The purpose of this paper is to attempt to lay out a framework, both analytical and historical, in terms of which deeply conflicting and surprisingly complicated claims about equality and egalitarianism may be discussed. My aim is to help to make more intelligible what is at issue in contemporary disputes, and hence what kinds of arguments and evidence bear on and might illuminate these competing claims. I then exploit this conceptual framework to sketch a way of organizing some of the voluminous literature in the on-going debate about equality, that is, to bring into focus the dimension(s) in which the issues are being joined, and from which historical tradition an argument emerges, in hopes of clarifying these debates.

The excerpts introducing this article are drawn from two recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on equality rights. Illustrating the directional changes in the nature of equality rights, they vary from antagonism to ambivalence towards remedial relief for disadvantaged groups. In particular, they illustrate the current debate between traditional individual rights and a new communitarian conception of equality rights.

Affirmative action generates so much controversy that very often proponents and opponents both fail to understand the other’s position. A recent work by Michel Rosenfeld convincingly argues that the incommensurability of the opposing sides is based on fundamental disagreements about the meaning of such concepts as equality and justice: “the affirmative action debate is not between persons who are ‘pro-equality’ and others who are ‘anti-equality’. Both the most ardent advocates of affirmative action and its most vehement foes loudly proclaim their allegiance to the ideal of equality.” Within a liberal framework, two conceptions of equality are commonly defended—formal and substantive equality of opportunity. Both conceptions assume background conditions of the scarcity of goods, a need to compete for educational, social and economic benefits, and the value of rewards for fair competition as a means to individual self-development and self-realization. In the first section, I outline each conception briefly, summarize the sorts of affirmative action each defends, and show that the irreconcilability of the opposing sides is ultimately grounded in different conceptions of the self. I then go on to argue that both conceptions limit our understanding of selves and ultimately constrain attempts to achieve equality in a context in which individuals are also members of groups with identities formed in historical contexts of discrimination.

Recently, in Canada both the Federal Government and various provincial governments have introduced a series of measures intended to address gender inequalities in the workplace. These measures are of two basic types. Employment equity policies involve the implementation of affirmative action programmes designed to encourage the hiring and promotion of more women in, for example, the civil service. Pay equity policies have sought to institutionalize the principle of equal pay for work of equal value or, to use the American terminology, comparable worth. The aim of this paper is to resurrect the presently out of fashion view that the principles of affirmative action and comparative worth that underlie employment equity and pay equity can be defended on the grounds that they contribute to the realization of an ideal of equality of opportunity between men and women in Canadian society. This view, although once prevalent among those concerned with gender issues, has been pushed aside, largely because of doubts about the visionary depth of the ideal of equality of opportunity. It has been replaced instead by an ideal of equality of results which emphasizes the goal of reducing the gender wage gap. It is my intention here to formulate a principle of equality of opportunity that can incorporate recent feminist legal and political philosophy in a way that offers a promising way to analyze issues posed by gender inequalities in the workplace and, as a result, provide a clear rationale for the recent employment equity and pay equity initiatives in Canada.

What is equality? How is it generally understood? What customs and norms produce its egalitarian features? What are its cultural and social markers?

Preoccupied with these questions I read A Theory of Justice. It was a brilliant book, very much like chess. It told me a lot about white men’s dreaming and nothing about the life I know. My reality in North America tells me that equality as “autonomous and the same” is a dream only privileged white men can have. Not only are they the ones with the luxury to dream this myth. Only they are “by nature free and equal” to do so. Moreover, only they construe themselves as “the natural proprietor of (their) own person(s) and capacities owing nothing to society for them.” As all-powerful patriarchs, they have imperiously universalized their myth to conceal their social, political, legal, economic, military, educational, and professional privileges.

The perfectly competitive market of economic theory often enters political philosophy because it can be represented as illuminating important values. Theorists who are enthusiastic about the heuristic potential of the market claim that we can learn much about individual liberty, the promotion of mutual advantage and efficiency in the distribution of goods by studying it. However, a principal limitation of the market for many theorists is its supposed insensitivity to the demands of egalitarian justice. According to the standard charge, markets—even idealised ones—are hostile to the achievement and maintenance of an equitable distribution of resources. It is striking, then, that a leading exponent of egalitarian justice like Ronald Dworkin should argue that there are very deep and systematic links between equality and the market. He contends that, contrary to the received view, “the best theory of equality supposes some actual or hypothetical market in justifying a particular distribution of goods and opportunities.” Moreover, the articulation of Dworkin’s influential egalitarian account of liberal political morality depends on acceptance of the market as an ally of equality. Thus Dworkin claims not only that the market plays a crucial role in the elaboration of a doctrine of distributive justice but also that it illuminates the distinctively liberal commitments to the protection of extensive individual liberty and to the requirement that the state must be neutral between different conceptions of the good. The aim of this paper is to raise some doubts about the soundness of one of the fundamental onnections Dworkin draws between the market and distributive justice.

The central feature of modern liberal political morality is the principle of equal respect for persons. According to Ronald Dworkin, governments have an obligation to treat each person as an equal, with equal concern and respect. In distributive contexts, this principle stipulates that each individual is entitled to an “equal” share of social resources, where equal is a function of what is required by the abstract principle of equal concern and respect. For Dworkin, this requirement means that liberal justice is fundamentally concerned with treating people as equals and not equally. By treating someone as an equal he supposes that government must treat each of its citizens with equal dignity, regarding her as an individual with a standing interest in leading a truly good life. By contrast, to treat someone equally, according to Dworkin, “...requires that government treat all those in its charge equally in the distribution of some resource or opportunity....” To treat persons as equals, that is, with equal concern and respect, is to arrange for all individuals to receive those material goods and opportunities that make living a good life possible. For my purposes, I will assume that treating people as equals is the constitutive feature of liberal equality.

The ways in which a society provides for people who, for one reason or another, are more socially and economically dependent throws into sharp focus the problems of equality as a political construct. The basic dilemma of social dependency is that of reconciling the responsibility of the state to ensure equality with the rights and needs of those who are dependent. The social, legal and economic policies in place at any given time in history reflect the ways that principles of justice have legitimated differential treatment. To study the case of intellectual disability, therefore, is to reflect upon the legal microcosm of the struggle for social justice and the parameters of political obligation to ameliorate inequality.

Immigration Law has as its primary subject the stranger: the outsider who is under no obligation of allegiance to the state, who is not represented in its political processes, and whose needs and interests are, in most situations, accorded less concern than those of people who already participate in the social and political life of a community. The immigrant stranger may, of course, appear in a variety of guises. He may be a wealthy entrepreneur or investor who belongs to another political community but who chooses to emigrate to advance his own or his family’s well-being. Alternatively, the stranger may be a person who has experienced life solely within the confines of a community that is plagued by economic deprivation. Such a person may be crippled by physical and emotional need or cultural fragmentation. His search is for a new social environment in which, it is hoped, these constraints will not be present in such exaggerated or severe measure. Sometimes the needy stranger will be seeking an immediate escape from a political regime which offers her no protection or which aims at her very destruction, and sometimes she will be searching for deliverance from the incessant, limbo-like tedium or the multitude of unspeakable terrors to which one is exposed in a refugee camp. Whatever the guise in which he or she appears, the stranger is someone with whom the modern political state must come to terms. He or she cannot be ignored.

One of the most perplexing difficulties for policy-making to emerge from the recent deliberations of Canadians over the new reproductive technologies is how to evaluate and if necessary, justify regulating, the practice of sex selection. Through the increasingly sophisticated reproductive technologies, gynosperm and androsperm may be separated and women artificially inseminated with the sperm most likely to result in a fetus of the favoured sex. Sex diagnosis may be performed on embryos in vitro, and selection for implantation made by reference to sex. And fetal monitoring may determine the sex of developing fetuses during pregnancy, thus allowing abortion of fetuses of the “wrong” sex. Recent Canadian trends in accessing and using sex selection technology, combined with sociological evidence showing a marked transcultural preference for male children, for male firstborns, and for more males than females within families of uneven sex ratios, alert us to the dangers of the practice of sex selection for women’s equality.