Equality is not sameness

Equality, in this telling, is the absence of discrimination between persons and between groups. A woman and a man, a young person and an older one, a child and an adult, a person with a disability and a person without one, should receive the same treatment as persons, even when they look different, have different temperaments, or were born in different places and families. Treating everyone identically, the text is careful to say, is not genuine equality. Equality is recognizing the differences among people and still respecting one another.

When a discussion of freedom and equality needs a place to stand, the text turns to Rawls. Freedom and equality had been at odds, and he tried to mediate by reaching for a concept higher than either of them. That concept was justice.

Two principles, and a question that remains

In A Theory of Justice, justice is said to be established only when two principles are both kept. First is a liberty-first principle: liberty may be infringed only in order to protect someone else's liberty. The reading offered here is that Rawls did not want to shake liberalism, or the capitalism built on it. Then comes what is called a maximin principle. Social and economic inequality is just only when it can improve the position of those worst off — the least advantaged in that society. The text treats this second principle as the one to watch, and as a foundation for a welfare-state theory that goes beyond a simply utilitarian view.

Whether freedom may be expanded without limit is left as an open question, and so is the old quarrel between competition and cooperation. Competition's institutional strength is efficiency. Its critics say that colleagues become potential enemies, and that people never learn to acknowledge and work with one another. One side points to the productive power and staying power of modern capitalism and calls competition a condition of survival. The other side points to the contradictions of that same history and would put mutual cooperation in its place. Erich Fromm is cited on a twentieth-century problem he named as the death of the human being, and the explanation given here is alienation: the ordinary feeling of being cut off, whose cause may be less a single slight than a condition that needs to be thought through. The principles are left on the table; the question of how far freedom may run is not closed.

Sources

1. an account of equality as equal respect rather than identical treatment, and of John Rawls's attempt in A Theory of Justice to mediate freedom and equality through a liberty-first principle and a maximin principle that treats inequality as just only when it helps the least advantaged, with a brief turn to competition, cooperation, and Erich Fromm on alienation.

Last updated: 14 November 2026