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Chris Bertram interviews Michael Walzer. Quotable:

Elizabeth Anderson has recently asked the following hypothetical question: 'if much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?' How do you view current philosophical work on equality, especially with respect to its relevance for the left?

Walzer: I think that Anderson's article is right on target. I agree with many of her positive arguments, but I am especially sympathetic to her critique. She is right to say that much contemporary philosophical writing about equality fails to address or even to recognise 'the concerns of the politically oppressed' and the actual 'inequalities of race, gender, class, and caste.' Maybe there is a natural disconnect between academic philosophy and political struggle, and maybe it is a good thing if philosophers are disengaged, looking on from afar. I don't want to argue that academic work is the same as work in the political arena. Still, there are reasons that we are interested in equality and inequality, and Anderson is right to insist that philosophers today don't always have a good grasp of those reasons. There are, however, contemporary writers whose grasp is very good indeed: consider the work of Ian Shapiro (Democratic Justice), Anne Phillips (Which Equalities Matter?), Charles Beitz (Political Equality), David Miller (Principles of Social Justice), and Iris Young (Inclusion and Democracy). It is interesting that these people are not working in philosophy departments; they are political theorists and feminist theorists, and they take their starting point from politics-on-the-ground.

For myself, I think that one great mistake of contemporary academic philosophers, starting with Rawls himself, is the claim that our natural endowments are 'arbitrary from a moral point of view' and should not be allowed to have effects in the social world – or, better, the effects they have should never be philosophically ratified. As Rawls wrote, we have to 'nullify the accidents of natural endowment.' This puts philosophy radically at odds with ordinary morality. Sometimes, of course, that is a useful conflict, but in this particular encounter, philosophy does not fare well. Our natural endowments make us what we are, and what we are necessarily has consequences in the social world, and some, at least, of these consequences must be legitimate. John Rawls deserved the honours he won by writing A Theory of Justice – even if his intelligence was an accidental effect of the natural lottery. Beautiful men and women may not deserve the sexual and marriage offers that they get (we have different, but not entirely different, ideas about intelligence and beauty); still, they cannot be obliged to share their wealth or, as Phillipe Van Parijs has suggested, to compensate the losers in love. This last is one of Anderson's most telling examples, and she goes on to point out that those of us who are not beautiful have never organised to demand such compensation. There is something to learn even from political struggles that never happened!