Opacity Respect, Bureaucracy and Philanthropy

In ‘Bureaucratic respectful equality’, Christopher Nathan puts forward two challenges for the author’s claim that basic equality can be grounded in a form of ‘opacity respect’ appropriately shown by the state towards citizens. According to the first challenge, this account is less powerful than the author supposed, inasmuch it does not rule out any equalizandum of distributive equality as long as that equality is pursued by individuals rather than by the state. According to the second challenge, the account is, alterna- tively, so powerful that it threatens absurdity, because it interprets individual egalitarian action as being carried out on behalf of the state and therefore rules out many of the normal, everyday assessments individuals make of each other’s capacities. The article responds to each of these challenges in the light of a clarificatory distinction between two kinds of ‘dualist’ interpretation of basic equality: a ‘state only’ account that requires opacity respect only in relations between the state and citizens, and a ‘twofold’ account that requires individuals to show opacity respect for others’ basic agential capacities and the state to show opacity respect also for certain non-basic agential capacities.