139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

Equality is fundamentally relational—about how people stand toward each other—not merely distributive, requiring flat hierarchies across domination, honor, and standing.

• Equality is fundamentally about how people relate to one another rather than merely about the distribution of material goods; distributive concerns should follow from the demand to relate as equals, which is why a hypothetically materially equal but segregated Jim Crow society would still be deeply unequal because segregation itself inherently insults and stigmatizes.

  “I want to embed it in a broader understanding of what egalitarianism is about, and in my view it's about how we relate to each other. It's about human relationships.”

• Inequality operates along three sociological dimensions—domination/subordination (who gets to order whom around), honor/stigmatization (social esteem), and standing (how much one's interests count in others' deliberations, especially the state's)—and egalitarianism aims to flatten all three and prevent them from constantly aligning to reward the same people.

  “you have relationships of domination and subordination, like who gets to order who around... then you have hierarchies of honor and stigmatization... and then you have hierarchies of what I call standing, which has to do with how much your interests count in the deliberation of third parties, and especially the state.”

• Achieving exact material equality at all times would require a totalitarian system, because letting people think and act freely produces unequal outcomes; the egalitarian goal should instead be to bound the distance between top and bottom so that no one is reduced to begging mercy from the wealthy.

  “if you try to achieve exact material equality at all times, you're going to have to have basically a totalitarian system.”

Modern firms function as private governments wielding control over workers exceeding state authority, requiring workplace democracy and sharper limits on employer power.

• Modern firms function as private governments, exercising over employees a degree of control—including over off-duty conduct—that often exceeds what even the state is permitted, because under employment-at-will bosses can fire workers for any or no reason while supposed labor-law speech protections go largely unenforced.

  “bosses, employers, have extraordinary powers that even the government doesn't have. So for instance, during the pandemic, you saw a lot of doctors and nurses complaining that their hospitals were not supplying adequate personal protective equipment, and some of them were fired for saying this. The government's not allowed to fire you because you're complaining.”

• Workers' lives could be improved by drawing sharper lines between on-duty and off-duty life and replacing employment-at-will with a regime requiring employers to show cause to fire, so that legitimate on-the-job order-giving and equitable task assignment remain while bosses lose the power to police workers' off-duty sexual partners, recreation, or politics.

  “it doesn't mean that the boss should be able to interfere with, say, Mary's off-duty life, like who her sexual partners are, or her recreational activities or her lifestyle. It's really none of the boss's business how she leads her life off-duty.”

• Empowering workers within the firm through co-determination—giving workers a say in management—could make companies more socially responsible, because most employees have an ethical core and want meaningful work rather than work that merely makes money while spreading social toxicity; this worker-empowerment route is preferable to state regulation, which carries its own dangers.

  “I do think that introducing co-determination at the big corporations, that is where workers have a say in management, could be one way to make these companies more socially responsible.”

The original work ethic sanctified socially necessary labor including dependent care, which welfare policy wrongly devalues by requiring waged work.

• The insistence that welfare recipients must work for wages downgrades the value of women's dependent-care labor (caring for children and the ill within the household); historically, very poor women moved in and out of the waged workforce precisely because of such care responsibilities, and the original Puritan work ethic itself recognized dependent care as socially necessary work.

  “this obsession that people on welfare benefits have to work is downgrading the value of women's dependent care, labor, taking care of children and ill people within their household.”

• The work ethic invented by mid-17th-century English Puritan ministers contained two contradictory strands held by the same people: one ascetic view treating relentless labor as discipline against sin and proof of salvation (which capitalists could exploit to justify low-wage subjection), and one sanctifying view treating socially necessary work as performing God's will, which demanded that even menial workers be honored, paid decently, and given safe, dignified conditions.

  “there's really two work ethics that were already there in the mid-17th century and held by the same people, that is, they actually had kind of contradictory views about work.”

• Work becomes meaningful fundamentally when it helps other people rather than only oneself; the original work ethic tied work to serving society, and most people have an ethical core that makes genuinely other-serving work fulfilling, so people will not lack motivation to work even if they also receive substantial free benefits.

  “what is a meaning fundamentally, it has to be something that's helping other people and not yourself.”

• The valorization of work was a genuine revaluation of values arising in the mid-17th century, overturning the prior aristocratic value system in which the best life was a life of leisure free of work; the Puritans inverted this with their beehive metaphor, casting idle landlords as drones to be expelled and worker bees as the honored producers.

  “The valorization of work really was a new thing in the mid-17th century, because before then people valued leisure, and that is the leisure of the independently wealthy.”

Philosophical methodology should be grounded in actual social problems, history, economics, and science rather than deriving first principles from pure theory.

• Aiming political philosophy at an ideal society is unreliable because we cannot know what the relevant normative categories will be in the future, ideal theory tends to paper over present structural injustices, and moral inquiry may never converge on a fixed ideal—so we should start from current problems and treat our ideals as error-prone, revising them by living through them.

  “how are we supposed to know what the ideal is going to be? We don't even know what the normative categories are going to be like a century from now”

• Moral and political philosophy should be done like the history and philosophy of science—engaging deeply with history, economics, and social science and starting from the actual problems people encounter in their lives—rather than deriving first principles purely from ideas in one's head.

  “you take your problems from practice from the problems that people actually encounter in their lives and then start theorizing from that rather than thinking, no, I'll just... I'm just going to think in my head and figure out first principles of morality and politics just by sticking to ideas in my head, and I think that's just wrong”

Free-market ideology appeals because it descended from an ideal of universal self-employment where equality and freedom would coincide, obscuring how firms concentrate power.

• American free-market ideology is appealing because it descends from a founding ideal of universal self-employment—everyone working their own capital in perfectly competitive markets—under which a free society and a society of equals would coincide, since no one could amass enough capital to dominate others; this ideal explains why political discourse talks about markets but ignores the internal organization of firms.

  “this goes back to the original free market ideology at the founding of the American Republic, where the ideal put forth that was eagerly taken up by Americans was universal self-employment, everybody stakes out their own homestead or their farm”

• Adam Smith and Thomas Paine, the original conceptualizers of the free market, were comfortable with a social safety net; Paine was the first to design a feasible universal social insurance system—costed using British Treasury figures and funded by an inheritance tax—and Smith's only criticism of England's Poor Laws was the Law of Settlement, which tied relief to one's birthplace and thereby inhibited beneficial labor mobility.

  “Tom Paine was the first person to envisage how poverty be abolished with a universal social insurance system. And he actually costed out the universal social insurance system using numbers from the British Treasury and showed it was completely feasible to do this through... And funded through an inheritance tax.”

Empathy naturally extends across boundaries to any being capable of suffering, breaking through ideologies that restrict moral concern to the familiar.

• Because emotions like empathy have natural objects—any being capable of suffering or joy, even projected onto stuffed animals or fictional characters—empathy has no inherent boundaries and can break through unjust ideologies that would otherwise restrict our moral concern to people like ourselves.

  “the natural object of empathy is any being who is able to have suffering or joy, or even, you can even project that on to an inanimate object like a stuffed animal.”

• Ideology is best understood non-pejoratively as a picture of the social world that we use for practical purposes to navigate it; it becomes pernicious only when that picture is missing major elements or distorted in ways that lead us to behave badly or treat others unjustly.

  “We have a picture of our social world which we use to navigate our way through it. And so the ideology in this sense does not have to be pernicious.”

• Rather than each person holding a single coherent worldview, people take on different ideologies in different social contexts to navigate whichever part of the social world they are currently engaging, and most people do not have very coherent worldviews at all.

  “Often what happens is in different social contexts, we take on different ideologies, right, to navigate that part of the social world that we're engaging at the moment.”

• A useful egalitarian strategy is to proliferate the dimensions of things that are admired, so that in a pluralistic society different communities value different things and no single person wins on every dimension—not being simultaneously the most beautiful, smartest, most athletic, and most pious.

  “one useful egalitarian strategy is to proliferate a dimension of things that are admired, and that's what you get in a pluralistic society. Different people value different things, and there's nobody who's a winner on all dimensions”

• Populism is always a reaction to the feeling that one is not being effectively represented in the political system, which maps onto the 'standing' dimension of equality—the sense across both left and right that one's needs are not being heard by those in power.

  “Populism is always a reaction to the feeling that one is not being effectively represented in the political system.”

• A leisure society would be desirable, but the world is not ready for it yet because there is an abundance of socially necessary and urgent work still to be done—above all addressing catastrophic global climate change, plus inadequate infrastructure and healthcare both abroad and within a crumbling America.

  “we're facing global climate change at catastrophic levels, we have to roll up our sleeves to get to work on that problem. There's plenty of work to be done, socially necessary, socially urgent work that we have to do.”

• The United States is the only rich country that does not guarantee paid vacation by law—whereas Denmark mandates five weeks plus holidays and most of France takes paid August off—and even American workers entitled to vacation often don't take it, partly from an internalized work ethic and partly from fear of being fired for not being visibly present, so Americans could work less to their benefit.

  “we're the only rich country in the world that does not by law guarantee paid vacations to everybody. You go to Denmark and everybody gets five weeks of paid vacation, and then a whole bunch of paid holidays on top of that”

• Anderson is working on a history of egalitarianism for which she found she had to go all the way back to humanity's hunter-gatherer ancestors.

  “I am working on a history of egalitarianism and I decided... I actually have to go back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”

• Social media companies bear significant responsibility for toxic public discourse because their algorithms appear structured to reward the worst behavior: users posting innocuous content get few clicks, but posting extreme content like QAnon conspiracies—even content they don't believe—rapidly attracts large followings and money, creating a perverse incentive that escalates people toward ever more extreme views.

  “they happen to post on QAnon or some crazy thing, and they don't even necessarily believe, but suddenly they have thousands of followers, and that's very seductive, so they post more and more extreme views”

• Making the world better requires improving democracy through better communication among citizens, because the current quality of public political discourse—full of insults, trolling, and mass shaming—is toxic and unhealthy, and only healthier communication will let people pull together to cooperate on the biggest problem, climate change.

  “I think we have to work at improving democracy, and that requires communication with our fellow... The quality of public... of political... is really, really bad. There's a lot of insults, trolling, mass shaming”

• The fact that today's richest people work extremely hard does not mean they are working in the original Puritan sense of promoting the welfare of fellow human beings; selling OxyContin and other opioids that addicted millions of Americans was extremely busy labor but was destructive rather than productive, so the social value of how money is made must be questioned in many cases.

  “it doesn't follow from that that they're working in the original work ethic Puritan sense, where work means actually promoting the welfare of your fellow human beings”

• Academics are the most privileged of all employees because they are granted extraordinary autonomy to think about whatever they like, a freedom that is extremely rare even among other professionals such as lawyers, who must take the cases they are given and generate revenue to remain partners.

  “academics are the most privileged of all employees, like our life is incredible because we're granted so much autonomy”

• A bullshit job, per David Graeber, is one so pointless or pernicious that even the worker cannot feel it is justified while having to pretend it is; Graeber estimated 40% of jobs in rich capitalist economies are bullshit jobs, a figure Anderson found informally corroborated when about 40% of her students raised their hands as having worked one.

  “he defined a bullshit job as a job that is so pointless or pernicious that even the person doing the job can't feel that it's justified, although they have to pretend that it is.”

Racial segregation operates as a reinforcing cycle generating economic disadvantage, unequal standing, and stigmatizing stereotypes that justify further exclusion.

• Racial segregation—where whites hoard opportunities to themselves—is the central feature generating all three dimensions of racial hierarchy: it produces economic disadvantage and unequal standing, which places black Americans in disadvantaged neighborhoods with high unemployment, which fuels stigmatizing stereotypes, which feed back to justify further exclusion in a reinforcing loop.

  “racial segregation, by which I mean the South's segregation of white people, where they're hoarding recording opportunities to themselves, is really a critical and central feature of all three dimensions of racial hierarchy.”