Educational Justice as Respect Egalitarianism
Krassimir Sojanov
The goal of this paper is to identify and justify a normative principle that allows for an identification of inequalities incompatible with educational justice. To reach that goal, three alternative versions of egalitarianism are discussed: luck egalitarianism, threshold (minimalist) egalitarianism, and respect egalitarianism. Respect egalitarianism can be closely linked to the model of epistemic justice, which was recently the subject of intensive, far reaching discussions in the field of philosophy of education. This paper argues that the approaches of both luck egalitarianism and threshold egalitarianism are inadequate to satisfy the aim of this paper. Luck egalitarianism entails the “bottomless pit problem” that seems to be conceptually and politically unsolvable. Additionally, luck egalitarians tend to interpret education as a positional, distributive good whose primary value is extrinsic. This stance ignores that education is foremost concerned with the growth of knowledge—a non-positional good whose worth is primarily intrinsic. On the other hand, threshold egalitarians do not offer a conceptual means of discriminating between just and unjust educational inequalities that lie above the capability threshold required by individuals to participate in the political life of society and/or to live a life of dignity.