If society should treat its members as equals, how can they be unequal in the possession of some valuable goods? In this chapter, I develop a novel relational egalitarian answer to this question. I argue that relational egalitarians must hold that, whatever else distributive justice requires, it requires ensuring that persons have a sufficient, not equal, capability to function as equals in society. This is because directly pursuing equality of capabilities above the sufficiency threshold has the paradoxical effect of rendering individuals vulnerable to being singled out as ‘less competent’ agents, thereby creating a ‘pathogenic vulnerability’ to social disrespect. This, however, is inconsistent with the expressive demands of equal respect for persons. Therefore, at least a certain degree of distributive inequality is not only compatible with but also required by a commitment to the ideal of relational equality.