Abstract

Since ancient times, equality has been a highly controversial moral and political concept. The most insightful conception of equality treats it as an essentially contested container concept symbolizing and organizing an entire ethico-politico conceptual field, in rivalry with other conceptual fields whose container concepts are liberty and the excellent society. ;A reliable philosophical method for evaluating the objective preferability of these rival ethico-political ideals is a form of the method that Rawls and Daniels have called "wide reflective equilibrium," modified so that a realistic conception of the person as a person-in-community and as a bearer of substantive human dignity functions as a "stake in the earth" for theorizing, and also modified to require that a feasible ethico-political ideal must arise out of and be useful in positively transforming shared moral and political experience. When the assumptions of the three rival schools of politico-metaphysical thought concerning the nature and status of the person are compared, a realistic conception of the person is found in only one: the communitarian school. Thus, only the communitarian school of thought can produce a feasible moral and political ideal. ;A sketch of a communitarian ideal of community life identifies three functions that are essential to the flourishing of person-in-community: provisioning to meet both basic needs and various persons' differing prerequisites for flourishing, organization and governance, and education. The substantively equal flourishing of community members depends upon their playing a substantively equal role in determining how their community will fulfill these functions, as well as their experiencing substantively equal treatment in the implementation of these plans. Both of these aspects of community life must be guided by a communitarian ethics, which is socio-systemic, ecosystemic, and founded upon the understanding that the substantively equal dignity of all community members must be taught and realized through the community's ethico-political language-games. Such a communitarian ideal is an egalitarian ideal, and it holds promise of becoming a feasible ideal with further development and use in ethico-political practice. ;How this ideal would guide the American polity's decision process concerning three contemporary controversies over sex equality is explored in an appendix