Felix Hagemeister

Concepts of justice and equality Felix Hagemeister

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Basics and General, grade: 1,0, University of Warwick, language: English, abstract: What does justice consist in? Political philosophy has given various answers to this central question. One prominent answer is that justice consists at least partly in some form of equality. However, the moral ideal of equality has been criticized as both mistaken and misleading. In this essay I want to address what I find the most convincing criticism of equality: that it alienates people from other valuable moral ideals in life such as all having enough (sufficiency). The discussion of this criticism leads me to my main thesis, the reverse of the two claims in the discussion statement: First, I argue that sufficiency alone is not sufficient for a plausible account of justice. Second, I want to show that equality can be a valuable moral ideal and relevant for justice. The crucial step towards this conclusion is to regard justice as at least partially comparative, a perspective that leads to a pluralist egalitarian account of justice.