Video version of this article here: https://youtu.be/USzFwIjafoU
[image source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399]
Almost everyone talks about "equality" as though it is an obviously good thing, but to me equality seems at best neutral and at worst dangerous. "Equal" means "the same". If I say 2+2=4 I'm saying that having two sets of two things is the same as having four things. Similarly, to say that people are equal is to say that they're the same. Do you really want to live in a world in which everyone is identical?
Now, you'd probably say that when you talk about equality you don't mean it quite that literally, but it's not clear at all what people do mean by it. So, what I'll be doing today is going through four possible definitions of equality that people might support, and I'll be explaining why none are worth supporting.
Actual Equality
Some say that believing in equality means you literally think that people are equal. But, of course, people differ in intelligence, preferences, strength, height, health, skills, etc. They differ individual to individual and group to group. As the great Thomas Sowell puts it: “Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.”
A common response when I point this out is "but people are only different because of oppression!" Which, to start with, is wrong. There are a whole host of reasons people can differ that aren't oppressive, including (but not limited to) upbringing, place of birth, genetics, or just plain luck—just because one person has been luckier than another doesn't mean the luckier person is oppressing the less lucky one—but either way, it's beside the point. The fact remains that people are different.
Whatever the cause of the inequality, any suggestion of actual equality of people is simply a false claim about reality.
Equality Of Outcome
An alternative could be that when you say you believe in equality you don't mean that people are equal, rather you just mean that people ought to be equal... but in what way is equality a good thing? Presumably nobody actually wants people to all be identical clones of one-another. Instead, perhaps what is meant is that we all ought to be equally well off.
Let's take a simple example to see whether you really think this kind of equality is a good thing. Consider two men; one rich, one poor. How much of the rich man's wealth would you be willing to destroy in order to lessen that inequality? I'm guessing most people's answer is "none."
I'm not asking how much would you want to steal from the rich man and give to the poor man, mind you. I'm asking how much of the rich man's wealth would you be willing to destroy. If you are willing to steal from the rich man and give to the poor man, you may just think the poor man would value that wealth more than the rich man would; possibly because you think the rich man has so much he won't notice a small percentage of his wealth gone, but the poor man would certainly notice the large percentage increase to his.
What you're doing there is just trying to maximize total value for all involved, which is not the same as valuing equality. If you really think that equality itself is a good thing, you must be willing to give up some cost in terms of total value to reduce inequality, which is accomplished by destroying some of the rich man's wealth. If you are not willing to give up even a small amount of total value in order to reduce inequality in what sense can you really claim to value equality? When I see that someone is not willing to pay any cost for something, I say that person does not value that thing.
Alternatively, consider yourself deciding which of two friends to give a spare concert ticket to. It's true that the relative wealth of the two people you're considering may play some role in determining who gets it, but more important, will be the relative preferences of the two people. If it's a ticket to the wealthier friend's favorite band, while the other friend thinks that band is merely okay, you might decide it's better to give the wealthier friend the ticket, even though that will increase inequality!
Again, the important thing seems to be maximizing total value, not equalizing value. It's only our tendency to value stuff less the more of it we have that sometimes makes equality seem like it's a good thing. That tendency creates predictable situations in which equality and total value agree (you might consider our hypothetical about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor to be such an example). However, when we consider situations in which equality and total value disagree (our hypothetical about the concert ticket, for example), total value wins, therefore total value is what is actually important.
That said, even stealing from the rich to give to the poor in order to increase total value is a mistake. Consider the incredible improvements in the wealth of the average person over recent centuries.[1]
Ancient kings couldn't dream of the incredible bounty of exotic foods from all over the world now available to even the poorest among us in the local grocery store, or the fantastical electronic devices that global markets are even making available in the third world at this point. All this did not come from "redistribution"[2] of wealth, but from the creation of wealth. People started businesses and worked hard to find ways to increase production because they were able to get wealthy doing it, and in the process they made everyone wealthier. The extent to which you start "redistributing"[3] the profits away from those productive people, is the extent to which you destroy the very incentives that keep this glorious process going.
It's important to note that I'm making this argument with one hand tied behind my back: I'm ignoring any other potential moral issues with stealing. What I'm pointing out is that even if you think there is nothing inherently wrong with theft, wealth redistribution[4] in pursuit of equality ultimately reduces total value for everyone, and should still be opposed.
However, if you really value equality, none of that would convince you to stop supporting that theft. Maybe for you, it's worth it for everyone to become poorer, so long as the poor only become a little poorer while the rich become much poorer. At least then people would be more equal! If you are one of these people, you're probably too far gone for me to reach with this article. Yours is the ideology that results in ridiculous hiring quotas, where an organization will refuse to hire perfectly good applicants, merely because they are of a race that is "over-represented"; as though that matters. Yours is also the ideology that results in Pol Pot murdering everyone with reading glasses because people who can read seem like they might be upper class[5]. However, the majority, who aren't monsters, would probably say that I'm talking about "equality of outcome", whereas what they support is "equality of opportunity."
Equality Of Opportunity
Let me introduce you to Professor Adam Swift. Swift is someone who actually takes "equality of opportunity" seriously. To that end, he is very concerned about whether we need to stop parents from taking care of their own children too well, lest they give their children an unfair advantage above other children. The following quotes are from an interview with ABC[6]:
"What we realized we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children."
As a result of this reasoning, Swift vehemently opposes parents' right to send their kids to a private school.
"Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realize these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school."
He isn't as extreme as he could be, though. Despite the fact that it confers an "unfair advantage" upon your children, he will still allow you to read to them—although you should occasionally feel guilty for doing so.
"I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,"
It's worth noting here that reading to a child apparently has a larger effect on his future than sending him to a private school.
"‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,"
Remember, it is precisely because of this large benefit to your child, that you should feel guilty about reading to him. This is what even a moderate dedication to equality of opportunity actually looks like. If a child doesn't have parents who will read him bedtime stories, that is not something the child can get back. It's simply an opportunity he or she will never have.
To head off a possible objection at the pass here, if you'd say that the solution to this inequality should not be to prevent some parents from reading to their kids, but to give other children the opportunity to be read to, then recall the reasoning from our discussion of equality of outcome. If you would never say it's a good thing to reduce the net opportunities available to people in order to reduce inequality of opportunity, then your position is indistinguishable from someone who doesn't care at all about equality, but just wants people to be better off. To drive that home, let's say I do something nice to give an additional opportunity to a child who already has more opportunities than the average child. Assume this is at no cost to any other child. If you really believe in equality of opportunity you must be willing to say that I might have done something bad by improving a child's life.
In fact, all of the same reasoning from equality of outcome really applies here, because as a particular clever internet rabbit puts it: "Opportunity is just an outcome from a different reference point."[7]
Another objection to this I have heard is that the education and upbringing you are given somehow still doesn't count as opportunity. This is strange to me, because upbringing is a factor you have no control over that will affect whether you'll be considered for certain jobs. Isn't that a classic case of inequality of opportunity? Isn't that exactly how you'd describe the problem with basing your hiring decisions on race? It may be the case that compared to education, race is a less relevant factor to the ability to do a job, but that's sounding more like a defense of meritocracy than of equality.
Furthermore, even if you somehow make that leap from "equality of opportunity" to "meritocracy," it still seems like a hard thing to defend as a moral precept. The example that best drives that home is this: Is it okay for a father to hire his son at the family business? After all, that wouldn't be giving everyone an equal opportunity. That would be the employer hiring based on the employee's genetic connection to himself. Are you really willing to condemn the entire concept of a family business? Because if you're not, you don't really want equality of opportunity.
Equal Rights
Even those who see the problem with equality of opportunity, still usually fall back on "equality before the law" or "equal rights" as a last ditch effort to claim that they support equality. If this describes you, let me ask: do you support a world government? No? Then, do you believe that it is wrong for there to be any differences in the legal systems of different countries? No? Well then you don't believe in equal legal rights. Different governments with different legal systems will protect different rights and to different degrees, and the same government will treat different people differently depending on whether they're citizens.
However, what if, like me, you think the law should be privatized? Then you oppose the one world government and the national governments. You believe that the law between you and me should be a contract that our respective rights enforcement agencies sign.
This should deepen your opposition to equality of legal rights. Your and my rights enforcement agencies may have one contract with one another, while each may have different contracts with some third agency. Therefore the law between you and me is different from the law between you and him. You may believe there should be certain constants among those contracts. Perhaps they all should protect some basic property rights, for example. However, what determines the punishment you have the right to inflict on someone for certain violations? What exactly constitutes fraud? How bright does your neighbor's porch light have to be before it violates your property rights? These are all questions that may have multiple valid answers, and if you believe in a market for law, you believe that it is acceptable—nay—desirable that we have a multitude of competing and coexisting ways of drawing these lines.
Returning to the current governmental system, this is already true of international disputes. If you buy something from someone in another country, the laws governing that transaction will differ a little from the laws that would govern an otherwise identical transaction with someone in the same country.
One of the main reasons that I oppose the government, and one of the main reasons that most people oppose a one world government, is because we think that if there are multiple competing systems of law, which people have some ability to choose between, there will be a selection pressure on those legal systems in the direction of producing desirable laws. In the market system, that selection pressure is due to people switching companies to find the laws they want to live with, and in the national system it's due to people switching countries to do the same. Neither of these selection pressures could exist if everyone in the world had to have the same legal rights. In short, we believe that unequal systems of legal rights will result in better legal rights.
However, perhaps you believe that "equality before the law" doesn't mean that everyone in the world ought to have the same legal rights, perhaps you only think it means that the law should treat everyone under its jurisdiction the same. This, however is less equal rights, and more equal treatment, so it deserves its own entry.
Equal Treatment
I have even heard people say that equality means that we should treat people equally despite their differences. When you point out that sometimes the differences are relevant (for example, you should treat criminals differently from innocent people), they then add "well, unless the differences are relevant, of course." Which is the most pointless concept I've ever heard. Of course only relevant differences should change your treatment of someone. That's pretty much what relevant means! You may as well say you believe in the equality of objects because you treat all objects the same except for when it makes sense to treat them differently. Ridiculous.
If, in my section about equal rights, you were thinking "but equality before the law only requires that the law treats citizens the same," I submit that you are making this same mistake. The law treating citizens differently from foreigners is an inequality before the law, whether or not you consider it justified or not. The same goes for how the law gives different treatment to children and adults, people with criminal records and those without, or even guilty people and innocent people. If all you mean by "equality before the law" is that the law should treat people equally despite their differences unless the difference is relevant, then once again, you may as well be advocating the equality of all objects.
This doesn't mean that we should support everything that is usually opposed on the grounds of equality. Sometimes there are other arguments that lead to the same conclusion. Let's say you want to advocate against a company hiring based on the sex of the applicant. Rather than waffling out pointless tautologies about how you should treat everyone "equally" (with the asterisk of "except when you should treat them unequally"), try explaining why the sex of the applicant isn't relevant to the performance at this job, and why performance at the job is such an important factor to consider.
It's important to note that my alternative argument is not just a rewording of the "equality" argument. It's a change from a claim about what everyone "deserves" (allegedly, equal treatment) to a determination of what factors are useful to consider in a specific situation. The focus should be on what the job entails, why it's important that the job gets done well, and why the factor being used right now isn't useful to that end. It's a practical argument, not a moral one.
Now, my alternative argument wouldn't work if the man making the hiring decision simply preferred to work with people of a specific sex, and that preference for him outweighed the loss of efficiency caused by the sex-based hiring policy. In such a case, the answer is that the sex-based hiring policy is the correct one to take. If you disagree, feel free to provide your argument; but it'd better not rely on the premise that "we should treat people equally", because no, we shouldn't.
Conclusion
It's troubling that so many put so much effort into finding strange ways to be able to say they believe in equality. It's like they aren't sure what it means, but they know that our society has decided it's good; and so they do mental gymnastics to justify supporting it.
Many of you will right now be thinking that you have some other, subtler concept of equality that you support, but at this point I have to ask why you'd want to call it equality. Surely there is a better way of describing whatever you advocate for than a word that—if understood in the most straightforward of ways—is a defense of those who want you to feel guilty for reading to your kids, and even for those who want to kill anyone wealthy enough to afford reading glasses. Doing mental gymnastics to justify saying that you support equality is not a worthwhile pursuit. Even if you succeed, all you will accomplish is to provide cover for those who have a much more sinister, yet much clearer idea of what that word means.
So let us say what we mean. People are not equal, and there is no virtue in trying to make them that way. Instead of working to equalize the world, let's just work on improving it.
By Danny Duchamp
Data for GDP per capita chart: https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf
theft
stealing
even without the scare-quotes it's still theft
Pol Pot killing the bespectacled: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399—Whether or not you think that their belief in equality was really their motivation here, the point stands that equality, if applied consistently, is a defense of these killings.
Professor Adam Swift speaking to ABC: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058
You should follow Bones the Rabbit (BTRBT_) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTRBT_/status/1292347851079467021
