Why Relational Egalitarians Should Care About Distributions

Abstract

Relational views of equality, such as those put forward by Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler, argue for a social and political ideal of equality that aims at being a better interpretation of what social justice requires than the prevailing distributive conceptions of equality, espe cially luck egalitarian views. Yet so far the criticisms raised by relational egalitarians against luck egalitarians have attracted a lot more attention than their own positive proposals; in particular, it is unclear what social justice as relational equality demands in distributive terms. Anderson's discussions of the topic suggest that relational egalitarianism vacates a large part of the terrain of distributive justice in favor of a minimalist, sufficiency view.1 Scheffler, on the other hand, has not so far spelled out the distributive implications of his view on relationship equality in any detail.2 This paper delivers an internal argument against Anderson's view, and argues that a relational egalitarian conception of social justice yields powerful intrinsic and instrumental reasons of justice to care about distributive inequality in socially produced goods—despite its according center stage to just social relationships and not to the distribution of goods per se. The paper is motivated by sympathy for the relational egalitarian view; however, its aim is not to argue for it against rival views—such as luck egalitarianism—but rather to first clarity what kind of view it is, and what connections it has to distributive justice, since this has not so far been adequately done. Section 1 explains that relational egalitarianism as understood in this paper puts forward an ideal of social justice, not a social ideal of equality independent of justice, and introduces the problem of its connection to