Jonathan Wolff - Loneliness, disability and social justice

A society of equals is one where no one looks up to anyone and no one looks down on anyone. No one is exploited, no one is dominated and no one is subjected to violence.

About Jonathan Wolff "I’m the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government in the University of Oxford.

I’m a political philosopher, and my research is largely about making connections between political philosophy on the one hand, and central questions in public and social policy on the other hand."

Key Points

• To judge the justice of our society, we should look at the wealth and income of the worst-off, and see if their wealth can be increased. • A society of equals is not so much about the distribution of resources but the way in which we relate to one another and the many ways in which we regard one another. • The alternative social model of disability says that we should change the world so that more people can fit into it rather than trying to change people to fit our world.

One of the main themes in my work over the years has been thinking about equality and inequality from the point of view of distributive justice. Coming from a well-meaning, middle-class, left-wing family, I always thought that great inequality was unjust, particularly the inequality of wealth. When I got to university as an undergraduate, I was pleased that this was one of the topics that I would be studying, just a few years after John Rawls had published his famous Theory of Justice. He argued that a just society is one where the worst-off are made as well off as possible. To judge the justice of our society, we should look at the wealth and income of the worst-off. We should see if the wealth of the worst-off can be increased without others becoming poorer than the worst-off people were before. In other words, we judge the justice of a society by how it treats those who are worst off.

This is a very appealing view, but it does allow inequalities. It says that if we need inequality to make the worst-off better off, we should accept that. Some people on the left argued that it is not right and that we should aim for greater equality, even if it means that everyone suffers. This debate continues. Should we allow incentives for the rich, and they would bring the poor with them – a rising tide raises all boats – or should we say no: what’s important is income equality, even if that makes everyone a little bit worse off than they might have been otherwise?