Justice, respect, and treating people as equals

Some believe that the ideal of social equality provides us with a very different way of thinking about justice to approaches which start from the question of how goods should be distributed among people. But insofar as this ideal provides a vision of a society of equals—a society whose members have equal standing because they are treated as equals, not only within its institutions and practices but also by each other in their ordinary interactions—there are grounds for supposing that it takes us beyond what justice alone requires of us in our treatment of one another, encompassing a broader ideal of civic friendship or respectful behavior