Introduction
Relational equality is a view that regards equality as a matter of (equal) relations between individuals. A group of egalitarian theories called relational egalitarianism claims that equality is ultimately a matter of individuals relating as equals. The most representative version of relational egalitarianism is, as will be discussed in the next section, Elizabeth Anderson’s “democratic equality,” according to which the negative aim of egalitarianism is to eliminate oppressive relations between persons and the positive aim is to construct a democratic society in which all citizens relate to each other as equals (Anderson 1999: 313).
Relational egalitarianism is contrasted with distributive egalitarianism, which had been the dominant position when theorizing equality in social and political philosophy until the late 1990s. The latter is a group of egalitarian theories that claim that equality is ultimately a matter of distributive patterns in which everyone has equal...
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Mori, Y. (2023). Relational Equality. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_1134-1
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