Sovereign Virtue

"I really like this book a lot. Even though it’s not the best-known, big philosophical book in this regard, I think putting the value of equality front and centre really expresses progressive politics in the right way. People sometimes feel that there is a disjoint between economic issues on the one hand, and social and cultural politics on the other. That these are in tension with one another, or that there is some kind of trade-off between them. One of the main messages of Dworkin’s concept of equality is the idea that government needs to be equally concerned with the welfare of everybody. It sounds almost banal. But actually it has quite radical implications for what constitutes a fair society and a just political order. OK. So we’re having this very intense debate about the budget right now. There’s a lot of talk about taxes and a lot of talk about spending programmes, the consensus now being that the retirement age for social security will have to be raised. If you really drill down and look at it, what does it mean to raise the retirement age for social security? You see that for some people, it’s actually a relatively modest change. We are living long lives nowadays, thanks to advanced medicine. We have comfortable jobs, we’re bloggers or lawyers or whatnot. But for other people – a substantial minority of the population – who have low income, much lower life expectancy, who are doing more physical labour and have much worse career prospects, it’s a giant change. For some of the worst-off people it’s a very real blow to their living standards. So if your starting point is “I’m seriously considering the interests of everybody equally”, then this idea – which now passes as common sense in Washington – suddenly starts to look quite horrifying. There is a consensus around this small change, but it’s a change that has a drasticallydifferential impact on people, with the most negative impact on the most vulnerable."