Equality and Difference

Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 262-3) points to the difficulty in the concept of equality. A purely formal doctrine is uninteresting and thin. A theory of equality must be capable of posing a challenge to “alleged distinctions which may be supposed to justify differences in the way in which we treat people.”

Yet this substantive doctrine of equality runs up against the constants of actual social life: “all the social structures of affinity . . . depend upon differentiated social roles which introduce or depend on inequalities between one person and another. Leadership, responsibility, initiative and authority are forms of differentiation without which a community cannot function or survive; and yet they imply differences not only of function but of power,” and this seems to run contrary to the ideal of equality.

We seem to be faced with a choice—either “an idea of equality that is purely ideal and abstract, an equality before God without social implications” or “a totalising egalitarianism that is destructive of all forms of society.” O’Donovan thinks there’s an alternative, that we can coordinate “our understanding of equality with our understanding of the humane forms of community.” But that means we have to judge between different sorts of difference; we have to determine “which [social] differentiations help, and which hinder, the meeting of person with person on a basis of equality, with neither of them slave or Lord.”

But that means we can’t operate with a purely formal notion of equality. It has to be filled out substantively.

And it also means we have to give up our fond fantasies of primordial autonomy and absolute equality. O’Donovan offers feminism as an illustration of the logic:

Confronted with the demand to recognise the ‘full humanity’ of women, one would be ill-advised to ask, ‘But who ever denied it?’ For a series of equivalences carry the argument irresistibly from the fact that women were assigned roles of subordination within various social structures to the conclusion that they were treated as unequal; and then, because equality is a state of nature constitutive for humanity, to the conclusion that their humanity was denied.

For a traditional, substantive understanding of equality, this is “sheer non sequitur,” since there is no conflict between difference in roles and equality; rather, any actual social equality requires such differentiation (280).