POSTONED: ILPP: The Duty to Treat Others as Equals: Who Stands Under It?

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO THE CURRENT CORONAVIRUS SITUATION

This event is organised by the Institute of Laws, Politics and Philosophy (ILPP)

Speaker: Sophia Moreau (University of Toronto)

About the paper:

This is Chapter Seven of my forthcoming book, Faces of Inequality. The chapter focuses on the moral and legal obligations of governments and private individuals to treat people as each other’s equals. I consider several arguments for the claim that governments owe those whom they govern a duty to treat them as equals. I then turn to the duties of individuals, and I argue that we do not acquire a moral duty to treat others as equals only when we occupy certain institutional roles, as many scholars have supposed. Rather, we always have a moral obligation to treat others as equals, in at least the senses explored in this book: we must not unfairly subordinate some to others; we must not infringe their right to a particular deliberative freedom; and we must not deny them access to a basic good when it is in our power to give it to them. I explain why this obligation is not too demanding, and I distinguish it from a duty to give equal concern to everyone’s interests in one’s deliberations (which I argue we do not stand under, as private individuals). Lastly, I argue that there are often nevertheless good reasons for the state not to use anti-discrimination law to regulate decisions made in more personal contexts —but that even when there are such reasons, there are many other ways in which the state can help to create the conditions under which people can relate to each other as equal

Please note that the time allocated for this seminar will be devoted to discussion of the paper which will be circulated a week before the scheduled date.

About the Institute:

The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3.

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