Revealing invisible inequalities in egalitarian political theory

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I consider what one might call a negative-critical turn in egalitarian political theorizing, according to which egalitarians should not begin with a positive account of how a society of equals would supposedly look, but with the identification and critical analysis of existing hierarchical relations. Subsequently, these relational egalitarians proceed by asking what kind of political actions are needed to combat these hierarchies. For this egalitarian critique to be successful, however, it is crucial that unjust hierarchies can actually be identified. Yet, because many hierarchies perform their deadly operations at the margins of societal life, operate subtly and silently, or are disguised by hegemonic epistemic frameworks, they tend to be invisible to powerfully situated subjects. While critical race and feminist relational theories tend to be well aware of this problem, mainstream relational egalitarian theory often ignores the existence of these sorts of inequalities. This paper asks what relational egalitarian political theory can learn from critical race and feminist relational theories with respect to the operation of hidden hierarchies.

KEYWORDS:

• Invisible inequalities
• egalitarianism
• feminist relational theory
• oppression
• equality

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ami Harbin, Christine Koggel, Rosa-Lena Lange, Jennifer Llewellyn, Nikolas Mattheis, Johan Schlüter, Rudolf Schüßler, Jan Siebold, and two anonymous reviewers.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See also Anderson, Jackson, and Phillips (2014, 226) for this example.

2 One may wonder whether talk of invisible inequalities, like the metaphorical use of ‘blindness’ in social epistemology and other domains, presents just another ableist metaphor. I tend to disagree. Firstly, rather than representing an ostensibly ‘defective’ property of an individual subject (‘somebody is blind to something’), in/visibility is primarily a feature of an object (‘something is in/visible for somebody’). Secondly and more importantly, the term ‘in/visibility’ is often consciously used by disabled people and their allies. Consider for example the Disability Visibility Project led by the activist Alice Wong (e.g., Hall 2019), or the discourse on ‘in/visible disabilities’ (e.g., Davis 2005).

3 Representative contributions to this strand of egalitarian thought are, for example, Anderson (1999); Wolff (2010), and Scheffler (2015). For a comprehensive overview about the expanding literature on the relational egalitarian view see Nath (2020).

4 For canonical statements of the luck egalitarian view see, for example, Dworkin (1981); Arneson (1989), and Cohen (1989). The term ‘luck egalitarianism’ has been coined by Anderson (1999).

5 This shift from a concern with individual shares of goods to social relations does not mean that relational egalitarians are oblivious to distributive demands. Far from ignoring the existence of material inequalities, they aim to reconsider the rationale on which redistribution of scarce resources should be based. Rather than being only concerned ‘with the distribution of goods themselves,’ relational egalitarians link the necessity of redistribution to the fight against hierarchical relationships (Anderson 1999, 314).

6 One may ask how this negative-critical approach connects or contrasts with non-ideal theory. If the latter is understood as starting from a diagnosis of injustice rather than from a picture of an ideally just society (e.g., Sen 2009), the negative-critical approach to equality falls within the broader field of non-ideal theorizing. Charles Mills (2005), however, offers a more complex and demanding understanding of non-ideal theory; one which recognizes that the shift in normative orientation from justice to ‘the actual workings of injustice’ has to go hand in hand with a heightened attention to the ways in which oppressive relationships affect social cognition and our perspectives on the world (170). Thus, in a sense, the present paper can be read as arguing that proponents of the negative-critical turn should follow Mills in adopting a more demanding understanding of non-ideal theory. For an overview about other possible ways to draw out the contrast between ideal and non-ideal theory see Valentini (2012).

7 Walzer (1983, xiii), for example, – who I have cited as an inspirational figure for the negative-critical turn – contrasts equality with domination rather than with oppression.

8 The term ‘amelioration’ is taken from the recent work of Sally Haslanger (see, e.g., Haslanger 2012, 366–367).

9 For a similar usage of the term ‘critical’ see Collins and Bilge (2016, 39–40). See, furthermore, Anderson (2010, 3–7; 2012, 41) and Wolff (2015) for such an understanding of relational egalitarianism, and Sen (2009, 4–22) for an elaboration and defence of a similar approach to political philosophy tout court.

10 For a comprehensive critique and rejection of ‘the doctrine of colour-blindness’ as ‘conceptually confused, empirically misguided, and lacking a morally coherent rational’ see Anderson (2010, 155–179).

11 At this point, it should also be born in mind that many authors – most notably Charles Mills (1997, 2005) – have argued that ideal theory is flawed on a different, more fundamental level.

12 For some suggestions along these lines see Anderson (2014) and Haslanger (2019).

13 A different but related concern is that the voices of marginalized actors involved in social movements do not receive proper uptake in the public sphere and, in particular, in the public media (think, for example, of the case of the climate activist Vanessa Nakate [see, e.g., Eveyln 2020]).

14 For an elaboration on how such a ‘political/relational model’ constitutes ‘a friendly departure from the more common social model of disability’, see Kafer (2013, 7).

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Leon Schlüter

Leon Schlüter is a graduate student at the Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin. In his research, he focuses on questions in social and political philosophy, and in particular on the study of social inequalities.