Ισότητα εναντίον ισότητας: μοντέλα διανεμητικής δικαιοσύνης

Abstract

The article begins with the assumption that the bipolarity equality-inequality has become -legally and theoretically- irrelevant. Since a wide consensus has been achieved in 

favour of equality, the question does not -or, usually, does not- involve a choice between equality or inequality, but rather what ‘kind of equality’ and ‘equality of what’. And since equality is a comparative notion, the question is also ‘equality amongst whom’.
The main argument is constructed in the way of multiple fragmented statements, which aim to shape a more general approach to justice and equality. While epistemologically I deny any eternal and stable foundations and I favour a pluralistic and ultimately incommensurable galaxy of ultimate values, methodologically I recognise the primacy of politics over philosophy. The argumentation is founded on a basic intuition explicitly set forth by Walzer (1983:6) ‘...that the principles of justice are themselves pluralistic in form: that different social goods ought to be distributed for different reasons, in accordance with different procedures, by different agents; and that all these differences derive from different understandings of the social goods themselves -the inevitable product of historical and cultural particularism’.
Given such multiplicity, the political question is which goods to subsume under the different distributive mechanisms. In other words, whether to plan the distribution of a good or burden; and what (given our egalitarian morality) it would mean to subsume it under the principle of equality, or to leave it ‘free’ (unregulated) or ’random’. The article attempts to answer some of these questions, in a way that brings together basic intuitions about social justice and other ultimate values. Different forms of equality are being examined, with the purpose of identifying matches between them and the social goods to be distributed.