SUGGESTED READING FOR LAW STUDENTS: EQUALITY

Jeremy Waldron, One Another's Equals: The Basis of Human Equality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) ("The principle of basic equality is opposed to any claim that there are moral distinctions and differentiations to be made among humans like unto or analogous in scale and content to the moral distinctions commonly made between humans and others animals. The principle of basic equality is opposed to this sour of differentiation among humans. We say, with Cicero in De Legibus, that there is 'no difference of ind between man and man." Id. at 30, citations omitted. "A separate principle--I shall call it the principle of distinctive equality--would add something to this. distinctive equality says that not only are humans one other's equals in the continuous sense, but also they are one another's equals on a basis that does actually differentiate them form animals. [] So the second position includes the first but takes us much further: it actually asserts the discontinuity with other animals and maintains that all humans therefore exist on a higher plane." Id. at 31. "The relevant sense of justice must mean something like a desire to apply and act on principles of justice, whatever these turn out to be. Of course, it is important that the sense of justice we all possess be oriented as far as possible toward the truth about justice: it must involve a determination to get at what is really just or really fair. Notoriously, people disagree about this. Even at the highest level of intellectual contemplation, there is Rawls, there is Nozick, there is Dworkin, there is Sen, there is Nussbaum, there is Walzer, and so on. There have been times when the disagreement seemed like fun, as people declared themselves members of Rawls's team or Nozick's team. But disagreement about justice is really a huge concern of a society. For it is not like religion; we don't lose by the presence of many different creeds in a multifaith society. But we do have to administer among us just one conception of justice, or at the very least, our answer to each particular problem of justice has to be given in terms of one such conception . . . Unfortunately, however,  the need for consensus on justice does not make the disagreement go away. So the variety of positions that people take up on the question of justice is a matter of concern, certainly not a matter of delight. Id. at 163-164, citations omitted.).