Equality

In plain terms

Almost nobody now argues that some people simply matter less than others. That is a substantial historical achievement and it settles less than it sounds.

The reason is that equal moral standing is compatible with almost any distribution of anything else. People can be equal in standing and unequal in income, health, opportunity, power, or the respect they actually receive - and which of those should be equalised is the whole argument.

Sen's question is the useful one: equality of what? Equalise resources and people with greater needs end up worse off. Equalise welfare and expensive tastes get subsidised. Equalise opportunity and outcomes diverge anyway, then shape the next generation's opportunities. Every answer produces inequality on some other dimension, and there is no arrangement that is equal in all of them.

As a philosopher would put it

The modern discussion turns on the currency of egalitarian justice. Resourcism equalises holdings; welfarism equalises subjective wellbeing; the capability approach equalises what people are able to do and be, on the ground that identical resources convert into very different capabilities for different people.

Luck egalitarianism holds that inequalities arising from choice are acceptable and those arising from unchosen circumstance are not, which tracks a strong intuition and produces the harsh consequence that the imprudent may be abandoned.

Anderson's relational critique attacks that whole framing: the point of equality is not to correct the distribution of luck but to end oppression and establish a society in which people stand as equals, which makes the demeaning judgements about who deserves help part of the problem. Rawls's difference principle occupies a third position - inequalities are permissible only where they benefit the least advantaged - and is neither straightforwardly distributive nor relational.

What is actually disputed

Whether equality matters in itself.

Egalitarians hold that an inequality is bad as such, independently of anyone being badly off. The levelling-down objection is the standard reply: if equality has value in itself, then blinding the sighted improves matters in one respect, which almost nobody accepts. Prioritarians avoid it by holding that benefits matter more the worse off the recipient is, without equality mattering as such; sufficientarians hold that what matters is everyone having enough, not everyone having the same.

Anderson's relational position sidesteps the whole distributive framing: what is objectionable is hierarchy and domination, not the distribution of luck, and a society of equals can tolerate considerable material difference.

What none of them settles is the boundary. Every egalitarian theory assumes a community within which equality is owed, and the question of who is inside it is where the sharpest disputes now sit.