Phillips follows Jamaican essayist Sylvia Wynter in locating the exclusionary potential of natural equality in sixteenth-century Spain. During the so-called “Valladolid debate,” two men were invited to dispute the rights of Spanish conquest over the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. The debate turned, in part, on whether the Americans were “equally” human with their European conquerors, or whether they were—as the humanist scholar, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, argued—subhuman “homunculi,” hence “natural slaves” (a central category in Aristotle’s Politics). His interlocutor, the Dominican friar and so-called “Apostle to the Indians,” Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Americans were equal to the Spanish in their capacity for Christian conversion; he was less sure about Sub-Saharan Africans. The implication, of course, was that Spanish rule must be made to serve the end of evangelization by, among other things, replacing Indigenous slaves with African ones.
Nevertheless, Las Casas is still hailed today among historians as providing an important step forward in the “progress” of equality. Phillips is less sanguine: as she sees it, this is just another example of the egalitarian ratchet ratcheting on. Meanwhile, Sepúlveda’s idea of equality as a matter of men’s embodied nature—including their sex and race—would eventually supplant Las Casas’s idea of spiritual indifference to outward forms. For Phillips (as for Wynter), both men “overrepresented” themselves and what they valued in the competing definitions of human nature according to which they justified the claims of other human beings to equal status. For Sepúlveda, it was the capacity for (European) civilization; for Las Casas, it was the prospect of (Christian) salvation. Mere humanity was not enough.
Phillips identifies the same exclusionary dynamic of “overrepresentation” at work in contemporary philosophical discussions of basic equality. These, too, turn on whatever features of humanity a theorist particularly values. For Rawls, it was “the sense of justice,” while for Dworkin, it was reason and moral agency. Yet, as Phillips observes, individuals “will inevitably possess [these and other characteristics] to different degrees.” This leads some philosophers to wonder whether equal status attaches to human beings as such, or only to the independent sites of moral agency we call “persons.” And if the latter, might it not also be the case that certain animals are entitled to “equal respect and concern”—while some human beings are not?