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Equality without Documents: Political Justice and the Right to Amnesty1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael Blake
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Extract

All modern democratic societies claim to be egalitarian. They do not agree, of course, about what egalitarianism demands; the ideal of equality is hardly transparent and can be plausibly understood to encompass any number of social arrangements and values. That some form of equality is to be prized, though, is uncontroversial. Indeed, it may be true that all political theories that have stood the test of time can be understood as specifying and interpreting the ideal of equality (Dworkin 1973, 500; 513). Whether or not this is true, I think it is hard to deny that democratic political philosophy can generally be understood as egalitarian in character; to know how to treat people as moral equals, on this account, is to know what justice demands of us. We are all, if this is correct, egalitarians now, however much we argue about what such a label truly demands.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 36: Justice and Equality , 2010 , pp. 99 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

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