ABSTRACT
Professor Westen’s thesis about equality is not just that there are many different views about how we should or should not be treated equally, although that is an obvious problem posed by the use of the concept. ‘Equality’ is also a vacuous concept because any rule we might choose to live by achieves equality in that everyone to whom the rule applies is treated equally, simply by being subject to the same rule. This follows, says Westen, from the very meaning of the word. By ‘equality’ he ‘mean[s] the proposition in law and morals that “people who are alike should be treated alike” and its correlative, that “people who are unalike should be treated unalike”’.1 In order to say anything about equality that is morally interesting, Westen argues, we will have to say which similarities or differences are morally relevant or, in the jurisprudential terms he uses, which rights people (or a certain group of people) should have. Once we know that, he says, we know that ‘equality’ is otiose, and this is why Westen wants us to stop talking about it.2
