Political Science 1020E Lecture 8: Lecture 8 - Equality 1

• School: Western University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: Political Science 1020E
• Professor: Charles Jones

Document Summary

Equality is a more controversial value than justice or liberty. Some claim that equality expresses envy, promotes a culture of dependency, Others claim that equality is incompatible with our commitment to and overrides individual responsibility: equality is objectionable tries to equalize wealth (cid:494)individualism(cid:495) Equality is a comparative concept, but comparisons are relatively unimportant least advantaged. What matter is (i) sufficiency, or (ii) meeting needs, or (iii) concern for the. But you can be (cid:494)against equality(cid:495) while being (cid:494)for redistributive taxation(cid:495) Almost everyone believes in equality in some sense. All citizens should be treated as equals: everyone is entitled to equal concern and respect. But there is disagreement about what counts as treating people as equals. We are unequal in many ways: intelligence, social and family background, sex, race, age, religion. Equality as a distributive ideal: focus on who has how much.