10 ms·

A Philosopher Redefining Equality

69 points by mrleiter 8y ago

keiferski 8y ago
Like philosophers, scientists chased Truth, but their theories were understood to be provisional—tools for resolving problems as they appeared, models valuable only to the extent that they explained and predicted what showed in experiments. A Newtonian model of motion had worked beautifully for a long time, but then people noticed bits of unaccountable data, and relativity emerged as a stronger theory. Couldn’t disciplines like philosophy work that way, too? It's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since. This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.
- yyrrll 8y ago
  Still worse, ignoring that philosophy has _always_ proceeded as a statement of theories to be questioned and improved upon. The scholarship is just bad. The whole argument is full of mis-statements of critiqued positions. Anyone interested in the article is better served to start reading Plato, Locke, Hume, Smith . . . .
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Wait, did you read her actual scholarship, or the summary of it given in a... New Yorker article? The pompous middlebrow dismissal strikes again. In this moment I am euphoric.
    - yyrrll 8y ago
      If the article misrepresents the actual work, please, by all means, show that.
trefn 8y ago
I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me: First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling: In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise. To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote. There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life). Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
Yes there are multiple hierarchy. But all hierarchy are not equal. Some are inherently more difficult to get on top, some are more beneficial to society, some are less likeable to get into, and in each case you can command a higher share of wealth for being on top compared being on top of another hierarchy. The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.
whack 8y ago
> "Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences." I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society. I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused moral philosophy.
- pytester 8y ago
  >By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society. Where did she say that society should treat its obligations towards non-members as equal to the ones it has towards members? I can't find it. >I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. I don't see how her philosophy of morality does either. This seems somewhat strawmannish.
- gaius 8y ago
  A border is a community saying "we believe certain things and within this physical territory, our beliefs prevail, by force if necessary". And if someone says "I believe those things too, can I come in?" that's OK. But if someone doesn't believe those things it's neither clear why they would want to come in, nor why that community would want them to, since whatever reason clearly isn't for the benefit of existing community members. The beliefs are written down as the law but they aren’t set in stone - a candidate who ran for office on a manifesto of an open border and won sufficient votes could rewrite the law. I’m not sure if there is an electorate anywhere in the world that would go for it.
- kirkules 8y ago
microcolonel 8y ago
Well, if you get to redefine the dictionary to confuse your readers away from a clear reading of your work, you can enthrall any common journalist.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (We unbanned you recently because almost all of your comments lately have been just fine for HN.)
semiagnostic 8y ago
Why does New Yorker's font have these double o curiousities: "...Coördination..." ?
- grzm 8y ago
  It's part of their style guide. The diaresis in this case indicates that the second vowel is part of another syllable. The New Yorker similarly uses similar spellings such as naïve. It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their style guide.
  - semiagnostic 8y ago
    Thank you for your explanation.
empath75 8y ago
I don’t believe that equality is a sensible word to apply to people, nor do I think that dramatically unequal distributions of wealth should be remedied because of reasons of fairness. I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law and in relations between each other is important— and I think that distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of have-nots.
bikenaga 8y ago
In the interests of helping people read her work, her home page is: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/ A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" - 2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of quotes: "Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which capitalism advanced freedom and equality." "The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract." The New Yorker article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the original works. New Yorker articles aren't a substitute for the real thing. For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the New Yorker article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.

69 points by mrleiter 8y ago

Like philosophers, scientists chased Truth, but their theories were understood to be provisional—tools for resolving problems as they appeared, models valuable only to the extent that they explained and predicted what showed in experiments. A Newtonian model of motion had worked beautifully for a long time, but then people noticed bits of unaccountable data, and relativity emerged as a stronger theory. Couldn’t disciplines like philosophy work that way, too? It's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since. This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.

yyrrll 8y ago
Still worse, ignoring that philosophy has _always_ proceeded as a statement of theories to be questioned and improved upon. The scholarship is just bad. The whole argument is full of mis-statements of critiqued positions. Anyone interested in the article is better served to start reading Plato, Locke, Hume, Smith . . . .
- danharaj 8y ago
  Wait, did you read her actual scholarship, or the summary of it given in a... New Yorker article? The pompous middlebrow dismissal strikes again. In this moment I am euphoric.
  - yyrrll 8y ago
    If the article misrepresents the actual work, please, by all means, show that.

trefn 8y ago

I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me: First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling: In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise. To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote. There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life). Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

Yes there are multiple hierarchy. But all hierarchy are not equal. Some are inherently more difficult to get on top, some are more beneficial to society, some are less likeable to get into, and in each case you can command a higher share of wealth for being on top compared being on top of another hierarchy. The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.

whack 8y ago

> "Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences." I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society. I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused moral philosophy.

pytester 8y ago
>By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society. Where did she say that society should treat its obligations towards non-members as equal to the ones it has towards members? I can't find it. >I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. I don't see how her philosophy of morality does either. This seems somewhat strawmannish.
gaius 8y ago
A border is a community saying "we believe certain things and within this physical territory, our beliefs prevail, by force if necessary". And if someone says "I believe those things too, can I come in?" that's OK. But if someone doesn't believe those things it's neither clear why they would want to come in, nor why that community would want them to, since whatever reason clearly isn't for the benefit of existing community members. The beliefs are written down as the law but they aren’t set in stone - a candidate who ran for office on a manifesto of an open border and won sufficient votes could rewrite the law. I’m not sure if there is an electorate anywhere in the world that would go for it.
kirkules 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago

Well, if you get to redefine the dictionary to confuse your readers away from a clear reading of your work, you can enthrall any common journalist.

dang 8y ago
Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (We unbanned you recently because almost all of your comments lately have been just fine for HN.)

semiagnostic 8y ago

Why does New Yorker's font have these double o curiousities: "...Coördination..." ?

grzm 8y ago
It's part of their style guide. The diaresis in this case indicates that the second vowel is part of another syllable. The New Yorker similarly uses similar spellings such as naïve. It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their style guide.
- semiagnostic 8y ago
  Thank you for your explanation.

empath75 8y ago

I don’t believe that equality is a sensible word to apply to people, nor do I think that dramatically unequal distributions of wealth should be remedied because of reasons of fairness. I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law and in relations between each other is important— and I think that distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of have-nots.

bikenaga 8y ago

In the interests of helping people read her work, her home page is: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/ A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" - 2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of quotes: "Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which capitalism advanced freedom and equality." "The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract." The New Yorker article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the original works. New Yorker articles aren't a substitute for the real thing. For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the New Yorker article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.