  The idea of relating as equals can be construed in different ways. Samuel Scheffler suggests one specification when he writes that “we believe that there is something valuable about human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status” (Scheffler 2010, 225). The idea is that equality of rank, power, and status is both instrumentally valuable and valuable for its own sake. He immediately notes that such differences are ubiquitous in the social life of modern industrial democracies, so equality so understood is puzzling. If the ideal calls on us to tear down and completely restructure the social life of modern industrial democracies, it looks problematic. Why accept this demand? If one qualifies and hedges the ideal, so it is less revisionary, then the question arises, what is the basis for drawing these lines of qualification and hedge.