Abstract
Post-Arawlsian egalitarianism has been shaped by two main currents. Distributive egalitarians, firstly, maintain that a just society is one in which everyone receives their fair share (Sen 1979; Dworkin 1981; Arneson 1989; Cohen 1989). Most of the debates within this first camp have focused on determining the good X central to egalitarian justice: opportunities, primary goods, resources, well-being, or capabilities. The second current of contemporary egalitarianism is relational. Relational egalitarians argue that we need to go beyond the distributive paradigm to better envision equality (Young 1990; Anderson 1999; Scheffler 2003). Instead of focusing on the possessive relationship between a person and his or her possessions and the comparative relationship between individuals, relational egalitarians encourage us to examine the different ways in which institutional contexts and unequal modes of relationship influence our positions. They encourage us to broaden the parameters we take into account when thinking about equality: beyond goods and their distribution, we need to consider respect, recognition and the absence of oppression and domination. They invite us to understand justice as the establishment of communities whose members see and treat each other as equals.
My approach to equality is fundamentally influenced by relational egalitarianism. My first book, Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals (OUP, 2021), applies notions of relational egalitarianism to justice across age groups and generations. I demonstrate that issues of age and temporality highlight the need for a relational component in egalitarian justice. Nevertheless, the notion of a relationship of equals is somewhat opaque. Progress is needed to develop theories of relational egalitarianism that are as precise as some distributive theories once were. This is the subject of my new book project, provisionally entitled Inferiorized. The book adopts a negative strategy: I study the unequal modes of relation that we have reason to avoid, and draw from them a positive proposal of what relations of equality entail.
Written at the crossroads of philosophy and the social sciences, the book presents a typology of the most serious and common modes of inferiorization, from infantilization and objectification to demonization and animalization. It offers precise definitions of these "technologies of debasement" (Chamayou 2008), highlighting their specific features, their social function and the public policies with which they are often associated. I focus on a variety of historical and contemporary cases, from the demonization of immigrants and welfare recipients, to the infantilization of the elderly, to the animalization of Tutsis during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The book's most important philosophical contribution is the development of a new theory of relational equality. My contribution to the social sciences is a precise typology that can be mobilized to identify and measure social inequalities. To this end, I am collaborating with sociologists and economists at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequalities to create a new relational measure of inequality based on my theorization.
At the Collège de France, I plan to present a new chapter in my book project on what I call "trashification" - a form of objectification in which individuals are perceived as waste and treated accordingly. Given that waste has a negative value and must be discarded or hidden away, trashification represents a particularly extreme form of objectification. Drawing on contemporary examples and existing theories of objectification, I clarify the specifics of this mode of inferiorization. My starting point is the very common slur of "white trash" and the trashification of poor whites in the USA. This dominant narrative is discussed by author Cedar Monroe, who grew up in a poor community in Washington state: "Poor whites, always pushed west as the vanguard of land acquisition by corporate interests, were finally pushed as far west as possible. There, many of us were dumped, just like the trash heaps that surround the tent cities that stretch along the coast. Trash people living among trash: such is the dominant narrative of our lives." (Monroe 2024).
