Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive theories fail to account for the importance of how institutions cause good shortfalls and, second, that they fail to account for the normative attitude of social and political institutions expressed in different ways of treating people. The article argues that the causal variant of the objection has only very limited reach, and endorses the expressive variant: the attitudes expressed by institutions in their treatment of persons, such as contempt or neglect, generate potentially unjust social relationships and hierarchies. This should be the focus of a relational egalitarian approach to social justice. The article proceeds to explain how it is possible that artificial agents such as institutions have attitudes and how these attitudes are not reducible to those of the individuals that sustain them, and argues that distributive theories cannot be so modified as to account for such attitudes. It concludes by indicating several directions for the development of more worked-out conceptions of relational equality on this basis.

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Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of self-respect that such theories ought to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness.

This chapter introduces the key features and motivations of liberal relational egalitarianism. It notes that social justice and social equality have mostly been treated as separate values in the history of modern Western political thought, and that contemporary liberal egalitarianism is traditionally thought to require a form of distributive equality. It then argues that weaving social justice and social equality together in an account of relational equality as an urgent and stringent demand of liberal social justice is therefore a novel project worth attempting. It goes on to outline the overall argument of the book and the contribution of each chapter, as well as the different literatures and rival theories it draws on, and concludes by delineating the social scenario it is a theory for: primarily, for a society characterized by a reasonably well-functioning institutional structure capable of organizing social cooperation by enabling and sustaining a complex division of labour.

IntroductionFollowing John Rawls's criticism of 'welfare state capitalism' (henceforth WSC), 1 a promising debate about the implications of Rawls's theory for the set-up of socioeconomic institutions has sprung up. This debate focuses mostly on the alternative to WSC proposed by Rawls: a 'property-owning democracy' (henceforth: POD).2 This article assesses Rawls's case against WSC and for POD, from both a normative and a methodological point of view. It points out several flaws in Rawls's critique of WSC, through a focus on an existing variety of welfare state -a Swedish-style universal welfare state (henceforth UWS) -which is relatively successful, both in terms of its normative merits (assessed on the basis of liberal egalitarian principles of social justice) and in terms of institutional stability and capacity for self-perpetuation. UWS is successful in these regards because it guarantees the continuous availability of a large range of essential goods to the vast majority of citizens, largely operating without means-tests in their allocation. Rawls's 'WSC', on the other hand, is modelled on a 'liberal', residual, welfare state which tends to provide only for the most disadvantaged, and largely draws on means-tests in doing so. In analysing this contrast, and drawing out its normative implications, the article identifies a way to achieve a better connection between liberal egalitarian theories of social justice and empirical research on socio-economic regimes in comparative political science: it illustrates that centring the discussion on the merits and shortcomings of the arguably best existing socioeconomic regime yields a sounder basis for developing and assessing proposals for how to go beyond it, where justice requires this. Journal of Applied Philosophy