Conceptualizing Politics

Equality of opportunity presupposes a view of society as a competitive place in 
which a hierarchy is created according to the results attained by every member. 
Equality requires giving everybody equal chances of participation, regardless of the 
family, the place, the class and perhaps even the country one comes from. For this 
aim, the formal (legal) equality of access to positions in the social hierarchy is not 
sufficient; it must be made real by an equality of resources that allows for everybody 
to pursue her or his life plans and possibly climb up the social ladder. The opportu-
nity to access the educational system is the first big equaliser that favours mobility 
beyond or against the (lesser) chances given by birth. Equal access to health care 
and social security for the elderly (once one has exited the competition) are – as we 
already know from the ‘social’ transformation of the state examined in  Chapter 4 – 
the two other pillars of policy aimed at distributing equal opportunities to all citi-
zens regardless of gender, race, ethnic origin, religion and sexual orientation.
4
 This 
may include proactive policies targeting discrimination (affirmative action).
This is equality of opportunity in a meritocratic market society as differentiated 
from, say, a feudal or caste society. Equality can, however, be pushed one or two 
steps forward, in a shift from moderate to reinforced egalitarianism. The first step 
imposes on the state and society a duty to correct the inequalities resulting from 
unfavourable/conditions created by nature (birth defects, genetic diseases, being 
born in a malarial swamp), especially when compounded by exceptional innate 
gifts at the other end of the spectrum; the persons hit by cases of ‘brute luck’ are 
by no means responsible for it, and the attitude to compensate them is called luck 
egalitarianism. In a second, more radical step, some theorists think that a compensa-
tion is due to the worst-off also when their condition results from the choices they 
made or omitted because these choices were based on unequally distributed skills, 
for instance cognitive or cultural ones. This background inequality is believed to 
limit the responsibility for choices connected to it. This can lead in the stronger case 
to a legal duty for the state to provide aid or in the weaker case to a moral motiva-
tion for societal organisations to act benevolently. Behind these perspectives lies the 
notion of human dignity, which we should never allow to be diminished, and/or 
the Kantian principle (second formulation of the categorical imperative [1785, 29]) 
telling us to treat all other human beings as ends in themselves and never as means; 
both principles sever the recognition of somebody as moral personality from her/
his performances in social life.
5
Equality of capabilities, granting everybody the freedom to ‘function’ according to 
one’s own ends, replaces for Amartya Sen (1999) the equality of resources because 
the latter does not take into account the diversity of the starting conditions among 
persons, which rather requires unequal resources to be allotted for compensation. 
Focusing on resources is said to be fetishist, as things (the resources) are believed 

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166  Ethics and politics
to possess the social quality of letting people realise their life plans. On the other 
hand, reconciling public policy decisions with a myriad of individual aims seems to 
contain the risk of generating, along with a chaotic multiplicity, unbearable costs 
for public finance.
As with the choice between negative and positive liberty, this book is not argu-
ing towards which of the three main road maps to equality the balance should tip, 
nor if any of the numerous variations to them can be regarded as an alternative. 
Let us remark that the equality these doctrines have been talking about is equality 
inside a standardised highly developed society, and let us add that models of equality, 
if they are to be taken seriously as compass for policy making, should be thought 
of in conjunction with their economic and financial feasibility – lest they remain a 
futile exercise in wishful thinking. It need not be feasible under the presently given 
circumstances of poorly regulated capitalism; yet normative models targeting ine-
quality should also say which economic and social reforms are capable of making 
them viable – this happens rarely. In any case, inequality in developing  countries – 
both domestically and in the comparison of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or 
HDI (Human Development Index) per capita between poor and rich countries – 
seems to be a bigger intellectual and moral challenge than, say, choosing between 
the resources and capabilities approach in highly developed societies. Economists 
have devoted to this challenge much more attention and research than political phi-
losophers, with more sense of the international dimension and real world dynam-
ics.
6
 On another count, equality among present and future generations is a question 
almost completely unknown to the literature, in which only recently this complex 
of problems has been examined under the heading of intergenerational justice and 
in the narrow terms of analytical ethics, with little sense for the political context.
But why should we choose equality over inequality? This is far from self-evident, 
as witnessed by the persistent existence of both doctrines praising the advantages 
of inequality (to which we will come back later) and practical attitudes favouring 
inequality such as tax cuts for the rich. Nature, with its very unequal distribution 
of luck and gifts, does not seem to be a champion for equality; nor does it suggest 
gender equality, since it gives women the chance of an experience, maternity, that 
divides them from men. Gender equality has been only recently established by 
law, which means that its proper venue is not nature but the polity, though many 
existing polities fail to enforce and even to acknowledge gender equality. Nonethe-
less, nature contains a basic equalising factor for all human beings: the vulnerability 
to death and bodily or mental suffering, (we are all equally mortal, even if the 
actual – not the possible – degree of exposure to suffering is unequal). This, rather 
than than the ability to form a conception of the good and to shape a life plan as 
rational beings (Rawls’s fairly thick criterion for being a moral person) seems to be 
the only – thin but robust – unifying feature of humankind that includes its most 
destitute members too; an anthropological basis on whose grounds arguments for 
promoting more equality can develop. If we do not keep the criteria for being rec-
ognised as a human being thin, we may be forced by our own standards to exclude 
people who, handicapped by hunger, poverty and lack of any education, cannot 
satisfy our ‘civilised’ criteria for rationality and morality.

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Liberty, equality and rights  167
Among these many arguments, what concerns us most here are the political 
ones. Preventing inequality from surpassing certain limits (which limits depends on 
the prevailing culture at any given moment) has two effects: it also prevents dissat-
isfaction, resentment, frustration and hatred from building up to levels engendering 
civil strife and social conflict from becoming violent or leading to exit behaviour. 
Yet it also creates better conditions for economic growth, for which high inequality 
is known to be an obstacle, while under favourable political conditions sustained 
growth is a factor of social peace and democratic development.
* * *
Underlying all these considerations are two questions that the reader may want 
to apply as tools capable of clarifying what is contained within doctrines about 
equality:
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