The Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical Model of Morality

I made a comment on Matt's post, which hasn't shown up yet. I didn't save it, and it disappeared as soon as I submitted it, so if it doesn't show up in a while I'll try to reconstruct it and maybe post it here.

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Anyway, my main response was to insist on the importance of scapegoating to moral thinking. The demand for equality must always involve scapegoating--there's someone preventing the desired and natural equality from being realized. The imagined equality is in fact realized through scapegoating--everyone is equal in relation to this enemy. Scapegoating is also always against the center--even when the occupant of the center leads it. The claim implicit in scapegoating is that the center has been usurped by someone "behind the scenes." So, discussions of morality need to include the resistance to scapegoating, which involves differentiation and pedagogical relations that allow for imperatives from the center to be distributed in a way so that no power is hidden.