When equality needs no justification

Proclamations about our natural equality have commonly coexisted with multiple exclusions by gender, class, and race. This seeming paradox reflects the influence of what I describe as property-based justifications for equality, for when supposed facts about our shared human nature become the basis for equality claims, this simultaneously creates alibis for deeming many people natural inferiors. Contemporary accounts of equality remain too much within that original mould, pursuing a logic of justification that is still bound to the exclusionary practices of the past. When pursued, more specifically, in the language of moral equality, they offer an account of the progress of equality that overstates the current acceptance of basic or ‘moral’ equality while understating the extent to which the status of equal depends on reducing material inequalities. The language of moral equality further encourages a slippage into precisely the kind of moral differentiation and judgement that it is intended to avoid.