Modern egalitarians follow Thrasymachus

Radical egalitarians confirm the suspicion, often stated here, that the demand for equality is based on the denial of objective truth. Feminist Ann Scales says: “Feminism does not claim to be objective, because objectivity is the basis of inequality.” Kimberle Crenshaw, a founder of critical race theory, describes that movement as “grounded in a bottom–up commitment to improve the substantive conditions” of minorities rather than in opposition to “the use of race … to interfere with decisions that would otherwise be fair or neutral.” As Albert W. Alschuler points out in First Things:

Legal scholars of both the left and the right have tilted from Socrates on the issue that marks the largest and most persistent divide in all of jurisprudence. In Athens, four hundred years before Christ, Socrates contended that justice was not a human creation but had its origin in external reality. Thrasymachus disagreed; he insisted, “Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 31, 2002 09:20 AM | Send