Geometric Equality

• In Event: Rethinking Equality

Abstract

In 1980, Audre Lorde argued that we need “patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.” Acknowledging that people and their circumstances, skills, and experiences differ, while seeking to preserve equality as a “basic moral” given, philosophers took up the idea that people should be treated not equally but “as equals” or as “one another’s equals” (Dworkin 1985; Waldron 2017) and called for allocating resources not according to a principle of numerical equality but instead “in proportion” to people’s differing circumstances. Rightly critical of the theorizations of these distributions in the “welfare facilitation” scholarship, contemporary advocates of “democratic equality” argue for prioritizing “relational” over distributive concerns (Anderson 1999, 2007, 2010, 2012), resisting inequality by means other than equality (Tsai 2019), and/or replacing equality with equity.

Insisting on the co-implication of distributive and relational considerations, and heeding Lorde’s call for equality across difference, I turn to Aristotle, who harnesses equity to equality in his account of distributive justice. Operating according to a principle of “proportional” or “geometric equality” (Nicomachean Ethics 1131b13-15), distributive justice, as Aristotle formulates it, treating equality as made not give, seeks to achieve equalize not in spite of but in light of difference. There are good grounds for skepticism about (re)turning both to Aristotle and to geometric equality: in the ancient world, proportionality, the principle of justice of aristocracies and oligarchies, underwrote profound social and material inequality and inscribed differences sanctioning enslavement and misogyny. Without suppressing these associations, my paper argues -- in dialog with dissenting opinions by US Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall (1978), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2003, 2013), and Sonia Sotomayor (2014) in cases on education and voting -- that it repays advocates of democratic equality to revisit Aristotle on proportionality and/in distributive justice.

Author

• Jill Frank, Cornell University