ABSTRACT
The peculiar and preponderant fact that marks the ages as its own is the equality of condition; the ruling passion of men in those periods is the love of this equality. From John Locke's theory of "sensationalism", according to which all our ideas are derived from the senses, Voltaire and Condillac develop an idea of moral pragmatism that comes close to David Hume and Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism: all that is useful to man is good and right. In archaic societies, inequality was determined by physical strength: the strongest and bravest men ranked higher with respect to the weak, to women and to slaves. Quoting Aristotle, Alfred Schtz recognises that equality and inequality are relational notions, and have to be defined in terms of the domain of relevances to which they pertain. This would seem to confirm that the issue of inequality is of a social nature and, therefore, it must be resolved in this context.
