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 Equality
reviewStuart WhiteChapter 1: The demand for equalityThe demand for equality is central to modern politics.Groups demanding equal rights (social, political, economic) have forced society to changetremendously since the 1700’s. The American and French Revolutions, Russian CommunistRevolution, and the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements all strove to make their members equal to the others in society.Expanding equality to new groups often causes undesirable changes to the society and canthreaten other values.Painful conformity, militarism and totalitarianism are sometimes needed to protect “equal”societies from unraveling. Liberty is therefore sometimes at odds with equality.This book will not consider human-animal equality or equality between humans across different points of time (multigenerational). Those are valid issues, but time and space constraints preventtheir discussion in this book.The demand for equality is almost always a demand for several specific things at once.Forms of equality:-Legal Equality*In large societies, laws must constrain and direct individual actions and relationships tomaintain order and to engender cooperation.*The government creates and enforces laws.*If a person is subject to the law, then they are a subject of the state.*Legal equality implies that all people within a polity’s borders are subjects. The law is notapplied differently to any person or group.*Moreover, if legal equality exists, all people enjoy the benefits of the law equally: Police protection and the quality of courts are the same in all areas, regardless of local wealth or race.Legal resources are spread equally.-Political equality*Implies that all subjects have an equal right and ability to influence politics, thereby givingthem the same ability to change the laws and their enforcement.*Subjects exercise their political power through the right to vote and to stand for office.*Meaningful participation requires some minimum level of intellect, so children and retarded people can be excluded from these rights. [But who decides what the “minimum level” is?Couldn’t this rule also justify the use of literacy tests at polling stations, which used, and stillwould, discriminate against blacks?]*Freedom of expression and assembly are required as supporting rights so as to allow people to be informed of problems that need government attention. The media also brings problems to theattention of government itself. [The media is also an important conduit for relatively impartialinformation on what the government is doing.][Important concept: The true exercise of rights requires knowledge of all ways in which therights may be used and all possible consequences of any decision.]*Wealth disparities affect subjects’ political power. For instance, a rich person could buy a lot of advertising to influence people with skewed information and affect some kind of politicalchange. A poor person might not even be able to take the time off from work to vote. Some1
 
advocates of political freedom therefore want to eliminate wealth disparities directly throughgovernment policies, or want specific restrictions like campaign finance reform that wouldremove money’s influence on politics. Opponents argue that such measures come at the expenseof other forms of liberty.-Social equality*Consists of status equality and the absence of domination.*Status equality means that no person is considered to occupy a superior or inferior station in lifethan another person thanks to occupation, wealth, sex, race, or any other characteristic.Institutions and individual people everywhere respect each other equally, and no one feels theneed to be servile to others, or is allowed a privileged position of superiority. Classes don’t exist.*The absence of domination means that no person is dependent upon another for survival, moneyor opportunities. For example, no one needs to keep a miserable job because otherwise they will be living on the street, and no wife must stay married because otherwise she will have no sourceof income.-Economic equality*The Industrial Revolution created huge and highly visible wealth disparities, which caused a backlash in the form of Socialism. Economic equality consists of four parts that are listed below.*The idea of making society into a meritocracy, where people would be free to move betweenoccupations and classes instead of being fixed in one from birth, was upheld by the Americanand French Revolutions. While this was an improvement upon the previous, rigid system, it soon became clear that meritocracy was imperfect since people were still born into differentcircumstances that strongly affected their potentials in life.*Land egalitarianism posits that it is inherently wrong for people to privately own property. Thiscreates a situation in which a small group of people might own every part of the Earth andtherefore completely control the lives of everyone else. Land should instead be consideredcommon property and should be state-owned, with landowners in fact leasing their parcels fromthe government and lease payments going into a common pool that would recompense all of society for the inconvenience of not being able to access all land.*Means of production egalitarianism was originated by Marx and Engels and extended the ideaof land egalitarianism to the manmade capital situated on the land. Instead of a rich elite (the bourgeoisie) owning all the capital, it would be held in common ownership for all the working people, who would equally share its profits.*Communism was the final evolution of means of production egalitarianism: All people wouldaccept that different members had different abilities and needs, and as such, workers would becompensated differently. This would not lead to the same problems produced by capitalistinequalities. Marx assumed that people would be naturally drawn to the types of work for whichthey were best suited, even without any monetary incentives. (Several important questions wereleft unanswered: Who would determine what skills were most valuable—markets or centralcontrollers? Would one’s claim to “needs” change if those needs resulted from personalirresponsibility?)-Moral equality*The state and all people should accept that any individual’s interests and beliefs are equallyvaluable as another’s. Policies that hurt one group at the expense of another should thereforealways be morally justified in some way. Rules—however consistently enforced—should besensible and fair.*All lives are equal in value and all people are entitled to a certain quality of life.2
 
*This causes controversy in deciding whether or not to extend equal rights to people livingoutside the country’s borders. While it is popular to claim that human rights should beuniversally respected, only a minority of thinkers—called “cosmopolitan egalitarians”—believethat wealth should also be internationally redistributed.Humanitarianism and egalitarianism are not the same thing: The former has limited aims thatstrive to end problems like hunger and disease. While doing such might require more reallocationof resources from the rich to the poor, this is merely a means to an end whereas egalitarianismholds it as an end in itself.Some human needs can be totally satiated. For example, at some point, a person is no longer malnourished and is no longer dominated by others. The quality can be intensified no farther.But why should we care about equality at all? How is it valuable to society?-Equality has instrumental value, meaning making people more equal in some respect makesthem happier or better off in some tangible way. For instance, promoting income equalitythrough taxes helps the poor a lot and hurts the rich a little, so net happiness increases. [Peopleare naturally satisfied once they hit a certain income.] One might also argue that income equalityis necessary for status equality, which again infers that the first has instrumental value towardsattaining the second. All types of equality empower the others.-Equality has intrinsic value, meaning people are naturally entitled to certain forms of equality,even if this produces no concrete benefits.-Status equality is valuable because it would improve the self-esteem and lifestyles of lower status people and allow them to lead freer and more productive lives once class concerns wereremoved. [But how much self-esteem, however ill-gotten, would it subtract from the well-off?What would be the net impact?] Status inequality is clearly unjust when people are consideredinferior due to race or sex.-Equality is not always beneficial. The process of making society equal in some way mightsimply drag everyone down to an equally miserable level of existence, a process called “levelingdown.” [For example, assume that half the people in a capitalist country make $100,000 and theother half makes $10,000. Communism is instilled, and the first half of the people lose their willto work since they can’t get ahead, and everyone ends up making $10,000. The country’s citizensnow have income equality, but no one is making more money than before. In fact, 50% of the people were just badly hurt by the switch. However, if the same scenario led to everyone making$15,000, half the people would be made better off, and it could be argued more convincingly thatCommunism helped the country.] This shows that equality is not the only societal concern.Efficiency [Pareto optimality] is also a goal. People strongly disagree over weighting thesevalues and hence over what type of world is most desirable. In fact, allowing inequality mightactually be more just than forcing everyone to be equal. History has shown that instilling incomeand status equality often require the severe curtailment of civil liberties, which most peopleconsider more severely unjust than living in an income-unequal society.Pure egalitarianism holds equality to be the supreme value, meaning equality must be pursuedeven at the expense of other factors like efficiency and civil liberties.Pluralist egalitarianism concedes that other considerations sometimes trump equality, and thatunequal systems can be more just than equal ones.It must be accepted that much inequality is beyond the control of individual people: No one hasany control over being born with some type of physical or genetic defect, being born into a poor country lacking opportunities, or being born into an abusive or neglectful home. Many thinkers3
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