Solidarity as a Virtue of Equality

Eudaimonistic virtue ethics has an equality problem: virtuous character is compatible with denying everyone’s fundamental equality. This problem is glimpsed in traditional objections such as the charges of egoism and conventionalism. Julia Annas responds to these challenges by examining the issue of slavery and abolitionism. I rebut Annas’s response and argue that standard eudaimonistic accounts cannot overcome conventionalism because they lack an account of fundamental equality. However, the equality problem can be resolved by incorporating a standalone virtue of solidarity, understood (following David Wiggins) as coequal membership of the “party of humankind.” Notwithstanding Wiggins’s deontological framing of solidarity, I argue that this conception works better in a virtue-ethical context because it accommodates Leonard Harris’s “insurrectionist” challenge. Moreover, building on Liz Gulliford and Robert Roberts’s theory of the virtuous character, I argue that a virtue of solidarity does important work in unifying the virtues and connecting virtue to flourishing, two essential aspects of eudaimonistic theories. A virtue of solidarity provides, not the “root” of the ethical, but part of its point.