Learning to Be Fair: Equity from Classical Philosophy to Contemporary Politics

The language of "equity" saturates our contemporary culture. Human-resources departments lead workshops on "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Progressive politicians promise "equity" in everything from housing to healthcare, while their conservative counterparts decry "equity" as a modern invention and a rejection of classical, Western culture's moral principles. Learning to Be Fair shows that nothing undermines that objection more than reading the foundational texts of Western moral philosophy.

Despite its newfound popularity (or infamy), the concept of equity is in fact one of the oldest, most durable principles of Western ethics. In Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara excavates the ancient origins of equity in classical Greek and Roman thought and traces their influence on lawyers, philosophers, America's Founding Fathers, and our contemporary culture. He shows how this history connects current debates about the role of equity to long-standing ethical questions about civil disobedience and the possibility of teaching people to be good.

Charles McNamara is the director of Greek and Latin Studies and a lecturer at the University of Minnesota. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich, Germany. Alongside his several academic publications, he has written for Commonweal, Lapham's Quarterly, and the Washington Post. He lives in downtown Minneapolis.