Egalitarian perfectionism: A (marginally) Girardian critique

Taking early advantage of what appears to be Charles Taylor's attempt to lift the "embargo" on the work of Rene Girard ( The Scapegoat; Les origines 200n.23), I criticize Christine Sypnowich's efforts to use "perfectionism" for "egalitarian" ends from a broadly "anthropological" point of view. These (really very modest) arguments appear at the end. The greater part of the paper is given over to distinguishing Sypnowich's "egalitarian" perfectionism from the "liberal" perfectionism articulated in Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom. The aim is to show that Raz and Sypnowich have in fact significantly different understandings of what it means to be an autonomous person, and that these differences make a difference to the practical conclusions they draw. The fact that they favour sharply contrastable versions of perfectionism enables me to present my "anthropological" arguments---essentially revolving around the human disposition to "envy" or "invidious" comparison---in a way that shows them to be (potentially?) damaging to Sypnowich's position but not to Raz's.