The Basis of Equality

Journal of Plasma Physics

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 105-125

  Cupit, Geoffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO   (New Zealand)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53349110512     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100000085     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. ‘The right to treatment as an equal is fundamental, and the right to equal treatment, derivative’ Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously London: Duckworth, 1977 p. 227).
2. For a discussion of some of the social factors which may promote egalitarianism see Ernest Gellner, ‘The Social Roots of Egalitarianism’, reprinted in Culture, Identity, and Politics Cambridge University Press, 1987.
3. As has been suggested: ‘Although almost every human need can be met by superiors and inferiors, the companionship which is the answer to loneliness can come only from equals’ (Henry Alonzo Myers, Are Men Equal? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955) p. 31).
4. For a defence of the claim that justice is to be understood as, at root, exclusively concerned with appropriate treatment of this kind see my Justice as Fittingness (Oxford University Press, 1996), especially Chapter 1.
5. Bernard Williams;, ‘The Idea of Equality’, reprinted in Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), Justice and Equality, especially pp. 118-119.
6. An alternative is to argue that our equality derives not from within-from what is (in some sense) intrinsic to us-but is imposed, or at least derives, from without. It might be said, for example, that we are equals because God makes it so. (For a discussion of the relationship between egalitarianism and theism see Louis P. Pojman, ‘A Critique of Contemporary Egalitarianism: A Christian Perspective’ in Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991) pp. 481-504.)
7. For an argument appealing to the idea of a range property see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 508.
8. I don't know any way of arguing for [the equal fundamental worth of all human beings] John Baker, Arguing for Equality (London: Verso, 1987) p. 71.
9. Lukes, for example, has claimed that ‘The principle of respect for persons, as “ends in themselves”, in virtue of their inherent dignity as individuals, is at the basis of the ideal of human equality’ (Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973) p. 125).
10. George Orwell;, ‘A Hanging’ in Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961) p. 11.
11. ‘Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ (Rawls, John; A Theory of Justice, p. 27); ‘There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, and his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, ’ (Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974) p. 33.
12. ‘Although [Rawls] seems firm in his view that to each individual human being there corresponds exactly one ‘system of desires’, he never says why this must be so, or what exactly a ‘system of desires’ consists in, or why it is wrong to conflate them’ (Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 00 167, emphasis added).
13. Feinberg claims that false judgments can be unjust without being derogatory: A false judgment or belief about a person is unfair to that person if either it is truly derogatory of him or else it severely misrepresents him in a way which is fundamental to his own conception of himself (Feinberg, Joel; ‘Noncomparative Justice’, The Philosophical Review 83 (1974) p.00 337).
14. Plato, The Symposium, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 00 62.
15. Arblaster, Anthony; The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p.00 22.