John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to that of democratic equality, which brings the concepts of freedom and equality together. Anderson’s groundbreaking work extends beyond political philosophy and engages in interdisciplinary research across fields and topics such as racial integration, the philosophy of economics, theories of value and rational choice, and the history and philosophy of the work ethic. In this interview, Anderson reveals the importance of empirical analysis within philosophy, what we can learn through an analysis of the history of egalitarianism and the role of social movements within its discourse, and how present inequalities have come about.
CJLPA: Could you perhaps tell us a bit about your trajectory to becoming a philosopher?
Professor Elizabeth Anderson: I started off in college studying economics, but there I noticed issues that I had at a very foundational level. These were questions like: should we assume that preferences are all in the person’s self-interest? We often choose to observe social norms: for example, out of norms of etiquette, you don’t take the last roll in the basket. But if the host offers it to you, you would prefer that to not having it. I thought economics wasn’t sorting out the distinctions well, and that was leading to mistakes in welfare economics. If people are declining to do things just out of social norms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their welfare is being advanced, even though they’re doing what they want in the sense that they are choosing to do it. Such foundational questions moved me into philosophy, because philosophers want to put pressure on concepts that are used in the social sciences that maybe haven’t been probed adequately, and to think about introducing other ideas that could call into question some of the normative conclusions that people are drawing from their social scientific research. So that moved me into philosophy, but I have always been engaged in the social sciences. I think economics would be enriched if it drew distinctions that better tracked normatively important ideas.
CJLPA: Your current research interest is in the history of egalitarianism. What was your motivation behind this recent research interest?
EA: If you look in contemporary political philosophy, you see that much is written about freedom, and what freedom means, and why it is important. Equality is there, but I found it to be under-theorised. In particular, there’s the dominance of a certain distributive notion of equality that is kind of cosmic, which I think makes no sense. It applies to situations like this: imagine there is a distant world out there with beings just like us, only they have half the welfare levels that we do. Some conclude that there would be this unfairness in the universe because there’s an inequality. I think this notion of inequality has nothing to do with the inequality that people care about in real society. What people care about is not just some abstract difference between what I have and what you have. It’s all about social relations and social processes. How did those rich people get all that money? Did they get it at others’ expense? And are they using that wealth to dominate others? Does society turn wealth disparities into grounds for stigmatising the less advantaged? If it’s just some cosmic inequality with some distant planet, there’s no causal connection between our well-being and their well-being, and there is no injustice in that.