Elizabeth Anderson and justice as a social relationship

Second, citizens are entitled to fair opportunities to develop their talents to compete for positions of authority and jobs that pay more than the minimum to which they are entitled under the first principle. A group that is denied such opportunities, although its members have the potential to hold such positions, has been relegated to an inferior status, confined to menial and servile occupations" (p.19). The profound reason for demanding such rights is not so much related to an abstract equality of outcome or opportunity. "These two types of claims," Anderson continues, "are necessary to overcome the two dimensions of segregation: the exclusion of one group from contact with another and contact only on the basis of subordination" (p. 20). It is not about possession, but about public dignity.

The third pillar of Anderson's theory is the notion of 'non-domination', which allows her to recompose a fracture often taken for granted: that between freedom and equality. The idea that more equality means less freedom, Anderson argues, stems from a reductive and simplistic conception of both. Taking up the republican tradition, Anderson defines unfreedom as the condition of subjection to the arbitrary will of others. "To be unfree is to be subject to someone else's arbitrary will" (The Imperative of Integration, 2010, p. 7). But this is already a relational definition based on the concept of hierarchy. To be dominated, in other words, means to be in an inferior position, to be dependent on the permission of others, not being able to say no without disproportionate consequences. This is why Anderson can state the thesis that 'From a relational perspective, social inequality and the absence of freedom are equivalent and become the same thing' (p. 8). Freedom and equality are not in tension with each other, but co-implicated. There is no freedom where there is structural subordination and there is no equality where someone can exercise arbitrary power without accountability. Non-domination, therefore, requires accountability, and accountability is an inherently interpersonal process. When economic or political elites are socially isolated, they can ignore the effects of their decisions because there will be no one to hold them accountable. This is why equality is not just an abstract principle, but a democratic practice of interaction.

It is here that Anderson's perspective helps us to illuminate our present. Examples are not lacking, even in the Italian context. One thinks of the increasingly stringent conditionality mechanisms that accompany access to income support measures: opaque bureaucratic obligations, repeated checks, threats of forfeiture, public narratives that systematically insinuate the suspicion of abuse on the part of the usual 'furbetti'. In these cases, the problem is not only the economic adequacy of the benefit, but the institutional relationship that is established between the giver and the receiver: an asymmetrical relationship, marked by forced deference, in which the citizen is treated as a potential culprit before being a rights holder.

A similar dynamic runs through large portions of poor and hyper-flexible labour. Workers who are formally free, but substantially blackmailable. Autonomous only on paper, but dependent on platforms, contracts or subcontracting chains that can revoke opportunities and income without explanation and without responsibility even with just a message on Whatsapp. Here inequality is not only expressed in low wages or contractual precariousness, but in the power structure that makes it impossible to say 'no' without paying an exorbitant price. It is precisely this impossibility of being 'eye to eye' that, in Anderson's perspective, transforms economic inequality into a relationship of domination.

But the same logic also emerges in areas that should embody civic equality in an exemplary manner. One thinks of public healthcare, where formal universalism increasingly coexists with unsustainably long and socially differentiated waiting lists. Those who have economic or relational resources can circumvent the wait; those who do not have them are forced to postpone or give up. Inequality does not only concern the outcome of care, but the position in which the citizen is placed. Not as an interlocutor holder of a right, but a subject who can do nothing but wait and endure.

Something not too dissimilar happens in schools. Here, too, equality of opportunity is often proclaimed but does not always materialise in practice. 'Voluntary' contributions, implicit fees, early guidance and differentiated expectations produce self-reinforcing unequal paths that generate inequality and exclusion. The point is not just who gets ahead, but who is implicitly educated to stay one step behind, not to aspire, not to bother.

The case of the ICE agents in the United States, then, is a true paradigmatic example of what Anderson means by institutionalised domination and humiliation. Raids on workplaces or in front of schools, families forcibly separated, arbitrary detentions, the blatant exercise of broad discretionary power over people with no effective means of challenge or defence. It is not just a matter of strict law enforcement, but the systematic production of a hierarchical relationship in which certain individuals are reduced to objects of control, deprived of the status of civic interlocutors. It is here that non-domination ceases to be an abstract ideal and becomes a clear and unequivocal criterion of political judgement.

From the combination of relational egalitarianism with a critique of the moralisation of disadvantage and the addition of the notion of non-domination, emerges a conception of justice that is both demanding and profoundly concrete. Demanding, because it is not content with mitigating the worst outcomes of the market or distributing ex post compensation; concrete, because it looks at the everyday workings of institutions, administrative practices, and power relations that run through people's ordinary lives. A society is just, for Elizabeth Anderson, when it succeeds in preventing economic vulnerability from turning into civil inferiority, when need becomes dependence, when public aid is conditional on deference and generates shame. The decisive political question, then, changes radically. It is no longer, or not only, how much redistribution we can afford, nor how strictly we must distinguish between merit and fault, responsibility and misfortune. The central question becomes another: how much hierarchy are we willing to tolerate without emptying the democratic promise of equality between citizens from within. Because every time an institution forces someone to prove that they are worthy of a right, to justify their existence, to undergo humiliating controls in order to gain access to basic goods, that promise is broken, even if the procedures are formally legal.

In this sense, Anderson's perspective offers a particularly valuable yardstick for our present. In societies marked by poor work, conditional welfare, unequal public services and increasingly invasive control practices, injustice is not only manifested in the lack of resources, but in the systematic production of asymmetrical relationships. Citizens who have to ask permission, justify themselves, wait. Workers who cannot say no. Students and patients who soon learn not to demand too much. Migrants reduced to administrative or judicial paperwork. In all these cases, the problem is not only distributive, but eminently political.

Equality is not an abstract ideal but a fragile social practice that must be built and defended every day through institutions capable of recognising people as interlocutors, not suspects; as citizens, not as beggars. Justice, in this sense, does not demand more compassion, but respect. It does not promise to make everyone equal in results, but to guarantee everyone the opportunity to live, work and participate in common life on an equal footing.