The Impartial Community: Aristotle and Rawls on Economic Inequality

Too often, dialogue on economic inequality fails to seriously consider the moral implications of economic inequality. This is unfortunate, because a conversation that does not situate economic inequality within a broader moral and political perspective must inevitably devolve to narrowly-tailored conceptions of economic welfare and growth or, worse still, unreasoned anxieties about too much or too little inequality. This intellectual impoverishment does not owe to a lack of thinking on this subject; economic inequality has fascinated political, economic, and philosophical thinkers for millennia. Two such thinkers are Aristotle and John Rawls. Most scholarship quite correctly views these thinkers as representing – perhaps even epitomizing – two separate and fundamentally different approaches to philosophy. For good reason: their respective accounts of virtue, metaphysics, history, science, and religion differ enormously. But on this subject, I argue, the two have a common framework for evaluating inequality. This similarity has much to tell us about the two thinkers – but so do their differences in motivation for and application of their common ideas. This paper’s claim is that Rawls and Aristotle both assert that impartiality – the ability to understand another’s perspective, and weigh all perspectives equally – is necessary to navigate inequality in the allocation of social goods. Moreover, they both understand successful political communities to be ones in which society’s members understand each other’s perspective, and accept the broader logic upon which society and its allocation of goods is based.Bachelor of Art