The new egalitarianism.

• Author: Martin, Adam
• Position: Essay

F.A. Hayek (1976) argued against social justice understood as distributive justice, especially in its egalitarian form. Among his many complaints was the idea that egalitarian morality was not suitable for a Great Society in which we regularly interact with strangers rather than only with a small group. Egalitarianism is an atavistic impulse from our evolutionary past in small tribes of hunter-gatherers (Hayek 1988). Our socially evolved morality, by contrast, enables us to interact with strangers by adhering to general and abstract rules. These rules allow us to expand social cooperation to the extent that they are simple rules that apply to all and do not require us to make detailed judgments about what we owe others. The social morality that facilitates cooperation with unknown strangers is distinct from the instinctual, small-group morality that still dominates our more intimate relationships.

Equality before the law or informal norms is a desirable quality of social morality, but concern with equality of outcomes would undermine the functionality of that morality. By creating a sphere of individual liberty within the boundaries set by abstract rules, social morality enables us to act on our individual knowledge. Hayek's work stresses the economic benefits of allowing individuals to act on their local knowledge of time and place. Mario Rizzo (2005) builds on this argument, claiming that there are important moral benefits as well. Regardless of the particular moral philosophy individuals follow, they can instantiate moral principles appropriately only when they are free to act on their beliefs about their particular circumstances. These beliefs might stem from individual conscience, Aristotelian judgment, or some other vision of individual moral capacity. This Hayekian approach to social morality makes room for both universals and particulars: general, abstract rules facilitate interactions with strangers but also enable the use of subjective individual knowledge and require the use of individual moral judgment.

A different form of egalitarianism has recently become a noticeable political force: egalitarianism focused on identity. This family of egalitarian views is often referred to by terms of abuse such as political correctness, and those who believe it are demeaned as social justice warriors. Identity politics is one manifestation of these ideas but predates them and is also a tactic used by other groups. To avoid the polemical and misleading connotations of these terms and to highlight what is truly distinctive about this strain of thought, I refer to it as "New Egalitarianism." The New Egalitarians are focused on eliminating inequality predicated on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identifying characteristics of traditionally disadvantaged groups.

A distinguishing feature of the New Egalitarianism is its focus on structural inequality. This focus is distinct from a focus on pure material deprivation associated with luck egalitarianism and from the widely shared belief that bigotry against particular groups is unjustified. New Egalitarians argue that systemic inequality stems from deeply rooted social structures that do not rely on overt prejudice. (1) It is not correct to say that they focus exclusively on equality of outcomes, but they do tend to cite systematically unequal outcomes as evidence of inequality of treatment. But since New Egalitarians tend to believe that correcting these inequalities requires positive action (and not mere procedural equality), it is fair to say that they have a thicker vision of equality in mind than Hayek's classical liberal view.

Certain aspects of the New Egalitarianism are appealing. It asks how different groups can live cooperatively together, a question that all liberals should take seriously. Some New Egalitarian views sound like invisible-hand explanations of inequality rather than naive constructivism. Although these concerns are valid, New Egalitarians articulate them in terms of a peculiar set of tendentious social scientific claims that, upon reflection, have troubling implications.

The most distinctive feature of New Egalitarianism is the way it draws on critical theory and related schools of thought such as Marxism, structuralism, and post-colonialism. (2) Though there are differences between these schools of thought and between thinkers within them, there are important commonalities. Most notably, they all tend to emphasize functionalism, the belief that "social practices of the most varied kind can be explained by their tendency to maintain the hegemony of dominant groups" (Elster 2011, 162). The goal of theory in these schools is to shine a light on forms of domination, in contrast to existing ideologies, which try to excuse or cover up domination. Critical theorists in particular argue that the point of social theory is emancipation, not just explanation.

New Egalitarians operate with an often implicit mental model of society drawn from critical theory. This essay argues that implementing the New Egalitarianism requires transforming social morality into an obscurantist epistocracy. The New Egalitarianism requires a set of moral experts to make judgments about right and wrong actions rather than to rely on either individual conscience or widely understood social rules. And this epistocracy, the rule of those with knowledge, is obscurantist in that it seeks to question the standing of critics rather than the substance of their claims.

I do not directly challenge the substance or the truth of New Egalitarian ideas but rather raise concerns about their implementation. As a consequence, I do not focus my critique on any one New Egalitarian thinker, for there are important differences in various thinkers' ideas. My argument parallels F. A. Hayek's (1944) description of how socialism creates a "road to serfdom." Hayek's critique does not depend on socialist moral ideals being mistaken; he merely points out what implementing central planning in a world of disagreement and imperfect intentions would require. Similarly, my goal is to sketch out some of the consequences of implementing the New Egalitarianism for the sorts of imperfect people that inhabit our world. If what we want is a social morality appropriate for beings like us, the aspirations of the New Egalitarians should be deeply troubling.

Epistocracy

Consider two definitions of racism, Racism 1 and Racism 2. One might draw parallel distinctions between Sexism 1 and Sexism 2 or Homophobia 1 and Homophobia 2. Everything I argue about conceptions of racism carries over to those issues and to others, but I use the term racism as a token for all issues surrounding group identity.

Racism 1: Individual conduct that is motivated by either (a) antipathy to other races or (b) a belief that those races are inferior (cf. Blum 2002).

Racism 2: Socially constructed, "invisible systems conferring racial dominance" (Mcintosh...