My department’s “Future of the Past” podcast recently invited me to talk about my new book Learning to Be Fair. It was a good opportunity to bounce around some ideas about civic education, government efforts to regulate discussions of “equity,” and the durable paradoxes surrounding “fairness” that arise from various authors in the Greco-Roman tradition.
You can find the episode at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen in the player below:
My book Learning to Be Fair: Equity from Classical Philosophy to Contemporary Politics will arrive on bookstore and library shelves on December 10, and it’s now available for pre-order at your favorite retailers, including Bookshop.org and Amazon. Here’s the jacket blurb for a quick overview:
The language of “equity” saturates our contemporary culture. Human-resources departments lead workshops on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Progressive politicians advocate for “equity” in novel programs for housing and healthcare while their conservative counterparts decry “equity” as a revolutionary rejection of traditional notions of equality and freedom. By excavating texts from antiquity to the modern age, Learning to Be Fair undercuts the supposed novelty of “equity” and anchors it in the foundations of Western philosophy. Despite its newfound popularity (or infamy), in fact, the concept of equity stands as one of the oldest, most durable, and often most paradoxical principles of ethical and political thought. In Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara draws out the ancient origins of equity in classical Greek and Roman authors and traces their influence on lawyers, philosophers, America’s Founding Fathers, and even our contemporary culture. He shows how this history connects current debates about the role of equity to long-standing, unsettled questions about equality before the law and the possibility of teaching people to be good.
I’m happy to have had the opportunity to dig into this contentious terminology and provide some clarity about how and why we struggle with the ancient and modern ideas of fairness, equality, and the law. Here’s what some early readers have said:
This marvelously balanced, penetrating, and eminently readable interdisciplinary study of “equity” deftly grapples with the historical and linguistic complexity in the use of the word, and brings much-needed light into overheated contemporary debates about how to foster equity and equality in various cultural settings. The volume would be a welcome guide and companion not just for academics and students seeking to better understand the concept, but also for administrators, policymakers and legal professionals grappling with practical questions of when and how to bend the rules and for what purpose.
—Amy Uelmen, director for mission and ministry, Georgetown University Law Center, and lecturer in religion and professional life, Georgetown University
With impressive historical knowledge and moral insight, McNamara helps us move beyond the narrow confines of procedural justice to consider questions of substantive fairness. He shows us how the venerable concept of equity can provide guidance not only for today, but also for the future of our diverse and pluralistic societies.
—Cathleen Kaveny, Libby Professor of Law and Theology, Boston College
With Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara offers timely assistance to readers at every level who are struggling to understand the roots and sources of our present-day conversations about equity in the workplace, on our campuses, and in public life. Written in an accessible way that spares no effort to explore the richness of how our civilization came to understand and value equity, McNamara’s book belongs in the board room as much as the classroom. Every reader could profit from Learning to Be Fair as a guide to navigate these challenging conversations today–conversations McNamara assures us are as ancient as they are contemporary.
—Steven P. Millies, professor of public theology and director of the Bernardin Center, Catholic Theological Union
In the June issue of Commonweal, I document the rise of “equity” as a central term of contemporary politics and culture. Even if equity seems to have emerged as some novel notion in our political lexicon, it’s in fact one of the oldest, most canonical ideas in Western legal and ethical thinking. More specifically, it stems from the “ability to bend the strict language of the law” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and despite claims from pundits like Christopher Rufo, it has nothing to do with “identity-based Marxism”:
In short, Aristotle praises the rule of law—whereby our actions are regulated according to statutes rather than the whims of despots—but he worries that laws alone might sometimes work unfairly. At one point, he writes, “whenever the law makes a universal pronouncement, but things turn out in a particular case contrary to the ‘universal’ rule,” it is up to us to “rectify the deficiency by reference to what the lawgiver himself would have said if he had been there and, if he had known about the case, would have laid down in law.” In such an exceptional case, Aristotle wants us to attend to what we would call the “spirit of the law” rather than the “letter of the law,” and drawing on a memorable image, he urges us to think of “the soft, leaden rule used by the builders in Lesbos: the rule adapts itself to the configuration of the stone, instead of staying the same shape.” He hopes that in a similar way, a “decree adapts itself to actual events.” In Aristotle’s view, rules were made to be bent.
Legal equity, in other words, is not driven by “a specific political agenda but a general willingness to override defective rules,” and this ethical framework has carried that meaning for about 2,500 years. Read the rest at Commonweal‘s site.