Relational Egalitarianism: Living as Equals

by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

Over the last twenty years, many political philosophers have rejected the idea that justice is fundamentally about distribution. Rather, justice is about social relations, and the so-called distributive paradigm should be replaced by a new relational paradigm. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen seeks to describe, refine, and assess these thoughts and to propose a comprehensive form of egalitarianism which includes central elements from both relational and distributive paradigms. He shows why many of the challenges that luck egalitarianism faces reappear, once we try to specify relational egalitarianism more fully. His discussion advances understanding of the nature of the relational ideal, and introduces new conceptual tools for understanding it and for exploring the important question of why it is desirable in the first place to relate as equals. Even severe critics of the distributive understanding of justice will find that this book casts important new light on the ideal to which they subscribe.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2018

Reviews

[Chris Marks · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fine piece of scholarship, and survey of the relevant literature. Lippert-Rasmussen largely succeeds in showing that relational egalitarianism is compatible with various forms of distributive egalitarianism. However, even if the desirability of egalitarianism is given (and I am not completely convinced), there is no evidence that any of the suggested egalitarian states could be achieved or maintained. Mao and Stalin failed, and it seems clear that the costs of egalitarianism will always outweigh the benefits. One might even say that any egalitarian achievement would be unjust. Little of the text has any practical application. More realistic and useful would be various game theoretic analyses, including the trade-off between Pareto improvements and inequality, but this is outside the scope of Relational Egalitarianism.