Building an equal society

Alex Hinds: Balance is a topic that you have touched on in your work across political philosophy, law, feminist epistemology, and egalitarianism – and in particular, in your forthcoming book on the history of egalitarianism.

Elizabeth Anderson: Balance plays a really important role in moral and political philosophy, both in terms of methodology and in terms of the substantive content of moral requirements.

If we think about methodology, we have this notion of ‘reflective equilibrium.’This is the idea that in trying to figure out what is right or just, we seek an equilibrium between intuitive, general propositions or principles about right and wrong and our intuitions about particular cases. We move back and forth; we refine the principles against our intuitions about cases and try and find principles that will fit all the particular cases; and then we also seek new cases and try to get them in equilibrium with our principles. We pretty much settle on the moral view that is in equilibrium between our intuitions about particular cases and our intuitions about general principles that could explain those cases. That’s a really interesting methodological view that involves the notion of balance. One way to cash out that view is through a mode of theorising about justice that’s known as social contract theory. Social contract theory says that the principles of justice are whatever principles rational people, standing in relations of equality to one another, would freely and voluntarily consent to be governed by. That also has a kind of equilibrium notion built into it, because any principle of justice is founded on an idea of reciprocity – “I will go along with this principle if you also go along.”The outcome of our discussion of what we’re all willing to go along with, conditional on other people going along, is also a kind of equilibrium. Many theorists working through social contract theory believe that if you start off with everyone situated in a symmetrical position (no one under anyone else’s thumb, no one forced or subordinated to just make concessions to somebody else), that everyone will expect that the principles of justice would treat them as an equal – neither superior or inferior to anyone else.

So, all of these notions of equilibrium generally tend in an egalitarian direction, into a vision substantively that justice involves something like ‘whatever principles would support a free