
A Philosopher Redefining Equality - mrleiter
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/the-philosopher-redefining-equality
======
whack
> _" Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was
> incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was
> blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps.
> Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the
> idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free,
> regardless of their differences."_

I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her
argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough
to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work
and participate in a well functioning free society.

I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't
subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate
end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused
moral philosophy.

~~~
Rotten194
I haven't heard her stance before, but it seems interesting and I agree with
what I've read so far.

With that in mind, I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you? A closed
border denies freedom of movement under arbitrary restrictions of
"productivity" (or random lottery, which is just as arbitrary), aka you only
earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with
physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness
should be denied the right to move where they wish? Or that person from the
Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their
birth?

I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian
human rights abuse. And lets be clear, most western nations aren't shooting
people trying to cross the border on sight, and usually have some sort of
asylum process (that may take years and years, however). But the limitation of
movement itself is also a human rights abuse, in my mind. German families were
cut off from each other, unable to see relatives trapped on the other side of
the wall. The Stasi secret police were able to apprehend and torture people
unable to escape because of the wall -- a closed border makes authoritarian
regimes more powerful. The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin
down that path? Don't we supposedly value freedom above all else? Didn't
Franklin say "He who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety
deserves neither"? How is a closed border compatible with that sentiment?

Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of
other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before
stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage
(see: every item in the British Museum that they refuse to return), and then
we turn around and say hey you can't come here without our permission? How
hypocritical is that?

And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out --
people who want to commit crimes _generally_ don't care about following
immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls, pilot submarines full of
cocaine past the Coast Guard (this really happens), and extort desperate
people trying to escape violence and crushing poverty.

So yes, I do think a closed border is immoral. If it means more strain on
welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here, well,
if we can afford trillions to bomb the middle east into the stone age, we can
probably afford that.

~~~
whack
I've upvoted you because your heart is in the right place and you're making
very good arguments which people should stop to consider.

In an ideal world, people should not be discriminated against because of their
birth-location. The fact that we do, is indeed a great injustice.

However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian
reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and
institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and
institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the
first place.

I think that successful countries have a moral obligation to absorb as many
immigrants as they can assimilate - no more and no less.

~~~
msla
> However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian
> reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and
> institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture
> and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in
> the first place.

I have to steelman this position with something now:

If you have a country which accepts broad civil rights for sexual minorities,
and you have a large influx of people coming into your country who prefer few
or no civil rights for sexual minorities, what happens when you have enough
immigrants to force a vote on rights for sexual minorities? Don't tell me that
can't happen; ultimately, there's always a threshold beyond which the
government loses legitimacy if it refuses to put certain things to a ballot,
and by "government" I mean "ruling party or coalition" if you're lucky.

If I were a sexual minority, I'd see border restrictions as being an
existential issue.

~~~
Rotten194
I'm trans. Please dont use us as a cover for your arguments, thanks.

People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a
generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people
don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were
savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america
nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to
deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile
everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but
wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow
reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.

~~~
msla
> People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a
> generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people
> don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were
> savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america
> nazis [snip]

You aren't making your own case very well.

~~~
Rotten194
so whats your point? yes people going back 10 generations can be intolerant
fucks, meaning there is no difference between the people who've been here for
a long time vs people who just came here, __proving my point __. the segment
of people who are intolerant, in my experience, is much more people who have
been here for a very long time and not immigrants.

------
keiferski
_Like philosophers, scientists chased Truth, but their theories were
understood to be provisional—tools for resolving problems as they appeared,
models valuable only to the extent that they explained and predicted what
showed in experiments. A Newtonian model of motion had worked beautifully for
a long time, but then people noticed bits of unaccountable data, and
relativity emerged as a stronger theory. Couldn’t disciplines like philosophy
work that way, too?_

It's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion
of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously
attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary
philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight
to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since.

This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of
Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.

~~~
yyrrll
Still worse, ignoring that philosophy has _always_ proceeded as a statement of
theories to be questioned and improved upon.

The scholarship is just bad. The whole argument is full of mis-statements of
critiqued positions.

Anyone interested in the article is better served to start reading Plato,
Locke, Hume, Smith . . . .

~~~
danharaj
Wait, did you read her actual scholarship, or the summary of it given in a...
New Yorker article?

The pompous middlebrow dismissal strikes again. In this moment I am euphoric.

~~~
yyrrll
If the article misrepresents the actual work, please, by all means, show that.

------
bikenaga
In the interests of helping people read her work, her home page is:
[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/)

A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in
Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" \-
2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of
quotes:

"Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for
failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to
evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this
critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent
some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which
capitalism advanced freedom and equality."

"The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is
superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical
economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better
able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic
theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract."

The _New Yorker_ article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of
peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the
original works. _New Yorker_ articles aren't a substitute for the real thing.
For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson
when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the _New Yorker_
article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.

------
empath75
I don’t believe that equality is a sensible word to apply to people, nor do I
think that dramatically unequal distributions of wealth should be remedied
because of reasons of fairness.

I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society
that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law
and in relations between each other is important— and I think that
distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the
society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of
have-nots.

------
semiagnostic
Why does New Yorker's font have these double o curiousities:
"...Coördination..." ?

~~~
grzm
It's part of their style guide. The diaresis in this case indicates that the
second vowel is part of another syllable. The New Yorker similarly uses
similar spellings such as naïve.

It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their
style guide.

~~~
semiagnostic
Thank you for your explanation.

------
LoSboccacc
Yes there are multiple hierarchy. But all hierarchy are not equal. Some are
inherently more difficult to get on top, some are more beneficial to society,
some are less likeable to get into, and in each case you can command a higher
share of wealth for being on top compared being on top of another hierarchy.

The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on
top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.

------
trefn
I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with
me:

First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis
on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:

 _In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality
to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals,
regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an
exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on
libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own
actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s
subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in
disguise.

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be
able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to
participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial
opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to
vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces,
markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on
areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition
by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that
problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings
weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit
of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people
should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which
everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this
crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t
something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are
responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive
hierarchies,” Anderson wrote._

There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before:
the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical
hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than
that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point
where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably
have a greater effect on your daily life).

 _Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial
Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch
between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that
our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live
their working lives under a third thing entirely:_ private government.

~~~
hliyan
Her idea of equality as the ability to function equally as human beings
resonated with me too.

Many years ago, what started my shift from a capitalist to what I am today,
was the following question: "If people had to earn and pay for breathable air
(a basic) the same way they had to earn and pay for food, education and
medical care (also basics), would the world be a better place or a worse
place?"

The world I imagined was one of such desperation that hardly anyone had time
to think about anything but themselves, a world that barely advanced because
hardly anyone had the luxury of time to think of greater things.

I am now completely sold on the idea of taking the basics out of the
competitive equation (nutrition, education and health). Desperation is the
enemy of civilization.

~~~
andonisus
I believe the fundamental difference between paying for air versus food,
education, medical care is that air is abundantly free. Someone could try to
charge you for it, but you could just open your lungs and consume all of the
air which they haven't bottled.

Food requires land, plants, and animals. It requires labor. It requires you to
either produce it yourself or interact with someone who does. Air does not.

~~~
lucas_membrane
Read _The_Air_Trust_, a sci-fi novel about a century old. Then consider that
human intelligence declines when CO2 reaches levels that might occur within
the next century or two. If levels of inequality do not decline, we can
reasonably expect that the wealthy will be polluting the planet with even more
CO2 in their efforts to protect the brains of the dominant class.

~~~
n-exploit
This is already starting to happen in China. The upper class are able to
utilize air cleaning technologies to eliminate any external pollution within
their living spaces, while the lower and middle classes can't afford such
luxuries.

------
microcolonel
Well, if you get to redefine the dictionary to confuse your readers away from
a clear reading of your work, you can enthrall any common journalist.

~~~
dang
Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? They include: "
_Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

(We unbanned you recently because almost all of your comments lately have been
just fine for HN.)

