Kant, it is well known, was celibate and condemned masturbation and homosexuality. Marx, it is equally well known, may have impregnated a maid servant but always refused to come on Engel's tits. Since the time of Gerald Cohen many middle school girls have been 'shipping' Kant & Marx and, more recently, making yaoi manga depicting the tender anal sex they inflict upon each other.
As a case in point, Kristin Voigt writes-
For relational egalitarians, equality is about how individuals relate to one another: equality requires that individuals regard and treat each other as equals.
Thus a billionaire, who has robots for servants, who only interacts with other billionaires, is a model 'relational egalitarian'. However, a Professor of Ethics who splits her pay check with the custodial staff and who spends all her spare time giving beejays to disabled hobos, fails the test because 'Professor' is a hierarchical title.
The problem worsens when we consider institutions- like the State- rather than individuals. They may treat each other very respectfully as equals and yet launch devastating wars against each other.
Of course, this does not mean that 'relational egalitarianism' is meaningless or incoherent. The fact is you could easily become a model relational egalitarian by farting appreciatively anytime anyone else farts. It is true that other philosophers may stress some other activity- e.g. showing respect as opposed to farting- but that just means there are many variety of the underlying thing. I may feel relational fart egalitarianism is more important that relational respect egalitarianism but, if you belong to the latter species, you will respectfully concede that farts are just as important as 'dignity' or 'opportunity' or 'respect' or whatever. True, there could be a 'concurrency problem'. You may feel that before fulfilling relational fart equality we must first fulfill relational eating hot dogs equality. But the fact that there is no unique model for relational inequality per se, does not mean that there isn't some consistent model for relational equality.
Consider a relational equality with a sociopathic serial killer. You can fart as you stab him respectfully in the knowledge that he is likely to expel gas from his anus as he dies. Moreover, the fact that it may take you forty of fifty years to catch up with him in death, still means that, ultimately, all humans, but not necessarily all institutions, do exhibit relational death equality.
It has been suggested not every variety of relational equality is consistent with every other. Consider those who object to
(a) hierarchies of domination, which leave those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy subject to the arbitrary control of others;
This is per se illegal. The problem is that nobody is criticizing the Mafia for this. They are pretending some shitty, spineless, administrator is actually a fucking Nazi and is sodomizing everybody and then shitting on their tits.
In any case, egalitarians aren't Batman. There's nothing they can do about Mafias or Mean Bosses or people who don't respond in kind to my friendly farts.
(b) hierarchies of esteem, in which those on the lower rungs are stigmatized and the targets of denigrating stereotypes
again, this is an imaginary grievance. The truth is flatulent Socioproctologists alone are worthy of esteem. No doubt a Prof. of Political Philosophy suspects his colleagues are laughing at him behind his back, but this is not the case. What the faculty are whispering about is the awesomeness of my farts.
(c) hierarchies of standing in which the interests of those in inferior positions are given less weight than the interests of those in higher positions of the hierarchy in deliberative and decision-making processes.
Different people esteem different things or differ as to how much esteem should be accorded a particular thing. This is just 'Preference Diversity'. Where it meets a Goldilocks condition, there is a coordination problem (or a discoordination game for hedging or because of income effects) and thus there can be an equilibrium- though it may not be unique. This is because 'relational equality' can go all the way down in terms of meta-Identity or meta-Preference formation. This also means, there is no reason why there should be 'lexical' orderings. In other words, everything can be traded off against everything else or relegated to a discoordination game.
These hierarchies are conceptually distinct though they will often operate in tandem, leaving some at the bottom of all three types of hierarchy.
But they may only be there because they hope to rise or, more commonly, not to incur a fatal fall. The good news is, sooner or later, everybody bites the dust.
Some people may prefer to be independent contractors or to only transact on the basis of contracts of adhesion on open markets. In this case, there are no hierarchies. Other people may prefer to have relationships and 'incomplete contracts' featuring things like promotion on the basis of superiority. But, once again, this is just Preference Diversity. It isn't a scandal for egalitarianism because most of us grew up in families where Mummy and Daddy and Big Sister and Woofy the Dog all had different preferences and interests.
The problem with relationism is that it is either a monadology synchronized in some occult manner or it is anything goes- i.e. ideographic and empirical. Synchronization may be by an Occasionalist God or else one's being in the 'field' of a Buddha or going to Church regularly or some such thing. If there is no synchronization then maybe we should be 'outsourcing' inquiry and decision making to experts who rely on statistical information of various sorts. Neither may appear egalitarian solutions. The holy-man or priest and the technical expert are believed to have some extra property or excellence.
For Philosophy, an alternative avenue was opened up by Kant's little essay titled 'what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?' His answer may be usefully compared to his objection to a purely relational theory of space. This has to do with 'incongruent counterparts'- e.g. the manner in which your left hand is different from your right hand such that there is nothing in your concept of a hand which is involved. The difference is 'internal' to the hand. We would speak of this as a symmetry. The Wu experiment in 1956 showed that weak interactions don't have parity conservation and thus provide a way to operationally define left and right without reference to the human body. In other words, the empirical path had solved at least one problem regarding 'orientation'. Who can say if it might not solve all others?
Kant's own more modest suggestion was that 'subjective feelings' were needed by Reason to meet its need for consistency, completeness, no infinite regresses, and so forth. The problem here is obvious. Why not have the 'subjective feelings' which are optimal not for Reason but for you personally- or, if you are a patriot, your Fatherland? Gassing on about Reason was all very well if that is what you were paid to do, but what if you weren't? In any case, if foreigners conquer the country, there may be little money to spare for teachers of useless shit. Indeed, the reason we have relations with other people which are not always to our liking is because the alternative is to have much more adverse relations with more horrible people.
A situation where people want to have relations with those like themselves is a separating equilibrium which is best maintained by a 'costly signal'. We can think of it as arising out of the focal solution to a 'discoordination game' of a certain type. There may be notional equality within an identity class which makes up a separating equilibrium but objectively there is heterogeneity. Indeed, a collective advantage gained through 'separating' may be divided up on the basis of Shapley values. Still, subjectively, this may feel like equality and the gaining of 'countervailing power' through solidarity or 'consciousness raising' or whatever. But, thus has it always been.
It is this consideration more than any other which compels me to endorse relational egalitarianism, at least for the purpose of reconstructing the history of Western Political Philosophy so as to give greater prominence to Kant's increasing subjective comfort with going ass to mouth on a thrilled and trembling Marx.
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