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One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality
An enduring theme of Western philosophy is that we are all one another’s equals. Yet the principle of basic equality is woefully under-explored in modern moral and political philosophy. In a major new work, Jeremy Waldron attempts to remedy that shortfall with a subtle and multifaceted account of the basis for the West’s commitment to human equality.
What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Is this supposed to distinguish humans from other animals? What is human equality based on? Is it a religious idea, or a matter of human rights? Is there some essential feature that all human beings have in common? Waldron argues that there is no single characteristic that serves as the basis of equality. He says the case for moral equality rests on four capacities that all humans have the potential to possess in some reason, autonomy, moral agency, and the ability to love. But how should we regard the differences that people display on these various dimensions? And what are we to say about those who suffer from profound disability—people whose claim to humanity seems to outstrip any particular capacities they have along these lines?
Waldron, who has worked on the nature of equality for many years, confronts these questions and others fully and unflinchingly. Based on the Gifford Lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2015, One Another’s Equals takes Waldron’s thinking further and deeper than ever before.
What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Is this supposed to distinguish humans from other animals? What is human equality based on? Is it a religious idea, or a matter of human rights? Is there some essential feature that all human beings have in common? Waldron argues that there is no single characteristic that serves as the basis of equality. He says the case for moral equality rests on four capacities that all humans have the potential to possess in some reason, autonomy, moral agency, and the ability to love. But how should we regard the differences that people display on these various dimensions? And what are we to say about those who suffer from profound disability—people whose claim to humanity seems to outstrip any particular capacities they have along these lines?
Waldron, who has worked on the nature of equality for many years, confronts these questions and others fully and unflinchingly. Based on the Gifford Lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2015, One Another’s Equals takes Waldron’s thinking further and deeper than ever before.
277 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 19, 2017
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July 6, 2025
(The book is from a series of six Gifford Lectures that Prof. Waldron gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2015)
One of my favourite essays is William James’ “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”. In it, James, in his characteristically incisive yet gentle way, chides moral philosophers for their preoccupation with what he terms the “quest for certainty”. To declare a moral principle as global and enduring, a la Kantian categorical imperatives, James thinks, is to kid oneself into thinking that philosophical theorizing can ever yield the kind of knowledge that is as accurate or as genuinely useful in practical life as that given to us by science. (This might, by the way, be the only thing that pragmatists and logical positivists agree on).
The real questions of moral life; “How, then, shall I make choices? How shall I live?”, James thinks, can never be meaningfully approached in this way. What one ends up doing is an act of, shall we call it “logical brutalism”? One puts forth one’s position (or the position held by one’s community of agreement) and declares it the correct one. If forced to justify it, one then appeals to some immaterial category of “reason” which, if we unenlightened ones had access to, would shine the brilliant light of truth upon us. It is the determined endeavour of forcing the world to cohere with one’s intuitions.
This, what James warns against, is what Waldron does in this series of essays. Waldron’s topic is equality, and more precisely, human equality (for, from the outset, he cannot conceive of animals as being thought of in the same plane of “equality” as humans). Borrowing from Anglican liturgy - “All sorts and conditions of men”- Waldron first speaks about two theoretical kinds of legal statuses: “sortal” status and “conditional” status. Conditional statuses tell us about, well, the conditions of people’s lives: are they married or divorced? Facing bankruptcy? Are they old or young? Members of the military? Conditional statuses are important, and of course, they attract a distinct set of rights, powers, privileges and disabilities: people in the military don’t pay taxes; disabled people have to lead a certain kind of life etc. But a conditional status does not tell us anything about the “underlying personhood” of the person who possesses it.
Sortal status, on the other hand, categorizes us based on the “sorts” or “kinds” of persons we are. Apartheid, for example, was a system that operated on sortal categorization. In that system, blacks were a different sort of individual from whites. This is very similar to the distinctions many of us (like Waldron in this book) draw now between human beings and animals.
Waldron’s contention then, is that the basis for /basic/ human equality is that human beings are the same sort of persons; that we all share certain “essential” (do you see the beginning of James’ critique?) and distinctively human capacities: the ability to love, personal autonomy, reason, moral thought etc.
Of course, a quick retort is that human beings do not share these capacities equally: some of us have more moral clarity than others; some people have a stronger sense of personal autonomy than others. In response, Waldron invites us to think of these capacities as a “range property”. Meru is a town smack in the middle of Kenya. Namanga is a town right on the border with Tanzania. Yet for all means and purposes, both towns are equally in Kenya, because the property they share is “being in Kenya”. In that capacity, they are equal. This is how Waldron would like us to think of basic human equality. We share these capacities to different degrees, yes, but our status as equals is grounded on the very sharing, not on the degree of possession.
Yet basic equality does not, for Waldron, mean equal treatment. Waldron prefers to think of it under the Dworkinian idea of “equal respect and consideration”, or the utilitarian principle of “all to count for one and none for more”. If I have two children and one of them has a terrible headache, and the other feels perfectly fine, it would be ridiculous for me to give them equal amounts of painkillers just because they share in basic equality. Equal respect and consideration demands that I give more painkillers to the kid who’s more unwell (assuming, of course, that more painkillers would be necessary to make the kid feel better). In the same way, billionaires are perfectly ok in Waldron's moral universe, and so is inequality of wealth and of opportunity, for those are conditional sorts of inequality, and to interfere with conditional inequality is, many times, to interfere with the principal of equal respect and consideration.
But then comes Peter Singer’s challenge. In his 1975 book “Animal Liberation”, Singer put forth a preference utilitarian idea of personhood. Singer’s idea was that personhood should be conceived of as the capacity to think of oneself as the same continuing being through time, with an identity-forming past, a present, and a future that one would have liked to see actualized. The harm in killing you then, if you had personhood, was that I robbed you of preferences that you would have liked to see come to life. Singer thus claimed that some animals were more “persons” than some human beings (this claim got the book banned in several countries, and there were anti-Singer protests in Germany as late as 2015). Pigs, for example, had this conception of personhood, neural scans and behaviour tests had shown that they were able to plan for the future and look forward to it; some human beings were (and are) so mentally ill that they did not have this conception of personhood.
Because they lack Waldron’s capacities for personal autonomy, reason etc., what are we to say about these people with regards to basic equality? Are they inferior to us? Waldron is uncomfortable with this idea, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. An easy way out would be to go the Elizabeth Anscombe way, which is to say, to declare that all of God’s (human) children are equal because he made us that way. The range property we share, per Anscombe, is that of equally being God's children. But Waldron, though a religious person, is not making a religious argument, so he is wary of doing this.
Another way is to go the Margaret MacDonald way, who, in her 1947 Essay “Natural Rights”, declared that “To assert that all men are of equal worth is not to state a fact but to choose a side. It announces: this is where I stand”. But Waldron cannot take MacDonald’s views, for he is trying to state a “fact”, not choose a side, and as he shows, MacDonald herself, when asked why she stood where she stood, had to resort to simple brute defiance - something like... I stand here because I stand here.
A better place to stand, in my opinion, would be Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of equality as a political concept. Equality, Arendt suggested, was a concept that we could adopt such that, despite recognizing that nature had given us different talents/ affinities etc., we agreed to hold each other as political equals, guaranteeing mutual rights for one another, because that was what was best for our political community. It's social contractual. Waldron finds Arendt’s position bewildering, a bit “mad”, he says. Why not, he continues, “just decide to treat trees, tigers, teapots, and teenagers as one another’s equals for political purposes then?” .
But that’s exactly my question: why not?
Arendt’s position, I believe, cuts through the hollow attempts at essentialism that accounts like Waldron’s aim at (and always fail to achieve). To say that what makes us equal as humans is that we possess certain capacities, as Waldron does, is to ignore the fact that other animals - dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses - also show love, demonstrate reason and moral consideration, etc. And it is also to ignore the fact that some humans do not possess those capacities, as Singer argued.
This is the heart of James’s critique of the moral philosopher like Waldron: the fact that he is so wedded to the project of “discovering truth” through “reason” that he cleaves to an essentialism that is simply untenable. Waldron has no first principle account for why the capacities he postulates are what make us deserving of equality, why those capacities couldn’t be narrower, say, because we possess blue eyes, or wider, because we possess the capacity to feel pain. This is Singer’s point, and Waldron pretends to engage it, but he does not answer the main argument. Absent an explanation for this, he does no more than continuously attempt to humiliate us into accepting his intuition about the issue, as if, by continuously repeating that humans, as a category, are special, but not the narrower category of blue-eyed humans or the wider one of sentient beings, we will simply get tired and yield to that intuition.
Nevertheless, there’s some value to Waldron’s reductio ad absurdum account of Arendt’s position: surely, trees cannot be equal to humans, regardless of what absurd theory we come up with. The value to this reductio absurdum account is that it forces those of us, who buy Arendt’s account, to clarify our position, for it is often misunderstood, and to reiterate the idea that equality is not a natural kind, not something to be discovered or that is inherent in things/ people, an assumption someone like Waldron seems to operate under. Equality, rather, as Arendt insisted, is a useful fiction; something to be created and agreed upon by members of a political community to achieve practical purposes.
So yes, in theory, trees could be equal to us (because there’s no immaterial category called “equality”), but as always, the more useful question is not the one Waldron asks: what is equality? It’s the one Arendt (and William James and John Dewey) asked: what are its practical purposes? To wit, what purpose would it serve to declare trees our equals? (Because there are numerous that would be served if we declared animals our equals).
One of my favourite essays is William James’ “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”. In it, James, in his characteristically incisive yet gentle way, chides moral philosophers for their preoccupation with what he terms the “quest for certainty”. To declare a moral principle as global and enduring, a la Kantian categorical imperatives, James thinks, is to kid oneself into thinking that philosophical theorizing can ever yield the kind of knowledge that is as accurate or as genuinely useful in practical life as that given to us by science. (This might, by the way, be the only thing that pragmatists and logical positivists agree on).
The real questions of moral life; “How, then, shall I make choices? How shall I live?”, James thinks, can never be meaningfully approached in this way. What one ends up doing is an act of, shall we call it “logical brutalism”? One puts forth one’s position (or the position held by one’s community of agreement) and declares it the correct one. If forced to justify it, one then appeals to some immaterial category of “reason” which, if we unenlightened ones had access to, would shine the brilliant light of truth upon us. It is the determined endeavour of forcing the world to cohere with one’s intuitions.
This, what James warns against, is what Waldron does in this series of essays. Waldron’s topic is equality, and more precisely, human equality (for, from the outset, he cannot conceive of animals as being thought of in the same plane of “equality” as humans). Borrowing from Anglican liturgy - “All sorts and conditions of men”- Waldron first speaks about two theoretical kinds of legal statuses: “sortal” status and “conditional” status. Conditional statuses tell us about, well, the conditions of people’s lives: are they married or divorced? Facing bankruptcy? Are they old or young? Members of the military? Conditional statuses are important, and of course, they attract a distinct set of rights, powers, privileges and disabilities: people in the military don’t pay taxes; disabled people have to lead a certain kind of life etc. But a conditional status does not tell us anything about the “underlying personhood” of the person who possesses it.
Sortal status, on the other hand, categorizes us based on the “sorts” or “kinds” of persons we are. Apartheid, for example, was a system that operated on sortal categorization. In that system, blacks were a different sort of individual from whites. This is very similar to the distinctions many of us (like Waldron in this book) draw now between human beings and animals.
Waldron’s contention then, is that the basis for /basic/ human equality is that human beings are the same sort of persons; that we all share certain “essential” (do you see the beginning of James’ critique?) and distinctively human capacities: the ability to love, personal autonomy, reason, moral thought etc.
Of course, a quick retort is that human beings do not share these capacities equally: some of us have more moral clarity than others; some people have a stronger sense of personal autonomy than others. In response, Waldron invites us to think of these capacities as a “range property”. Meru is a town smack in the middle of Kenya. Namanga is a town right on the border with Tanzania. Yet for all means and purposes, both towns are equally in Kenya, because the property they share is “being in Kenya”. In that capacity, they are equal. This is how Waldron would like us to think of basic human equality. We share these capacities to different degrees, yes, but our status as equals is grounded on the very sharing, not on the degree of possession.
Yet basic equality does not, for Waldron, mean equal treatment. Waldron prefers to think of it under the Dworkinian idea of “equal respect and consideration”, or the utilitarian principle of “all to count for one and none for more”. If I have two children and one of them has a terrible headache, and the other feels perfectly fine, it would be ridiculous for me to give them equal amounts of painkillers just because they share in basic equality. Equal respect and consideration demands that I give more painkillers to the kid who’s more unwell (assuming, of course, that more painkillers would be necessary to make the kid feel better). In the same way, billionaires are perfectly ok in Waldron's moral universe, and so is inequality of wealth and of opportunity, for those are conditional sorts of inequality, and to interfere with conditional inequality is, many times, to interfere with the principal of equal respect and consideration.
But then comes Peter Singer’s challenge. In his 1975 book “Animal Liberation”, Singer put forth a preference utilitarian idea of personhood. Singer’s idea was that personhood should be conceived of as the capacity to think of oneself as the same continuing being through time, with an identity-forming past, a present, and a future that one would have liked to see actualized. The harm in killing you then, if you had personhood, was that I robbed you of preferences that you would have liked to see come to life. Singer thus claimed that some animals were more “persons” than some human beings (this claim got the book banned in several countries, and there were anti-Singer protests in Germany as late as 2015). Pigs, for example, had this conception of personhood, neural scans and behaviour tests had shown that they were able to plan for the future and look forward to it; some human beings were (and are) so mentally ill that they did not have this conception of personhood.
Because they lack Waldron’s capacities for personal autonomy, reason etc., what are we to say about these people with regards to basic equality? Are they inferior to us? Waldron is uncomfortable with this idea, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. An easy way out would be to go the Elizabeth Anscombe way, which is to say, to declare that all of God’s (human) children are equal because he made us that way. The range property we share, per Anscombe, is that of equally being God's children. But Waldron, though a religious person, is not making a religious argument, so he is wary of doing this.
Another way is to go the Margaret MacDonald way, who, in her 1947 Essay “Natural Rights”, declared that “To assert that all men are of equal worth is not to state a fact but to choose a side. It announces: this is where I stand”. But Waldron cannot take MacDonald’s views, for he is trying to state a “fact”, not choose a side, and as he shows, MacDonald herself, when asked why she stood where she stood, had to resort to simple brute defiance - something like... I stand here because I stand here.
A better place to stand, in my opinion, would be Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of equality as a political concept. Equality, Arendt suggested, was a concept that we could adopt such that, despite recognizing that nature had given us different talents/ affinities etc., we agreed to hold each other as political equals, guaranteeing mutual rights for one another, because that was what was best for our political community. It's social contractual. Waldron finds Arendt’s position bewildering, a bit “mad”, he says. Why not, he continues, “just decide to treat trees, tigers, teapots, and teenagers as one another’s equals for political purposes then?” .
But that’s exactly my question: why not?
Arendt’s position, I believe, cuts through the hollow attempts at essentialism that accounts like Waldron’s aim at (and always fail to achieve). To say that what makes us equal as humans is that we possess certain capacities, as Waldron does, is to ignore the fact that other animals - dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses - also show love, demonstrate reason and moral consideration, etc. And it is also to ignore the fact that some humans do not possess those capacities, as Singer argued.
This is the heart of James’s critique of the moral philosopher like Waldron: the fact that he is so wedded to the project of “discovering truth” through “reason” that he cleaves to an essentialism that is simply untenable. Waldron has no first principle account for why the capacities he postulates are what make us deserving of equality, why those capacities couldn’t be narrower, say, because we possess blue eyes, or wider, because we possess the capacity to feel pain. This is Singer’s point, and Waldron pretends to engage it, but he does not answer the main argument. Absent an explanation for this, he does no more than continuously attempt to humiliate us into accepting his intuition about the issue, as if, by continuously repeating that humans, as a category, are special, but not the narrower category of blue-eyed humans or the wider one of sentient beings, we will simply get tired and yield to that intuition.
Nevertheless, there’s some value to Waldron’s reductio ad absurdum account of Arendt’s position: surely, trees cannot be equal to humans, regardless of what absurd theory we come up with. The value to this reductio absurdum account is that it forces those of us, who buy Arendt’s account, to clarify our position, for it is often misunderstood, and to reiterate the idea that equality is not a natural kind, not something to be discovered or that is inherent in things/ people, an assumption someone like Waldron seems to operate under. Equality, rather, as Arendt insisted, is a useful fiction; something to be created and agreed upon by members of a political community to achieve practical purposes.
So yes, in theory, trees could be equal to us (because there’s no immaterial category called “equality”), but as always, the more useful question is not the one Waldron asks: what is equality? It’s the one Arendt (and William James and John Dewey) asked: what are its practical purposes? To wit, what purpose would it serve to declare trees our equals? (Because there are numerous that would be served if we declared animals our equals).
April 4, 2024
Not an academic review, but a review as a reader. I do not share many of the concerns my fellow reviewers have brought forward. The book contains a series of lectures and they should be understood as such. Points repeat, footnotes are an afterthought. The audience is likely not full of professional philosophers etc. With that in mind, it is certainly true that Waldron does not present the clearest, most logically structured account of human equality I have ever read. Instead, one gets the feeling of listening to a sage think, of partaking in an experience of inquiry. I enjoyed this greatly, even though the book should have been published as a shorter article as well, focussed on what Waldron adds to the debate.
In essence, this book manages three things well: (1) emphasize that equality is a topic worth thinking about, basic human equality is a concept worth teaching, debating and demanding again and again and again, especially in the face of obvious and immense inequality, (2) show that the matter of finding a reason or basis for equality is deeply complicated and - to some extent - unresolvable, (3) argue for a very pragmatic and juristic grounding of equality, namely in the multi-facetted ways humans realize their human capabilities, which are fragile potentials unfolding in time. In that, we are equal, herein lies the "range property" that justifies a distinctive equality that even profoundly disabled humans share, but animals do not. Waldron is also careful enough to re-iterate that this is not intended to be a "proof" of any sorts, but rather as a way to make sense of the concept of basic equality. As such, it works well, especially as Waldron actively steers away from even more difficult political problems such as abortion and vegetarianism.
This is, finally, a book in an enlightened tradition: What Waldron seems to want most is that we think, well-informed of the world and with human fallible reason. To this end, more important than reading this book is to ask oneself: How can we live better in light of human equality? What do I make of it?
In essence, this book manages three things well: (1) emphasize that equality is a topic worth thinking about, basic human equality is a concept worth teaching, debating and demanding again and again and again, especially in the face of obvious and immense inequality, (2) show that the matter of finding a reason or basis for equality is deeply complicated and - to some extent - unresolvable, (3) argue for a very pragmatic and juristic grounding of equality, namely in the multi-facetted ways humans realize their human capabilities, which are fragile potentials unfolding in time. In that, we are equal, herein lies the "range property" that justifies a distinctive equality that even profoundly disabled humans share, but animals do not. Waldron is also careful enough to re-iterate that this is not intended to be a "proof" of any sorts, but rather as a way to make sense of the concept of basic equality. As such, it works well, especially as Waldron actively steers away from even more difficult political problems such as abortion and vegetarianism.
This is, finally, a book in an enlightened tradition: What Waldron seems to want most is that we think, well-informed of the world and with human fallible reason. To this end, more important than reading this book is to ask oneself: How can we live better in light of human equality? What do I make of it?
September 7, 2021
I was disappointed by this book. The upshot of it was something like Nussbaum's capabilities approach as the basis for human equality/dignity. However, Nussbaum's account is probably more illuminating not least because it is grounded in a nuanced account of vulnerability. Waldron acknowledges that some readers may think he has just given a messy account of equality with little insight, appealing to, for example, theological traditions and creating some (perhaps unnecessary) conceptual distinctions. I have little more to say other than this is exactly how I feel.
So disappointed by Waldron's account, if I had did not have any prior views on this topic, I would have thought Hobbes account of human equality was the most promising of the accounts outlined in the book. According to Waldron, Hobbes thought that our universal "fear of death at one another's hands", our equal propensity to be killed by one another, is what grounds human equality.
So disappointed by Waldron's account, if I had did not have any prior views on this topic, I would have thought Hobbes account of human equality was the most promising of the accounts outlined in the book. According to Waldron, Hobbes thought that our universal "fear of death at one another's hands", our equal propensity to be killed by one another, is what grounds human equality.
November 2, 2024
Clear, measured, and pragmatic approach to a fundamental question.
May 29, 2023
I did not get, at the end, what is Waldron's claim on basis equality. What is the abstract assumption which makes everybody "equal". In my view it is simply the belonging to the same species, and I cannot see why such an intuitive claim is not embraced.
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