an elaborate scheme of how we should work out the compensation. But if you're badly off through your own choices, then you have no claim on other people. So the example that Walkin uses is if you're poor because you had a decent amount of money, you walk past the casino, you decide to go in, you put all your money on red, and black came up. That's your own fault. That's a freely made gamble. We don't subsidize you for freely made gambles, but if you lose all your money through something that's completely out of your control, maybe a lightning uh, you know, lightning strikes your house, say, and unpredicted, and no one could be insured for it, say, then uh you do have a claim on other people. Now, a million questions. The big one, how do we tell the difference between circumstances and choice? And so there's a whole literature on that. I'm not going to go into any of that now. Um, so this was the orthodoxy. When I was a graduate student, this was the orthodoxy. And my teacher Cohen was very impressed with Walkin. There were other people who were trying to refine the view, because of course, any view in philosophy, there are going to be problems with it. And there are other people who think they can solve those problems, and someone else comes along. So there was an industry of people trying to work out how to make this choice circumstance distinction right. And um I should have been, yeah, I was a graduate student, I should have been part of that, and I sort of pretended to be. But all along I had this anxiety about it, which I couldn't quite put my finger on. Took me about ten years because you know that's the pace of philosophy, I think. Or for me anyway. Um, but eventually I came I came to realize what it was. So uh not just on my own, uh yeah, I gave talks and people were appalled that this is where philosophy had got us to. I thought, okay, what's going wrong here? But what I realized, these were the Thatcher years, and uh Margaret Thatcher was introducing quite punitive welfare legislation, and part of it was that to get unemployment benefit, you had to show that you were willing to work. So you had to show that you were unemployed not through your own choices, but because of bad circumstances. It weren't the jobs or you had the wrong talents. Well, that was the same as this view, which became known as luck egalitarianism. It subsidizes you for bad brute luck, but not bad option luck. So the luck egalitarian view bizarrely seemed to converge in social policy terms with Thatcherite social policy. So the most right-wing government we'd ever had seemed to have the same view as what was meant to be cutting-edge egalitarianism. And I was particularly concerned about this type of means testing. So suppose we say you can only get welfare benefits if there aren't other jobs out there, aren't enough jobs, or you don't have the talents. And I thought, well, what about someone, you know, suppose there are plenty of jobs out there, and I can't get a job. I have to go to the welfare office to prove that I'm useless, to prove that I don't have the talents, and then I'll get welfare benefits. I thought this is meant to be an egalitarian view. You end up humiliating people who are already towards the most disadvantaged in society. That cannot be right. That cannot be right. So uh Elizabeth Anderson, myself, Samuel Shuffler, round about the same time, thought that this was just the wrong way of thinking about equality. And what we wanted to do instead was to argue that equality was much more about how people treated each other, much less about counting how much people have got, but thinking about um whether you're looking up in society or looking down. I read Tawny, uh I read it before, looking to see what position Tawny took in the debate that we were having. He didn't seem to be taking a debate position in the debate we were having, he was doing something else. And what he said is that the enemies of equality are snobbery, so looking down, and servility. Not civility, but servility, looking up. So these are the enemies of equality. Some people looking down, some people looking up. Berthold Brecht says something very similar. He wants to live in a society where he doesn't look up at anyone and he doesn't look down on anyone. So this idea of social equality as some sort of idea where we see each other all on the same level, that is what attracted many of us, maybe not everyone, to equality. This notion of snobbery and civility comes from Tawney, or at least that's the formulation I saw. So I was very encouraged when I saw Tawney, thinking that he was doing a very similar thing to what uh what we were doing. So this then moves me now to look in a bit more detail at Tawney and some of the other theorists who were writing in the same time and uh in the next decade or two. Now, what I've come to find out is there were many, many theorists who wrote many, many books. I don't have the time to read all these books. I certainly don't have time to tell you about them all if I did. So I'm going to be taking a selection of a selection. I'm taking a sample of who I think are the most important theorists and a sample of their works. I'm not pretending to be comprehensive. And most of the people I'm talking about did change their views over time. So I'm not pretending to give a final definitive interpretation of anyone, but I just want to tell you about the things I found when I started looking. Okay, so Tawney is opposed to snobbery and civility. He doesn't leave it there though, because he says that snobbery and Civility are caused by privilege and tyranny. So that makes it a much more political-sounding view that we have a group of privileged people who are looking down and they exercise a form of tyranny in the workplace and in society. So it's not just about attitudes, it's about the way society is organized and has historically been organized. So it's not something we change just by educating people to treat each other better. There's a whole system of privilege and tyranny behind it. And Tawney himself begins with a chapter on what he calls the Religion of Inequality. And this is something he takes from the poet, Matthew Arnold. So Matthew Arnold is most famous for the poem Dover Beach. I don't know if anyone could recite Dover Beach for us, maybe later on, not now. But he also wrote a volume of essays called Mixed Essays, and one of them is called Equality. And Tawney is very taken with this phrase of Matthew Arnold's, the religion of inequality. And Matthew Arnold, writing in 1879, so well before our period here, 1879, believes that there's a difference in the type of ethos, social ethos in England and in France. What he says is, talking about England, people of different social classes cannot but feel that there is somehow a wall of partition, it is a wall of partition, I did check that, between himself and the other, that they seem to belong to two different worlds thoughts, feelings, perceptions, accessibilities, language, manners, everything is different. In France, there is not this incompatibility. Whether he mixed with high or low, the gentleman feels himself in a world not alien or repulsive, but a world where people make the same sort of demands upon life in things of this sort which he does himself. Now, whether he's right about France is another matter. Some people have said this is complete nonsense about France. I'm not going to comment on that now. But the idea that he's putting forward is that England is a society of social classes. And this is something that is very important about all the early thinkers I'm going to be talking about. Because they, in terms of social division, they only really were interested in social economic classes. There was an aristocracy and there was the workers. There's barely a middle class in 100 years ago. Obviously, there were teachers and so on, a few civil servants, but they were interested in a commercial aristocracy by this time, not the landed aristocracy by 1920, but the rich and the poor. The literature we have today is very interesting as a contrast for that, because we hardly see anyone thinking that the big divide in society is this simple division between the rich and the poor. So even in John Rawls, who talks about wealth and income, we've got much more of a sense of a gradation of people at different levels rather than this idea of two different classes. But what Arnold and then Tony have picked up on is this idea of a type of social division between people who don't mix. And they both say that this starts very early on in life because the rich send their kids to one set of schools and the poor send their kids to another set of schools. It's the people who go to the exclusive schools who are going to end up as the rulers, but they haven't actually met the people they're ruling over, other than as maybe shop assistants, say. They didn't even mix with them as children. They don't marry across class lines. So in the society they're talking about from the 1870s to 1930s, we have two rigid classes that do not meet, and that is the religion of inequality. What's been so interesting sociologically is that that dissolved a bit, but there's a sense in which it's coming back again. And that people of different economic backgrounds are again not meeting. So Robert Putnam, for example, uh wrote a book called Our Kids, and he has this nostalgic, misty-eyed thing about America in the 1950s, where the rich and poor men played baseball in the park together, not knowing anyone's backgrounds. Kids of the rich and poor went to the same schools, people married across class lines, but he said this is all ending now, and leisure activities are separate, people are only marrying people of their own social class, and so on. So it looks like the religion of inequality is coming back again. But um the point for us is that this for Tawney is primarily a social divide. So what he says is what is repulsive is not that one man should earn more than others, for where community environment and a common education and habit of life have bred a common tradition of respect and consideration, these details of the counting house are forgotten or ignored. It is that some classes should be excluded from the heritage of civilization, which others enjoy, and that the fact of human fellowship, which is ultimate and profound, should be obscured by economic contrasts which are trivial and superficial. So this and similar passages like this in Tawny are an absolute delight for me. Because you have this idea of forgetting the counting house. The whole point about distributive equality is the counting house is their front and centre. What we're trying to do is count things to make sure everyone has enough. And for me, this is a type of fetishistic approach to material goods. That you know, that those with upbringing like mine were taught material goods aren't very important, what matters is how you behave and how other people behave towards you, and so on. But suddenly we've got a whole theory, set of theories about equality that just concentrate on the counting house, making sure everyone's got the same amount. Whereas Tawney says that if we've got a common environment, if people are mixing, people are uh having the same education, the counts, it doesn't matter if some people get rich and some people are not so rich. Everyone has to have a level. Thinkers of this time talked about a civic minimum. People should not fall below a level. In current language, we would call that a sufficiency view. But if everyone has achieved a decent amount, then further inequalities are less important. And Tawney has some other interesting things to say, sorry. Um particularly about equality of opportunity. So equality of opportunity is one of the uh ideas that pretty much everyone agrees with, left or right. Everyone can agree there should be equality of opportunity. But Tawney says this is pretty hollow. So people come have different backgrounds, different um education, different situations, different connections. Quality of opportunity doesn't mean very much. And he coins an idea, a term that has been taken by some other people, I don't know how many people would have would have heard it, what he calls tadpole society. So tadpole society is where everyone is born a tadpole. We all have equal opportunity to be frogs, but it turns out only a tiny percentage of us will become frogs. So we have equal opportunity, but what is the point if there are so few positions? And of course, the poor are already born frogs in, the rich are born frogs in waiting. So it's not really equal opportunity at all. And he says, what's also striking about this is very occasionally a poor person will become a frog. They'll do all the right things. And so the establishment will say, see, we've got equality of opportunity. Because even a poor person can get into the House of Lords, or even a poor person can become captain of industry or control the BBC. So going from one tiny example saying, look, this is possible. And of course, say it's possible doesn't mean it's fair or equal, but it's very good argumentative cover, and we see it all the time for people who want to claim we're in an equal society to point one or two examples of people from humble backgrounds that have achieved a great deal. Okay. So that is Tawney for now. I will be coming back to him. Here we have uh another person of the same time, uh, G. D. H. Cole. Now, G.D. H. Cole was much more explicitly a socialist than Tawney. They were both on the left. Um, Cole, at various points of his life, was very influenced by Marxist thought. And was at a time, he was at Oxford, probably the leading academic Marxist of his time. And he wrote a book which, even though it's out of print, is still on the syllabus at Oxford University, called The Simple Case for Socialism from 1936. So when I arrived, I had to buy a second-hand copy because it's impossible to get this new, but it's still on the syllabus under the socialist reading list, or it was when I last looked. It's a very good book, very interesting book. But early on, he sets out the case for socialism. So, first of all, a human fellowship which denies and expels distinctions of class. So this is only what we could expect. Secondly, a social system in which no one is so much richer or poorer than his neighbours as to be able to mix with them on equal terms. So this is really interesting for me because it opposes material inequalities. No one should be richer or poorer. But why? Because material equalities stop us mixing on equal terms. So it's a mixing on equal terms that is driving this. And this was similar for Tawney, I think. Although Tawney did oppose material inequalities, it's the effect of those material inequalities rather than the material inequalities in themselves that's the problem. Now, with number three, we get to a typical socialist view: the common ownership and use of all the vital instruments of production. I don't know anyone in the academic literature who's arguing for that now. Similarly, an obligation on all citizens to serve one another according to their capacities in promoting the common well-being. So we all have to do our best for the common well-being. I'll come back to that a bit later on. There are other things in Cole that I find very interesting. So he says, I want a society in which I shall have no cause to feel ashamed when I look my fellow men in the face. Okay, so the same thing, the eye-to-eye society, looking people in the face. So this metaphor of looking people in the face, how you're looking, where your eyes are, are they up, are they down, are they looking at other people? This is a great metaphor for equality, which is used innumerable times, even in the contemporary literature. There's a fascinating passage that I wasn't expecting in this book. So the second bullet point, the means of making pageance, of covering the drabness of everyday life with light and warmth, and the appearance of jollity are mainly in the hands of men who are set on preserving class distinctions and holding up the symbols of superiority for the adulation of the poor. Now, so what's the argument here? He's saying that when we do have festivals, when we do have some sort of celebrations, it's always showing the poor how wonderful the rich are. When I read that, I realized that this is like a 1920s version of what Iris Marion Young more recently called cultural imperialism. So Iris Marion Young has, in her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, has the idea of five faces of oppression. And one of the five faces of oppression for her is what she calls cultural imperialism, which is where people, she's thinking mostly about minorities, are not able to express and enjoy their culture in the places where they're living. So they're expected to take on the symbols of the dominant culture, they can't follow their religion, they don't have festivals, the libraries don't have their books, there are no music festivals, food festivals, for example. So overcoming cultural imperialism is one of her goals in terms of creating a more just society, a good society. So it's just it's fascinating for me to see Cole making the same argument, but in class terms, rather than diversity or multicultural terms. And you can think perhaps of things like miners-garlers or um brass bands, collary brass bands, of ways in which people were trying to assert a type of proletariat culture or working culture to combat the cultural imperialism of the rich. So this is one of a number of parallels where I see things in the contemporary literature which are anticipated or foreshadowed in this earlier literature. Here's another idea. Um the third bullet points, what he wants is a society in which no one is avoidably poor or miserable or stunted in mind or body, or desperately overworked. So that's a type of sufficiency minimum, or denied the chance of working according to his abilities in the common service. Well, when I first read that, my eyes just went over it thinking this is just what people say. And then I realized that this is another anticipation of something that has happened in the contemporary literature. Um there's an American philosopher called Paul Gomberg, who has developed a view called contributive justice, which is becoming more popular now. It's not mainstream, but there are more and more people who think there's something to this. And Gonberg, you know, he works in Chicago, he works in a very disadvantaged community in higher education. And what he sees is a lot is mass unemployment among minorities in Chicago. And what he said is their complaint isn't so much they don't have food or don't have housing because they do, their complaint is they're not able to make a contribution to society. So they're denied the right or they're denied the chance to contribute to society. And he thinks, and I agree with him, that it's a great motivation for most people that they want to contribute to the lives of others, they want to have the chance to contribute to the lives of others in some way or other. And so Cole agrees with him. So this is Cole anticipating Iris Marion Young and Paul Gomberg in two bullet points on this slide. And there will be more of this as we go on. So I want now to move to Harold Lasky. Um, so Harold Lasky was a political philosopher at the LSE. He's also an important person for us because he appears in the first number of our journal as hosting a symposium that was published in the very first number of the journal. So I have a soft spot for Lasky, independently of anything he wrote, because he's he is um obviously very closely associated with the Royal Institute. But he is interesting in a different way. So what we have, what what I'm suggesting is that in Tawney and also in Cole, we have the idea that the point of equality is for people to be able to relate to each other in particular ways. Tawny, it's very clear, he wants you not to look down, uh, not to look up. Uh Cole, too, wants people to be able to mix on equal terms, and he made that very clear. Lasky doesn't seem to be so interested in how people mix, how people relate to each other. And one thing he says is uh this passage that really took me aback, this is written in 1926. Okay. By liberty I mean the eager maintenance of that atmosphere in which men have the opportunity to be their best selves. Now, I don't know about you, but I thought this term best self best selves was sort of airport book 1990 or something. And this is a bit of for self-help. Am I my best self? But no, there it is, a hundred years ago. Tawney is saying what we want to do is create the atmosphere in which people can be their best selves. And he thinks that we do very badly. This nothing is more striking than the way in which our education system trains the children of rich or well-born men to habits of authority, while the children of the poor are trained to habits of deference. So the poor are stunted, they're not able to achieve their best selves. So this is the idea then that inequality the problem with inequality is it leads to lack of freedom. It leads to stunting, it leads to habits of deference. This next point from Lasky, unless I enjoy the same access to power as others, I live in an atmosphere of contingent frustration. It does not matter that I shall probably not desire to take full advantage of that access. Its denial will mean that I accept an allotted station as a permanent condition of my life, and that in turn is fatal to the spontaneity that is the essence of freedom. What's going on here? This concept contingent frustration. Very, very interesting. That is, Lasky says that freedom is not so much about whether I can do what I want to do right now, even though, of course, if I can't, that limits my freedom. It's much more counterfactual. If I were to want to do that, could I do that? Do other people have the power to stop me from doing something? So he has this concept of contingent frustration. People who know the contemporary literature will see an anticipation of forms of republicanism here. So the views of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, which are considered to be revivals of much older views, are here in Lasky, amazingly enough. What freedom is not so much about what I can do, but whether someone is dominating me, whether someone could stop me doing something if I wanted to do it, even if I don't want to do it. So that type of contingency, or that second level of what I can do. Okay, so um, next bullet point: no man should be placed in society that he can overreach his neighbour to the extent which constitutes a denial of the latter's citizenship. So here we have a very political view now. What matters about inequality is that you can deny someone else's citizenship. You can stop people acting as a citizenship. And then another comment about opportunity. So long as a family endures and there seems little reason to anticipate or desire its disappearance, the varying environments it creates make the notion of equal opportunity a fantastic one. Now, anyone who has read Rawls on equality of opportunity will find almost that same sentence in it. That Rawl says, for as long as a family persists, we cannot have equality of opportunity. Why is that? Well, you I'm sure you know the stories, that uh probably the most fateful thing in your life, if we do a longitudinal study, and we, of course, are going to be exceptions both ways around, is whether your parents read to you in bed. Uh the success of people's lives can be traced. I've I've said that once or twice in lectures, and people have come up very worried and said, My parents didn't read to me. We're a Bangladeshi family, and they didn't want me, they didn't speak English. Yeah. Yeah, there are plenty of exceptions. Don't worry, plenty of exceptions. But just as a generalization, it appears to be this is much more important than which school you went to. So these factors about what happens at home, whether your parents talk to you, whether they encourage a type of freedom, whether they encourage fun, these are the sorts of things that no government will want to regulate, shouldn't regulate, but they stand in the way of uh equality of opportunity. Rawls says, should the family be abolished then? Guess what his answer is? No, it shouldn't. So we can't have equality of opportunity. And yeah, other philosophers have taken up the slide. Okay, so you can see I got very excited reading through these theorists and seeing how close many of their views are to things we think we've done ourselves in the last few decades. Now, this is one of my favorite quotes, and it may be the thing I've quoted more than anything else, the things I've mentioned. So this man is Arthur Lewis. He was a development economist. He was born in St. Lucia. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics. At the time he did, he was the first black man to win a Nobel Prize for anything other than peace, and he remains the only black man to have won a Nobel Prize for anything other than peace in literature, incredibly. There's a building named after him at the LSE where he taught, a building named after him in Manchester, born in St. Lucia and eventually went back there. He wrote a pamphlet or a long pamphlet for the Fabian Society, and a lot of it is about tax and transfer. But he just has this passage which I love, I'll read out. So he says, What the socialists want is a society in which every child shall grow up in pleasant homes and attractive surroundings and with good educational opportunities, in which every adult should be provided for in sickness and adversity, and in which the pensioner can take untroubled ease. And I read that and thought, yep, that's what we want. And it doesn't sound that hard either. So this is the mystery of it. Why haven't we managed to do this? Well, giving every pensioner and our untroubled ease is probably a bit more expensive than it was in 1949. But you can see the point here. This feels like what an ordinary human life should be like. A normal human life. It's not asking for the moon. But what is so interesting to me about it. It says nothing about social relations. It says nothing about politics. It says nothing about work. So his idea is that a socialist is just interested in living conditions, which clearly is not true, but it is one of the views that was being promoted at this time. So his view was much more about material conditions. Okay. So where do I go with all of this? So what I want to have impressed on you is that many of the positions we take up now were there. We've got a debate between material and social equality. We're very explicit about that. But those positions were there a hundred years ago. All of the positions that we have now, maybe all is an exaggeration, but many of the positions were there before. There's a diversity, there's an anticipation. There is a desire for type of sufficiency rather than equality, which is also very popular now. That is, everyone should be brought to a high level of sufficiency, and above that level we're not so worried about material inequality. That was a very common view at the time. And I just want to give you one more anticipation before I move on, which is from Laskey again. Now, one of the arguments that Dworkin used in presenting his view is this. So I said Dwarkin believes in equality, and there's a debate about equality of what, as Jerry Cohen had put it. Some people believed in equality of welfare. Everyone should have the same level of preference satisfaction. Others say we should have the same resources, roughly speaking, money. So there was a debate between equality of welfare and equality of resources. Dworkin came down very heavily on equality of resources. Why was that? Well, his main argument, bizarrely enough, was about people who deliberately cultivate expensive tastes. So suppose you have someone who's, you know, we're all happy with beer and hens' eggs. Someone reads about the French kings and decides their life would not be worth living unless they had pre-philoxia claret and plover's eggs. And they train themselves only to like those things. They don't get more satisfaction than other people. They just get the same, but they like this. Now, this example seems sort of crazy. I mean, why would you do that? Why would you do that? But the debate between Dworkin and people who believed in the quality of welfare focused very, very heavily on that example of Louis, named after the French king, and his expensive tastes, his deliberately cultivated expensive tastes. So turning the page in Lasky, I was just astonished to see Lasky making the same argument using more or less the same example. Not pre-flux or claret, but he says, we could not proffer a clerk a reward which enabled him to purchase the quartos of Shakespeare, however urgently he demanded their possession. Now this is an argument about need satisfaction, in fact, rather than preference satisfaction. But again, it's about a subjective view. And the general point is that for Lasky is if someone says I'm only going to get my need satisfied if you give me these things, how do we know whether that's true or not? You know, who's to decide? So Lasky says we just have to give people this normal notion of need rather than the extravagant, personally tailored one. But I just thought it was so interesting. They both use these actually rather snobbish examples of expensive tastes, completely fictional examples. Well, actually, there are examples of people with expensive tastes. For example, you know, people who can't eat bread in a very bread-dependent culture and have to buy more expensive food. Should they get more money because they can't eat the cheap food that the rest of us can? That seems to be a real dilemma rather than something we ought to be just brushing aside. Anyway, um enough of that. It's not part of the main argument, but I was just so impressed with it, I thought I would share it. Okay, so um, main similarities. There are many. What are the differences? Partly the academic, the tone of the debate is so different. So um, Tawney, Cole were writing for this person, they would all love to reach the educated general public. Uh, why were they not writing for the academic audience? Well, there wasn't one. Um there were barely any universities in England at the time they were writing. Uh Tawney boasts that the number of universities has recently gone up from six to sixteen in, I'm not sure whether it's in England or the United Kingdom at that time, but there was a tiny academic audience and barely a community of political philosophers. There was a cluster of people at the LSE, one or two elsewhere, but the academic audience barely existed. So you had to have this type of crossover audience. And this goes with a number of other things. So I said that there was a distinction, I've been going on and on about the distinction between distributive and social equality. Tawney, I've argued, is believes in social equality, but he talks a lot about material equality too. And he might be quite bemused at the idea he's got to make a choice between it. That he might think you can just do both. You have to do both. And the reason for that, part of the reason for that, is that the social equalities are the consequence of economic inequalities. If you've got a class division of society, economic class, and that is your main social divide, there's not really a lot of difference between material inequality and social inequality. I mean, there's means and ends here, but the two things will go together. And there are a couple of other debates that I've been pushing in recent times, which I think would have mystified these earlier thinkers. So one of them is between so-called ideal and non-ideal theory. So ideal theorists want to set up a theory of justice as like a template of what a just society is. So if you think of most theories of justice, they set up a theory of justice, and then we try to move society in the direction of justice. Non-ideal society says that's utopian, non-ideal theory says that's utopian, we won't get agreement on the ideal. What we should do is start from the injustice we see in the world. So we see exploitation, we see cultural imperialism, we see powerlessness, we see social exclusion. These are bad things, and that's where we should be starting from. What do these theorists do? Well, again, they do both. They're very engaged, they're all very politically engaged. They're going in and out of cabinet office, they're talking to policymakers, they're writing reports for Fabian Society, they're giving lectures to students. So they're working on all levels at once. Another question I've raised is what is our topic here? Is it equality or is it inequality? Tawney calls his book equality, but most of the time he's talking about inequality. He's not telling us what equality is. So I would say he's a critic to that degree, but if I put that to him, he'd say, What's the difference? I think. Aren't they different sides of the same coin? Well, I've got a long paper where I try and show they're not different sides of the same coin. I'm not sure he would be very impressed with this. So there's a type of division that goes on in the c in the contemporary literature where we try to put people in different camps and have an argument with them, which I don't see so much in this early literature. There definitely were people who were disagreeing about things, there's no doubt about that, particularly over policy. But over the general frame, there seems to be much less need to try and pigeon your whole yourself as one thing. So um, what are the main differences in the end? Let me come back to responsibility. So this was the thing that got me uh interested. I tried to get you interested in in the first place. So Tawney says, until about 1906, there was a type of economic orthodoxy that if you tried to help the poor, it would make things worse. So if you tried to bring in old age pensions, I don't know what the argument was for that, but that would make the pensioners worse off. If you brought in unemployment benefit, that would make everyone worse off. Okay, so that was the orthodoxy until about 1906. Then people tried some social experiments, and guess what? The orthodoxy was wrong. Giving pensioners a bit of money made them less poor, improved their lives. He's worried that now, 1920s, 1930s, we've got a bit of social insurance. There's a right-wing backlash. But he says there's little evidence of lavish and indiscriminate assistance to persons in distress. And in this other passage that could have been written last week, if we change the language slightly, the picturesque theory that the greater part of existing social expenditure consists of dolls, so payments to unemployed people, may continue to be believed by readers of the Daily Mail, but it is a delusion that has ceased to be plausible for a quarter of a century. I mean, I don't know what happened a quarter of a century before. I can't imagine it was plausible 25 years before he was writing. But this idea that there's a right-wing discourse that says we're wasting our money by paying too much to people who are unemployed, they have a lavish lifestyle, we're spending too much money. Remember the Brian Barry quote, the Midwest filling station owner grousing about how his taxes are going to the Welfare Scrooges? Well, it was in the Daily Mail 100 years ago. It's probably been there in every week of the Daily Mail, probably you can, maybe every day of the Daily Mail, you can find it somewhere for the last hundred years. Okay, so what is he going to propose? Does Tawney think that we should not have these sort of humiliating tests I talked about? So is Tawny going to be like a luck egalitarian all over again, saying that we've got to make sure that people who get unemployment benefit really deserve it? Because we can't have lavish and wasteful expenditure on people who don't deserve it. Well, um, he says a mere increase of benefits and relaxation of the conditions on which they can be obtained, unaccompanied by measures of constructive character, is a lamentable confession indeed of intellectual bankruptcy. So, how do we read this? Well, many of you will be aware of the campaign for unconditional basic income, say, where people should just get money, rich or poor, you get money from the state, and you don't have to do anything to deserve it. None of the thinkers I've talked about here, well, none of the things I talked about, there were one or two people from that period who did believe in something like unconditional basic income, but the general consensus was against it, partly for political reasons, because they thought if the left was associated with unconditional benefits, they're so unpopular that's the end of the left. So, very similar to Dworkin's response to Nozick. If we're the theory of wealth of subsidizing welfare scroungers, we've got no chance. So Tawney didn't want to subsidize welfare scroungers. What did he want to do? Well, here I think he's much more interesting than the contemporary debate. Or I should backtrack some aspects of the contemporary debate because there are things in the contemporary debate that are just like Tawney's view. What Tawney presents us is things like unemployment not being an individualistic problem of one person, you, you bad person. Rather, it's a structural problem. So one way I've written about this, many of you, not everyone, will remember Norman Tebbitt, and Norman Tebett telling, lecturing unemployed people, that when his father was unemployed, he didn't moan, he just got on his bike and went to look for another job. And people have reacted very badly to this, but on the whole, they haven't said what's wrong. What's wrong is that Tibet's father getting on a bike didn't create more jobs. It may have given Tibet's father a job that someone else would have got, but it didn't address unemployment. It was very individualistic. Tawney's view is unemployment is a social and structural problem, not an individual problem. So when we have unemployment, we need economic stimulus to create jobs. We need training schemes. As we should change the social environment and we should change the person. What we have with Dworkin and others is you take the social environment as static, you take the people as static, and you use responsibility almost as a punishment to see who should get benefits and who should not. So, on the whole, Tawney is very opposed to that type of individualization and wants to see things in a social problem in a social context. I think this is very beneficial. There are people who've made similar arguments in the contemporary literature, but they've tended to be rather sidelined. But um they you know we we need to pay more attention, and and I don't have time to go into it, but something like the capability view of a March Asen may well be another way of presenting something like this. So, in the end, then, what is the big difference, if there is one, between people writing 100 years ago and people writing now? Okay, well, I haven't mentioned it so far, so I will end by talking about the big difference. So the big difference may have occurred to you is that in 1929, when Tawney was writing, 1931 when he was publishing, there was this thing called the Soviet Union, which was equality in action. Now, all of these thinkers had to take a view on what they thought about the Soviet Union. Generally, enough was coming through where they realized it was illiberal, it had lots of problems. But it gave them the idea that it was possible to create a society of equals. Furthermore, when you read Tawny and when you read Cole and Lasky even more so, you have the sense that they think they're on this road. We're on a road towards equality. We've come out of this rampant capitalism. We've come out of aristocracy a bit further back. We're now in this period of rampant commercial capitalism, it's breaking down a bit, we're getting more enlightened, we're getting more social services, we're getting more people understanding about workers' control and democracy, which I haven't had time to mention. The economy is transforming, the social world is transforming. It's a world mostly that's positive, except that by the time we get to the 30s, we've also got fascism looming. And so they understand that everything they want to do could be derailed by fascism. So, particularly as we get into the 30s and later 30s, this is a bigger and bigger threat. There is a bit of writing by uh T. S. Eliot just before the Second World War. And he paints a picture of there being three world systems fascism, communism, and what he calls liberal democracy of the US, France, and the UK. And he says this is before the war. He says it's impossible for all three of these to coexist long term. One of them will triumph. We don't know which one. 1939, we don't know which one of the three will triumph. And of course, you can triumph for a short term and things can come back again. But when you look at egalitarian writers now, no one thinks that we're on our way to an equal society. No one thinks that there's a model. Well, maybe Denmark is still our model. Now we think if Denmark can do it, if Denmark can have something like Arthur Lewis's society, why can't the rest of us? Maybe reasons for that. But people don't think we're on our way to Denmark. In fact, Denmark doesn't think it's on its way to Denmark. Denmark thinks it's retreating from Denmark. So the direction of travel is the other way now. And this, I think, has has made people go in two different directions. So some people think, well, as philosophers, we've still got to try and come up with the best models we can. We've got to come up with theories of justice because maybe things will change. And there are others, more like me, who said we've got to work with what we've got now, we've got to try to identify the greatest injustices we see now and try to work out how we as philosophers can help with that. So that's a split we get between ideal theorists who want to come up with the best theory and non-ideal, or as I prefer to call it, real-world theorists who want to understand, want to work with social movements, not that I do, but some people do, or work with people in policy. But this end of optimism, I think, is the big thing missing in the contemporary writings. Okay, I've had my time, so I will stop. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:26

So um, a few questions. Um about the idea of relational equality. So sometimes people talk about a society in which everybody is a moral equal and treats others as moral equals, and that's truly a good thing. Is that enough for what you call relational equality? Because it's compatible with huge differences of wealth.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

So thank you. So that is the that is the question, really, that um I think that needs to be asked. So if I talk a little bit about the my approach to this, so in the now, I I was defending a form of relational egalitarianism in the late 90s, and um I I wanted to develop it further. But it was a stumbling block for me to think about this question of what are the relations of equality? Because you can say everyone is a moral equal, that's fine, but as you say, that doesn't give you a distinctive political philosophy that um you know that there's a view that every theory, libertarianism, treats everyone as a moral equal. If that's all it is, it's very thin. Um Christian socialist, and you can see elements of a type of Christian view in there. Uh, I wasn't going to go down that line, particularly in multicultural society, you can't have you know the brotherhood of man through a, and that gives it away immediately calling it the brotherhood of man through a religious view. So, what is it? We hold doors open for people? Yeah, that doesn't seem like it. So I got stuck and I stopped working on it. And you know I had a couple of graduate students who wanted to work on social equality. So I said, okay, go away, think for three years and tell me what these relations are. Uh two graduate students tried that, they wrote very good theses, but they didn't come up with the answer for that. And so I stopped working on it. And then uh, but but I was also working on ethics and public policy, policy areas. So I'd worked on gambling, I worked on regulation of drugs and so on. And the methodology I'd adopted for that was don't first come up with a positive theory of what an ideal gambling regime would be, or an ideal, because if one thing you happen, you don't have a chance of implementing it. What you have to do is start from where you are and see what sorts of improvements you can make. So that in in these policy areas, I always took a very practical, you might say negative approach, which is how are things going wrong? And um I I read some work by Amart Chassen exactly on this ideas of justice, where he talked about equality, not relational equality. And he said that in his view, injustice was prior to justice. And I thought, well, this is very interesting. Can I say inequality is prior to equality? Because David Miller wrote a paper where he said, so he's another social egalitarian, a relational egalitarian, and to paraphrase he said, you know, it's very easy for us to say what we're against. We're against hierarchy, we're against exclusion, we're against exploitation. Much harder to say what we're for. I thought, okay, let's turn that into our theory. So for me, um, so I take a negative approach to relational equality. I know what we don't want, right? And I also think that um there are many, there are probably many different ways of achieving a society of equals. So a kibbutz might be a society of equals, or um a religious community might be, but they might not have much in common except avoiding hierarchy and exclusion. So for me, the essence of the relations is the avoidance of the negative rather than the rather than the positive. So that's why I I think it's very important to do this. And as soon as I came up with that view, I thought, which I thought was highly original, I started looking at things I'd been reading, and I realized, for example, Miranda Fricker's very important book on uh well, her book is called Epistemic Injustice. It's not called Epistemic Justice. There are so many people who have taken injustice as their topic or inequalities as their topic. And um I uh last thing I say. Say on this one. I went back to look at some things from Stuart Hampshire, Philosophy Stuart Hampshire, and he said, In my youth, you know, I had these ideas of what a good society would be. As I've got older, I can tell you at great length and with good justification of the things I don't want, my society, but I can't really tell you what I do want anymore. I thought this is really interesting. And because even if I mean there are two ways of taking this. So Sen thinks it's a bad idea even to try to think you can come up with a theory of justice. I can be more agnostic about that and say, look, we've got plenty of work to do if we just look at injustice and inequality without necessarily having to take a position on whether some notion of equality will eventually be the be the right one. So I can I officially I remain open on that. Unofficially, I remain very skeptical about it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:57

At a certain point in your talk, you were talking about the idea of compensating egalitarians who believe that you should compensate for things that are people for uh problems that are beyond people's control. Can you say a little bit about the notion of compensation that's in play? Because I can think of two. One is a kind of leveling up idea. You people are unequal for reasons beyond their control, and you give them something that will enable them to equalize their situation. Another interpretation would say it's more like the compensation you get in court if you've been wronged, which may be better than nothing, but it doesn't enable you to always restore the situation that would have obtained before you were wronged. It's just a kind of legal goodie that you get instead. Which which idea of compensation do those sorts of egalitarians have in mind? Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:52

So very, very good question. Um don't have a specific notion in mind, so just use an undifferentiated notion of compensation because it because as soon as you specify anything, you can get into tangles, and do quite tangles about it. But the way it first comes up is very interesting in Dwarkin. So take the case of someone who has uh low earning power, so not low earnings, but because of the economy they're in, they're unable to unable to get a job, or they can only get a very bad job, much worse than other people, no fault of their own, and nothing they could have done about it. So what Dawkin says is the way to deal with this is to imagine a type of hypothetical insurance scheme. So imagine yourself behind a thin veil of ignorance where the only thing you don't know is what your earning power is. And he says, what insurance would you take out under those conditions? And he says there are two main options. One is what he calls high cost insurance, where you would take out a lot of, you would take out high cost insurance, so you would get the same as everyone else, which I take to be the same as your leveling, you're leveling up one. Or he says you might take low-cost insurance, and then you would have a sufficiently good life, but you wouldn't be, you wouldn't come out equal to others. So you might think someone who calls a view equality of resources would go for the high cost, uh, but he doesn't. And his argument is that suppose you go through this and you turn out to be someone who can earn at a high level, you're going to have a huge insurance premium to pay, which he says will make you slave to your talents. And so if you want to be a poet, but you could earn a lot, because remember, this is about potential, not actual earning power, if you could earn a lot as a corporate lawyer, maybe thinking about himself, but he'd rather be an indifferent poet or one of the world's leading political philosophers, but he could earn much, you know, Dwarkin could have earned much more. He would have had to do the thing that is most okay. So this is a very controversial argument. Because why shouldn't be people why shouldn't people be slaves to their talents? Someone's going to be a slave to their talent because they just someone is just going to earn enough to pay their insurance. But anyway, Dwarkin is very concerned about high achievers not being slave to their talents. So he says it's not rational to take out the high-cost insurance. And it's quite interesting if you think about the insurance policies we take out in real life. There are some things we do which would be, which are for equivalent. I think so. House insurance. I think it's very important for people to have leveling house insurance. There are other types of insurance, I don't know, holiday compensation. Actually, I don't take out much insurance. I don't, I think I must have some sort of medical insurance for holidays and so on. But I don't what do people do? The main thing is to make sure things aren't a disaster. Then you might think, well, we'll have a lower premium so I can do something else with the money. That's what Walkin would say.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:02

But you you you can take a lot of view on that. So is that an answer?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:07

It is an answer. It's it's it's uh, I mean, of course, and the difficulty with the insurance case is that there are some things where however much insurance you take out, you're not able to compensate get back what you've lost, unlike rebuilding your house. I think I'm gonna leave it there. I might ask you my third question if there's time at the end, but I'd like to open it up to you folks. So yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:27

Thanks. So my question is about, as I call the personal aspect as opposed to impersonal aspect in the social uh equality. So I appreciate you mentioned lots of aspects of the uh relational equality, which I think to be more institutional-oriented, impersonalized, and also objective in the wish. But uh, I think you won't disagree with me that when it comes to uh the relational equality as opposed to the distributive ones, people also talk about and also care about partiality, allegiance, the emotional connections. And I have in my mind things that Samuel Shaffer talks about, both with their fellow members and also on the state level or from the political community. So here's my question: the following two lines. Number one, you draw the contrast, you call that a big difference between those things 100 years ago and also more recent discussion about topics about quality. Do you think there is also such a difference in terms of the in-person aspect, as I have elaborated, that is not necessarily salient or even totally missing when scholars talk about the equality back to 100 years? And the second line is just for the sake of contemporary discussion, you also recognize briefly that we are in a multiculturalism background with the polarization and also those of the social conflicts, etc. etc. Do you believe that the particular aspect of the impersonal one, the impersonal one, could be even more salient for the current debate about equality, especially along the relational lines?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:58

Okay. Excellent, thank you. So so just to uh pick out the main thing. So you're drawing a distinction between two different ways in which you could be a relational egalitarian. So one you call the impersonal, which is about how the state treats everyone.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:18

Institutional equipment.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:19

So how institutions treat people. The other is a personal one, which is about how we treat each other. And um what I'm seeing in the early views is both of them. Uh sowney is very interested in snobbery, which is a personal matter, and civility. Um G.D. H. Cole says he wants to be able to look other people in the eye. So these are these are personal. Very interesting. I mean, you mentioned emotions, and none of these people from the 1920s and 30s are talking about emotions, or at least not directly. Actually, no one in the contemporary debate, hardly anyone in the contemporary debate is either. So we're we're tended to keep off that topic. And partly I think it's because um there's a type of question of scale here. So if you specify relational egalitarianism in terms of having an emotional response to each other, it's very hard to see how you create a society out of that. You can create a small organized group of people. So I think one of the reasons why some people in the contemporary debates have gone to the more institution is they see how you can scale it. And so if you look at um people like Scheffler or Clodny who are talking about like an interpersonal justification test, I I can't justify my actions to more than one or two people at any one time. I certainly can't justify my actions to everyone in society. So these things have to be institutionalized to a degree. But I think that that we just find both of them in there. That there are very few people who don't want to talk about how people relate to each other. One of the ways this comes across is this idea of people from different groups marrying. And so obviously, this is an emotional and very personal connection. And if we think about the barriers, there can be institutional barriers that stop people from different backgrounds marrying, but there can also be personal barriers. And what we've seen in um and what Robert Putn discusses this and says there has been a shift, and that's partly a consequence of something which is very good, which is the professionalization of women's careers. And so if you go back to the 1950s, doctors married nurses, and so you had a connection across class lines very often, but now doctors marry doctors, and people come back from a very similar class position. So you have a very complicated matrix of what's going on. So Putnam and others think that marrying across difference is actually less now, certainly social and economic difference than it was. But if we talk about other types of difference, like you know, racial difference, religious difference, it's so interesting to see where these lines divide and that they don't divide. So there have been studies about school kids and who do kids play with, and they're much more likely to play with other kids of their own social class than they are the colour of their skin. Or um who do people marry, particularly in the United States, I think also here, they're very unlikely now to marry someone who votes for a different political party. So you you you you have these new divisions coming in that may not have been so strong in the past. So I I think that's probably all I have to have to say. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:47

So I think it's uh I think it was Hanovent who uh who criticized Marx as having uh a idea of uh of some sort of humanism without a theory of uh of uh humanism because he he was a materialist. Uh and this is a contradiction within Marx. And uh listening to this this uh uh it seems like there's there's something that could be similar going on here because the the counters are essentially just taking a material material system and traveling around. Uh the original uh uh prototype. Do they have uh something beyond uh that material world uh that material that materialist uh uh framework that we're talking about that we're dealing with? And that seems to be uh a lot of the contradiction that a lot of the a lot of how we've gotten stuck, actually. Uh you've got the socialists on one side and the uh and the country on one side on the other side, we're both dealing with essentially the same uh uh model, which is a very materialist uh view of the.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:56

Thank you. So are the um do the people who believe in social equality lack a type of understanding of human nature that would, or something that goes beyond the material, that would support yeah. So um it's a fascinating question. Um as I mentioned, Tawny himself was a Christian. So you know he he personally would have had something that went beyond. Uh, but he doesn't want to force this on everyone, even in 1930s, so he so he wears that quite lightly. Um there's a part of Tawney that I've always been inspired by, uh, which may or may not address your question, but we'll we'll see. So you know that so the logic, he is you said, I said he's against the logic of the counting house. There's something very alienating about this. And um when I first wrote about this, I think I I can't remember if I wrote about it or just thought about it. Um so this would have been in the 90s, and thinking of people who you know go to a restaurant and then working out exactly what everyone has had and decide to pay for it. Um now that struck me as a very bad way of ending an evening, right? And that what you should do is split the bill unless someone has been taking advantage, right? So there's this sort of alien, there's a type of alienation you get. And so for me, the um the point about counting is that there's a type of there is a notion of fairness there. You could say if you go out for a meal, it's only fair if everyone pays for what they've eaten. But then the question is how important is the value of fairness? And then the question, next question is, well, what is the value of fairness up against here? So it could be community, it could be friendship. Uh, and it's a balance. So I don't think there's a perfect harmony between fairness and friendship, say, in that there can be, but it can come under strain. So things, so if you have a friendship which suddenly starts becoming rather unfair, it's very likely to ruin the friendship as well. So you know, you go you when you go out with your friend, first night they have a more expensive meal than you do, fine, put it down to experience. If they do that every time, right, then unless you're encouraging them, you might think that's going to be a strain on the friendship. So, what does Tawney say about this thing? The passage that inspires me from Tawny is he says there there are some goods where to divide is not to take away. Now, this is a completely obscure uh expression, and you can probably interpret it however you want. So I'll tell you how I interpret it. So there are some goods where if someone is going to have more of it, another person has to have less. So if there's a cake in front of us, I have more, you have less under normal circumstances. But there are other goods that are not like that. So friendship is an example. So if I have more friendship, that doesn't mean I'm taking friendship away from you. Maybe you might get more friendship as well. Or security. So security in a neighborhood. If I feel more secure, that doesn't mean someone else is going to feel less secure. Probably they're going to feel more secure as well. And so the tragedy, I think, of contemporary social science is we've listened to economists who tell us that the world is all about scarcity and there is opportunity costs. So if one person has something, someone else has to make a sacrifice. And Tawney is saying that's true for some goods, but not all of them. But what we've done is concentrate all our efforts on those goods where to divide is to take away. And they're the trivial ones. The good ones are where you can increase the stock just by how we behave to each other. So goods with positive external output, well, however you want to put it in technical terms. So I would say that that is something beyond the counting house, but without having some sort of exotic theory of spirituality or even a theory of human nature, is just understanding the gains from human interaction. And actually, I I criticized economics, but if you go back further in economics, sorry, I'm going to digress a little bit here, but uh I was on a panel interviewing for a health economist, and you always have someone who wants to ask the same question to everyone, and it's a very general question to put them off their guard or something. And so someone on the panel decided they were going to ask every economist if there was one concept you wished the public understood better, one concept from economics, what would it be? And every one of them said opportunity cost. And I thought, what a dismal view of life. Whatever happened to gains from trade? The idea that if you make an exchange, both are better off and no one is worse off. So if you think about utility, to think about human, you know, there would be absolutely no point to trade if people weren't making a benefit from it. It would just be a stupid thing. You would be trading things of the same value. So you have this in economics like this double valuation. So that's what I think we've got to get to. This idea there are things human beings can do together that creates benefits for everyone, or maybe not everyone, but creates positive benefits. Pareto improvements. Um, and that is not anything mystical, it's just an ordinary part of life. So that's what I think the relational egalitarians have should say more about, including myself, actually, because I've said only a few sentences in print about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:52

Now I think did you have a question in the corner? Yeah. Take the microphone.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:58

So uh first of all, thank you for the interesting talk. Um, my question is about I think one a step before the uh question about the implications of equality or what equality demands. Um so my question is why should we be motivated for equality in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:20

I just didn't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:21

Why should we be motivated for equality in the other? Okay. So um uh for the person who is living in an unequal situation, um how should we argue that there is a good inequality? Is it because it is a morally right thing to do, or is it because looking at it from the self-interest perspective, we should be convinced that we have to try for equality?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:53

So that have I understood what is the motivation to get people to act or believe inequality? Is that it, yeah? Yeah, um so there are different philosophical projects, and some of them are to try to answer that question, and some of them are not to answer that question. On the whole, I I haven't attempted to answer that question. I think it's very, very hard to motivate people, other than by doing the sorts of things I try to do, which is to present people a picture of the world and see whether they feel that's something that chimes with them. So if you show someone the slide from Arthur Lewis, ask, wouldn't you like to live in that society? And if someone says no, you can then have a very interesting argument with them about why not, right? So what's wrong with that? And they might say there's not enough initiative or something, and then you can have that argument. So I tend to think that if you paint equality the right way, it's something that people need to argue against rather than for. Having said that, um, I do think there are some arguments, and I think they're very old ones, which are I mean, every religious tradition has what would you think if it happened to you, type arguments, or look at it from the other person's point of view. So that idea of getting people to look at things from the other person's point of view, would you like it if it happened to you? Now, of course, they they might say, I'd hate it, but I don't take that as an argument. And then you know you're you're on a different level about what counts as an argument anywhere. But I think I think the arguments that people tend to give against equality are either economic arguments, that if we have too much equality, then the economy won't work. And you know, most egalitarians have accepted something like that and said, well, we're not going for full equality, we want as much equality as is consistent with having a functioning economy. So it's the point of rules. The other argument which I find much more difficult to um to counter is that um if you think about social equality, there's a whole research program in social psychology, uh, empirical social psychology, that says there has never been a society without hierarchy in it. And that any attempt to overcome hierarchy has led to disaster. And the this work is called Social Dominance Theory. Um it says every society has three hierarchies: one of gender, unfortunately, um, one of age, and one of just some arbitrary third thing. So it could be religion, it could be party membership, it could be looks, something, but but human beings, it's in our biological nature, supposedly, to organize ourselves in this hierarchical way, right? So for me, for social egalitarians, it's very disappointing to come across these empirical studies. You know, they're not. 100% no empirical study is 100% interpreted the same way by everyone, but I think if you go in with an open mind, I think that human beings are primates, and primates organize themselves into hierarchies. So, what do we do? Well, we can throw up our arms and say nothing we can do, or we can say, Well, we can mitigate them, we can try to make them as harmless as we can. Hannah Arendt was mentioned when I was working on this before, I found something in Simone Vale in the need for her book, The Need for Roots. And bizarrely, she has hierarchy there as one of the needs of the human soul. And so this is not going to make uh her friends with many people in this room, but she says that if we're going to have hierarchies, it's much better that they're purely symbolic rather than having power with them. And in that respect, she says she thinks the British royal family gets it about right. So that we have this hierarchy where you can look up to people who have absolutely no power. I think this is the way to deal with it. So if you put that together with social dominance theory, you say, okay, we we don't have to give people at the top power. There are other ways of dealing with it. Okay, so I'm getting way out of my depth here, but but I feel that those are the arguments we're going to have to counter. And the first one about incentives in the economy, say, well, we do what we can consistent with keeping the economy running. And if that means economic growth is not as strong as it might otherwise have been, if we still got everyone employed and so on, that's fine. And the other one, yes, there are hierarchies and we have to deal with them. I think what has happened in the egalitarian literature is that people have tended to try to justify individual hierarchies, like student and teacher, say, or doctor and patient, and that these are easy because they're functional work for everyone's benefit. Well, it's really difficult to justify group hierarchies, where one group is above another, and morally you can't. So you think we should be able to abolish them, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

unknown 1:30:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:02

I'm sorry to have to end on a somewhat pessimistic note, but we have come to time. Apologies to those of you who couldn't get your questions in. Thanks to those of you who did ask questions, but thanks above all to our speaker. Thanks so much for.