An essay called 'On the Idea of Equality' makes some important points. Equality is badly understood.
When I say, “One should not confuse equality with sameness,” my interlocutor frequently responds that such a banal truism is unworthy of articulation. I wish this were true, and that this moral principle were self-evident. But it is not.
Just a few days ago, the Atlantic published an essay skeptical of sex segregation in sports which concluded with the assertion that, “…as long as laws and general practice of youth sports remain rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior, young athletes will continue to learn and internalize that harmful lesson.” The unstated premise of this argument is that empirical claims about differences between men and women are also moral claims about the relative value (inferior vs superior) of men and women.
Equality is said in many ways, and as he points out two people may be equally valuable as moral beings without being equally good at basketball. That points up the fact that equality of moral value requires someone who has the right standing to value someone: in the Declaration's formula, the Creator stands in that relationship. God values everyone equally, and bestows dignity and rights in one motion and in the same way for everyone. That kind of equality is true equality.
In the absence of God, the majestic State or the Law has to do this work. But the law does not, empirically, value everyone equally. The Law exists to discriminate between the honest man and the thief, the murderer and the victim. Justice such as laws and states are even capable of are not forms of equality, but forms of balancing: taking life or freedom or property from one, and bestowing it on another. Even when this is done as justly as possible, it is an act of discrimination and differently-valuing. It can of course be done quite unjustly.
The author is not concerned about that.
At one time, many believed that humans were equal because they were equal “in the eyes of God.” Then Darwin and secularism arrived, and today many people no longer believe in a literal human creator. But that does not vitiate the force of the moral claim that humans are equal. In fact, most of us would be appalled by the assertion that, “Since we know that humans are just evolved creatures, they do not deserve equal moral consideration.” Our endorsement of metaphysical equality is not tethered to belief in a benign creator. This is why we can continue to celebrate the eloquent defense of human equality expressed in the US Declaration of Independence while embracing evolution.
It's a bigger problem than he admits. Evolution is what has given rise to all these inequalities, especially the heritable ones he mentions as central. If people who are mathematically and empirically un-alike are to be truly equals, the equality has to be a bestowal. There aren't many metaphysical candidates who stand in the right relationship to us all to be positioned to make such a bestowal, to have both the power and the right.
4 comments:
I believe Rush has a song about how the "trees are all kept equal by hatchet, ax, and saw." Which seems to be the way that the federal government (all national governments to an extent) seems determined to do it.
"Harrison Bergeron" was not supposed to be a how-to guide.
LittleRed1
That we want it to be true that people are naturally equal without their being a God to bestow that does not make it true. We can "endorse" the sentiment all we wish, but in the end it will all come down to whether your society acknowledges your equality. And almost certainly means you will be beholden to your government to give it to you.
We have lived under a government that generally does acknowledge our equality, largely on the basis of the religious beliefs of the founders. We have therefore come to believe this is a natural and universal state of affairs, which is an illusion.
I think I get where you are coming from but I tend to lean towards what I think AVI is saying. It wasn't so long ago that people invoked A Supreme Being in defense of the theory that far from all of us being equal, there was One Person ordained to rule over an entire polity.
The problem isn't that we don't believe in God but that we, or at least large numbers of us, have accepted the idea that physical manifestations of inequality are representative of metaphysical inequality in the opposite direction.
This dispute is even older than that Christopher B: it's Socrates' dispute with Protagoras over whether man, 'or some god,' is the measure of all things. What that god wants is not so much the issue as whether or not the divine is the right place to locate the metaphysical ground of morals.
The point I am trying to raise here is that God is the only actor who could bestow a true equality on such differential kinds of beings. If we try to prove human equality from human reason that only gets us to a 'rough equality,' i.e. not a true equality: we have more capacity to reason about the world than dogs, and thus more freedom; and in that way we are kind of all alike, but so imperfectly that some people are clearly not really able to do it and need to be restrained in some way. Others are imperfectly good at it, but sufficiently so as to be left free (but perhaps, some say, with regular 'nudges' in the right direction); others need no help from us, and it would be an affront to their rational dignity even to try to nudge them.
The author is right to say that the empirical and the metaphysical can and should come apart. What he fails to realize is that there is then no alternative but to have a metaphysics that achieves what he no longer trusts the empirical to judge.
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