ABSTRACT
The idea that public policy should seek to render levels of human flourishing more equal might seem at odds with the lack of interest in equality of contemporary perfectionists such as Sher, who discusses the idea largely to reject it,6 or Raz, who as we noted in the last chapter, finds equality a misguided ideal. The perfectionist tradition is thought to focus on enabling great achievements for the gifted – promoting superman over the herd, as Nietzsche put it – rather than extending wellbeing to the many.7 At most, perfectionists are interested in equality for instrumental reasons, as a means of achieving perfection. Thus Galston contends that a conception of equality ‘is needed to move from the individual good to public institutions and policies.’8 Hurka suggests that egalitarian policy serves perfectionist goals, and thus perfectionism has a ‘strong but defeasible tendency to favour material equality.’9 The position I seek to advance, in contrast, begins with egalitarian premisses and then argues that what we seek to equalise is flourishing. The concept of egalitarian flourishing or egalitarian perfectionism might seem peculiar to contemporary ears. But there are historical precedents. Indeed, the entire nineteenth century egalitarian tradition has perfectionist assumptions. For the socialist aesthete Morris, there was no tension between perfectionism and egalitarianism.10 Morris’s design house – Morris, Faulkner and Company – sought to create ‘art for life,’ and much influenced by the art of the Middle Ages, looked to traditional manufacturing for an aesthetic beautiful in form, useful in practice, and fulfilling in its creation. This conception of art was a broad one, figuring in ‘all labour in some form or other.’11 Thus even before Morris became engaged in political debate, his aesthetic ideals, in their very emphasis on cooperative labour, artisans and decorative art, had a populist, and in some sense egalitarian, aspect.12
