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Against Equality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. R. Lucas
J. R. Lucas
Affiliation:
Merton College, Oxford.
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Extract

Equality is the great political issue of our time. Liberty is forgotten: Fraternity never did engage our passions: the maintenance of Law and Order is at a discount: Natural Rights and Natural Justice are outmoded shibboleths. But Equality—there men have something to die for, kill for, agitate about, be miserable about. The demand for Equality obsesses all our political thought. We are not sure what it is—indeed, as I shall show later, we are necessarily not sure what it is—but we are sure that whatever it is, we want it: and while we are prepared to look on frustration, injustice or violence with tolerance, as part of the natural order of things, we will work ourselves up into paroxysms of righteous indignation at the bare mention of Inequality.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 40 , Issue 154 , October 1965 , pp. 296 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1965

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References

page 300 note 1 E.g. in a monarchy, the monarch: Elizabeth II has no private existence and is quite unlike anybody else. Our laws are not couched altogether in universal terms, and do pay peculiar respect to the person of the Monarch.

page 300 note 2 For a much fuller account, see Morris, Ginsberg: ‘The Concept of Justice’, this journal 1963, pp. 99–116.Google Scholar

page 301 note 1 Or, to be exact, both criteria of relevance and criteria of irrelevance. Sometimes the onus of proof is on the man who claims that a certain factor is relevant, sometimes on him who denies it. Differences of skin-pigmentation may be presumed irrelevant, unless the contrary is shown, on any question of employment: differences of hair-pigmentation may be presumed relevant, unless the contrary is shown, in a beauty contest. Very roughly, in public life there is a presumption of irrelevance, and we will not be happy about any distinction in the Law, in public service, in the conditions of public employment, or in the award of public contracts unless it can be shown to be relevant: whereas in private life there is a presumption of relevance, and we are disposed to accept any distinction a private individual draws, unless it is clearly an irrelevant one.

page 303 note 1 See, for example, Ralf, Dahrendorf: ‘On the Origin of Social Inequality’, in Philosophy Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslet and W. G. Runciman, pp. 88–109.Google Scholar