Quarterly Bulletin

 

For a long time now, I have struggled with the question of what the sovereign responsibility of every democratically elected (or purportedly democratically elected) government is. Is it simply the provision of goods and services to its citizens or the safeguarding and upholding of the intrinsic human worth demonstrated in fundamental freedoms? This thought troubles me more especially as I reflect on the political leadership in Zambia today. If it is the former, our government has not met the social contract, nor has it done so if the latter is the case. Records of 65% of twelve million people living in poverty and 10% of the population claiming 48% of national income does not qualify Zambia in the first case, and the usurping of legal processes and denial of freedoms of expression through mass demonstrations disqualify Zambia in the second case.

Having just finished reading for the second time Ronald Dworkin’s book, Sovereign Virtue, I must confess I am strongly intrigued by the argument Dworkin advances in this book and how it speaks to the Zambian situation today. Dworkin presents a distributivist political concept built on the notion of insurance. In its simplest version, it consists in asking people to ignore their own internal endowments, though not the distribution of these endowments in their society, and to decide on this basis how high a premium they would be willing to pay in order to get a correspondingly high compensation in the event of their being poorly endowed. Dworkin argues that this configuration answers the key problems of political and social justice in a liberal society and shows how a government can best show equal concern for all its citizens.

As much as Dworkin’s argument is firm on distributive justice, it leaves a yawning disparity between the need for material resource equity and the substantive issues that concern equality as such. One question that immediately occurs to someone who is concerned about the egalitarian debate is whether or not Dworkin’s conception of equality is broad enough to be a government’s prime sovereign virtue. In any case, can Dworkin’s equality of resources, as he conceives it under his designed hypothetical insurance scheme adequately and equally show concern to all citizens? I will attempt to assess these queries further on in this discussion.

Indeed, material distribution is one of the main issues of social outcry in political societies today. With 80% of the rural population and 34% of urban areas living in dire poverty, material resource distribution is a major concern for Zambia. However, a government that exhausts its efforts seeking equality evaluated only through resource equity misses the fundamental point of society’s egalitarian quest. In this article I defend a concept I claim ought to precede concerns about resource distribution, that is, democratic equality and the expansive freedoms it engenders in a political community. I also argue that once democratic equality is secured, then the distribution of resources more or less automatically falls into place.

Since both material resource distribution and respect for fundamental rights aim at spelling out the principle of equality among people, we might as well ask, “what is the point of equality?” To respond to this question, I suggest that we reverse the question to, “what constitutes inequality in society?” Elizabeth Anderson observes that inequality or inegalitarianism, to which equality or egalitarian political movements are a response to “the justice or necessity of basing social order on a hierarchy of human beings, ranked according to intrinsic worth. Inequality [therefore] referred not so much   to distributions   of goods as to relations between superior and inferior persons” (16). This is what provokes pioneers of the egalitarian movement. Immanuel Kant, for instance, argues that human beings must be seen as equals in that they share a minimal rational capacity for taking responsibility for their lives and for knowing and obeying the moral law (Gutmann 20). According to this assertion, we are considered to be equal moral beings until we clearly demonstrate otherwise. It seems to me this is what is at the core of so much civil society public disgruntlement in Zambia today. If citizens are guaranteed equality insofar as they all are assumed to possess rational faculties capable of autonomous action, why do we see some sectors of society refused access to public demonstration except for those small religious groups and party cadres who parrot Government praises, often times on fundamental issues they hardly understand

It is only appropriate, therefore, that it is essentially the deliberate social intention to upset equality of human integrity that is the precursor to the quest for the egalitarian thoughts. It is such inegalitarian postulates that are behind the unequal social relations that, in fact, breed inequalities in the distribution of other areas such as common resources. After all, people  might  even   have  equal resources but remain fundamentally unequal by structural and moral stratifications. The prime virtue of every government, then, is to annihilate such inequalities whose counterintuitive can be very damaging on citizens’ self-image and social relations. Therefore, Dworkin, like our leadership in Zambia today, and in many countries that think material distribution is their sovereign virtue, skip a fundamental consideration that ought to precede material resource distribution: namely, the question about what engenders social or political inegalitarianism? As one other thinker put it, without the prior understanding that justice is about the distribution of freedom and not about happiness, any resource-based notion of equality leads straight into the equalisation of welfare rather than of opportunities.

The point of egalitarianism as a political ideal is to oppose any ideology that ranks people in relation to their intrinsic endowments and to inspire, instead, a culture of justice built on interpersonal recognition and therefore, on freedom and equality of opportunities. The egalitarian claim asserts that all competent adults are equally moral agents. Everyone has the equal power to develop and exercise moral responsibility to cooperate with others according to principles of justice, to shape and fulfil a conception of their good.

If our leaders understand this, then they will respect the material resources dues of citizens. The problem with evaluating democracy on resource distribution and, subsequently hedging that as government’s sovereign virtue, among others, is that it does not immediately reveal to us, as the greater virtue than mere resource assurance, an equality that is demonstrated by an even distribution of liberties and opportunities that put persons in relations of moral equality. This is not to mean that opportunities for material satisfaction are trivial, but that liberty as such is a greater political virtue prior to the quest for resource equity. Human beings are not likely to willingly forfeit greater liberties to secure their material satisfaction. To speak for myself, I would rather go hungry than commit myself to slavery where my master will lavishly feed me. As Jean Jacque Rousseau puts it, to renounce one’s liberty is, in fact, to renounce one’s quality as a human being, the rights and also the duties of humanity.

We need to examine some of the fundamental contrasts between the two political ideals and show why democratic equality is a more comprehensive political virtue than equality of resources for equal concern.

Democratic equality, as a political ideal, brings individuals in equal standing before one another. Its aim is to abolish all socially created oppressions that, as a result, breed inegalitarian ideologies like sexism, racism, class, caste, etc. Indeed this should be the foundational goal of every liberal democratic society: to bring its citizens to a stratum of equal moral worth before each other. I can further argue that democratic equality is concerned with relations among peoples – it is concretely based on social relationships. And surely, it is in the way that social relations are patterned or unpatterned that human beings begin to relate either as equal or unequal. On the contrary, equality of resources, as a distributive theory, conceives equality as a pattern of distribution. What this measures up to is that equality of resources considers two people as equal in so far as they enjoy equal amounts of some distributive good. This proposition has telling implications.

Firstly, it means that social relationships are largely seen as instrumental to generating such patterns   of   distribution.   Secondly,  the proposition ignores the fact that what counts as enough between two peoples varies with, for instance, cultural norms, the natural endowments, and individual circumstances.

When this is well understood, then goods will be distributed according to principles and processes that express respect for all. It is evident that the point of equality is the preservation of the human dignity in the structures that society erects. Every human being wants to be treated as an equal before the other, most fundamentally by enjoying the same liberties that his or her equals enjoy. I do not deny that material or resource fulfilment is one such a freedom one would want access to, but I argue that fundamental liberties such as recognition of one as an equal rational and moral agent, freedom to appear and express oneself as an equal before others, etc., are prior to the former and therefore would be more consistent with a government’s supreme concern. 

The desires and wishes of the people essentially precede the state’s independent agenda and so the state should take this into account in discerning what its sovereign virtue should be. With this, let us evaluate the performance of the social contract we have with our government and learn the practice of issue-based politics as opposed to squabble-based and “material-donation bribery-based” politics.

Privilege Haang’andu, S.J.
JCTR Staff
Lusaka, Zambia

 

Gutmann, Amy. Liberal Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198