Lecture
CPP Colloquium: "Vindicating equal political power within anti-caste egalitarianism"
- Date
- Thursday 10 October 2024
- Time
- Series
- CPP Colloquia 2024-2025
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
The Centre of Political Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Kristina Vasiç, PhD candidate at Central European University, Austria.
Relational egalitarians such as Niko Kolodny and Daniel Viehoff, among others, have sought to justify democracy on the grounds of relational equality, as an ideal which necessitates equality of political power. The view can be captured by Kolodny’s assertion that “democracy is a particularly important constituent of a society in which people are related to one another as social equals, as opposed to social inferiors or superiors (2014, p.287).” This opposition to the relations of superiority could be called the anti-caste view of social equality, with caste as a commonly employed paradigm of social inequality.
According to Viehoff (2019), to vindicate an ideal of equal political power, from the anti-caste view, requires showing that equal political power is: 1) not a mere by-product of an instrumental justification of democracy, 2) not a baseline or a default, but, rather 3) a value “in its own right,” derived from the commitment to social equality. Viehoff’s conclusion is that showing 3), while retaining the anti-caste view, is much more difficult than it appears. What is more, anti-caste account can only regard equality of political power as an egalitarian baseline, and nothing more.
My paper challenges this critique, primarily charged at Kolodny’s anti-caste view. To do that, I first propose two ways in which the “baseline view” can be understood. Following what has been written about it (Viehoff, 2019), I argue that the conception is incoherent, since it cannot both hold out the commitment to equality and simultaneously lack any reasons in favor of it. If, on the other hand, the baseline view is construed as a prima-facie principle of equality, we might be able to make sense of the idea that equal distribution of political power is a starting point, but, upon closer inspection, perhaps not a necessary one on the road to social equality. If this is an adequate understanding of the “baseline view,” then Kolodny’s (2014; 2023) account is able to accommodate the challenge it poses. The challenge consists in realizing that, if equal political power is just a baseline and, as such, can be overridden with proper justification, then anti-caste view fails in vindicating political equality as an ideal “in its own right.” I will show that Kolodny’s notion of “tempering factors,” as circumstances that can reduce the bad of inferiority or completely undercut claims against inferiority, already contain Viehoff’s suggestion that, sometimes, unequal political power is perfectly compatible with social equality.
This conclusion notwithstanding, I will argue that Kolodny’s view cannot be reduced to a mere baseline, it cannot show, as Viehoff notes, that, for social equality, it only matters how we justify inequalities in political power. Finally, in order to successfully vindicate equal political power, I will argue that “tempering factors,” while alleviating the bad of social inequality, can never undo the wrongness of power inequality, which, as a moral residuum, reminds us that every deviation from power equality constitutes a hierarchy.