Rights and Egalitarianism

Project Information

REAL

Grant agreement ID: 819043

DOI

10.3030/819043

Project closed

EC signature date 27 February 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 28 February 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 319 355,00

EU contribution

€ 1 319 355,00

Coordinated by

THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - REAL (Rights and Egalitarianism)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

As global economic inequality has been steadily rising in the recent past, activists, economists, epidemiologists, and philosophers have highlighted different problematic aspects of an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and have called for measures to reduce inequality. However, debates about inequality rarely make reference to human rights and conversely, the human rights movement is poorly equipped to deal with questions of distributive justice. This is partly because the kind of rights enshrined in international documents are either civil and political rights or socio-economics rights that only envisage the relief of poverty rather than the elimination of inequality.
This is not just a historical accident; a rift between individual moral rights and egalitarian justice is well entrenched in the philosophical literature as well. Theories that take rights seriously either neglect the distributive question, are explicitly inegalitarian, or suggest that egalitarian redistribution may infringe on individual rights. Egalitarian theories of justice—i.e. theories that propose an equal distribution of some overall good, such as welfare—are often silent about rights. Egalitarianism and rights thus appear to be in tension with each other.
This project seeks first, to understand what explains this divide; second, to demonstrate that it can be bridged; and third, to provide a framework that accommodates rights within an egalitarian theory of justice. The overall aim of the project is, thus, to demonstrate that rights and equality are not only compatible but also mutually supportive. Achieving this aim would have significant scientific as well as societal impact since it would help frame demands for social justice in the language of rights.
Sub-project 1 examines theories of rights and the extent to which they might have implications that are inegalitarian. The question is whether there is anything intrinsic to the nature of rights that might rule out an egalitarian account of distributive justice.
Sub-project 2 examines the most prominent contemporary egalitarian theories and seeks to uncover the reasons why egalitarian theories are hostile to or, at best, silent about rights.
Sub-project 3 develops a framework that integrates the two perspectives and proposes a blueprint for a rights-friendly theory of (luck) egalitarian distributive justice with global scope.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

REAL includes three interrelated sub-projects, which have distinct aims and objectives but overlap in their themes. The first two sub-projects critically examine theories of rights and egalitarian theories of justice respectively, while the third aims to provide a framework that integrates the two perspectives, which is the overall aim of the project. The REAL team has made significant progress on most objectives as well as the overall aim of the project.
First, the team, and especially the PI, have sought to illuminate the nature of rights, their special normative force or status, and the issues raised by putative conflicts of rights (Preda, 2021). Since rights to equal shares of the good(s) to be distributed may conflict, this issue is of central importance in a framework that aims to reconcile rights with egalitarianism. The PI has also critically examined existing justifications of human rights and the extent to which they rest on egalitarian commitments with the aim of providing a genuinely egalitarian foundation for human rights.
The team have also examined in some detail the question of the compatibility of self-ownership rights and distributive equality and argued that egalitarian distribution is not merely compatible with an adequate understanding of self-ownership but is actually required by it (Spafford, 2021 and forthcoming).
Second, the REAL team have examined in some depth the foundations of egalitarianism and proposed novel accounts of distributive egalitarianism that respond to some challenging objections, offer a more solid ground for equality, and make some methodological innovations (Intropi, 2021; Preda &Voigt, 2022; Spafford, 2021 and 2022).
The work undertaken so far thus supports the overall hypothesis of REAL, namely that rights and equality are not only compatible but also mutually supportive.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

REAL advances the debate beyond the state of the art by bringing together two perspectives that have so far been seen as competing and perhaps incompatible. The project has brought together experts on both rights and egalitarianism from different parts of the world, thus creating an ongoing dialogue between the two perspective and hopefully an enduring academic network.
The work undertaken so far by the REAL team is expected to make several important contributions to current debates. For instance, the PI’s research on rights, especially on conflicts of rights—a topic that is under-addressed in the literature—is expected to result in a rigorous and novel account of conflicts of rights that will demonstrate that, contrary to existing accounts, conflicts of rights are neither pervasive nor impossible.
The work of the team also advances the field beyond the state of the art by arguing that certain assumptions that underlie libertarian theories and theories that focus on rights, especially self-ownership rights, are only tenable in conjunction with some egalitarian commitments. Additionally, one of the publications (Spafford, 2021) makes a valuable methodological contribution by establishing a link between a core concept in value theory (justification) and a central notion in the philosophy of science (explanation). It then uses this connection to defend a foundational assumption of egalitarianism. The hope is to build on this novel intra-disciplinary connection in future work.
REAL is expected to produce further notable results in the remaining time. The hope is to provide a novel and solid ground for human rights that is centred on equality and, at the same time, provide an egalitarian theory of justice of global scope that can translate into the language of rights. Ultimately, the aim of this holistic approach is to argue that all human beings have rights to equal shares of what matters in terms of justice. This may seem unremarkable, but it would upend certain dominant assumptions about human rights that are entrenched in both the philosophical literature and public discourse, namely that they are grounded in specific interests or needs and that they only protect people from the most severe harms or deprivations but cannot help in combating inequality.

Visual representation of inequality and its effects on human rights Copyright:Adina Preda