ABSTRACT
In the twelth century the corpus of Roman law was recovered and a critically ordered edition of some of the enormous mass of cannon law texts appeared in the Decretum of Gracian. For the first time the Medieval monks had access to two great bodies of law, covering worlds both sacred and profane. Equality of civil rights, or of human rights or of well-being, or of opportunity, or of income, or of resources are all intelligible ideas, but none of them is abstract enough to be plausible as the, or a, foundational principle of equality. Much of concern about promoting equality is expressed in terms of prohibiting discrimination. Some groups of people are treated as inferior: a certain race or gender or class or caste. They are in fact equal in morally relevant ways, so they should be treated equally.
