Humanity and Moral Equality. Editor’s Introduction.

ll human beings are morally equal. The former statement is both a platitude and deeply counterintuitive. It is a platitude insofar as most if not all political philosophers working within a broadly defined ‘liberal’ tradition would accept it as true. It is also a platitude insofar as some kind of interpretation of the idea that human beings are morally equal to one another seems to be embedded in many of our moral norms and political practices. Moral equality of all human beings is something we simply take for granted, a background feature of the moral landscape we occupy. To see this, imagine how you would react to a solemn political document that started with a statement to the effect that persons are created morally unequal, or to legislation that took for granted that some citizens are morally inferior to others. At the same time, the statement is deeply counterintuitive because one thing that we know for sure from our lived experience and from theoretical and scientific reflection is how different human beings are. We vary in our physical appearance and characteristics and, most importantly, we seem to be radically diverse with regard to our intellectual and moral faculties. If the moral landscape we occupy is one of moral equals, much of our lived experience concerns the unequal attributes and features we possess as distinct human beings. In this essay, I shall briefly summarise the other pieces in the special issue. I will then move on to highlight what I take to be one of the most important intellectual contributions made by Sangiovanni’s work. Finally, I will highlight what I take to be an important problem and suggest a non-trivial alteration to Sangiovanni’s theory that might resolve it.