Published 2000 (ISBN 1 902488 07 5) Price £14.95
A monograph by John Wilson with a foreword by the Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. Tony Blair MP. It seeks first, to develop a coherent moral conception of equal human worth, and secondly, to outline the main features required in a social setting if it is to give due recognition to each person’s equal worth. To say that each person is of equal worth is to say that each person has an equal value in each of the four dimensions of need, action, potential and meaning. This conception gives rise to six social ideals: those of sufficiency, equal opportunity, fairness of outcome, social equality, political equality, and a freedom from domination by others. Each of these receives a four-dimensional analysis. The discussion applies this framework to a wide range of social policy issues, extending to such matters as freedom of information, devolution to Scotland and Wales and residential care as well as to the more obvious issues of economic inequality and social exclusion. The author takes issue with the meritocratic approach to fairness, stresses the importance of power to a full understanding of equality and suggests that equality must have some bearing on the relationship of individuals to corporate bodies as well as on the relationship of individuals to one another.