Photo by Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos It’s no accident that equality comes first among the ‘self-evident’ truths articulated in the United States Declaration of Independence. The claim that ‘all men are created equal’ serves there not simply as an abstract premise from which revolutionary consequences ought to follow, but as a concrete practical foundation on which the American colonists could claim to stand as equals with the greatest king and hold him to account. Still impressed by his own handiwork 50 years later, Thomas Jefferson even prophesied that the ‘palpable truth’ of equality enshrined in the Declaration would one day unite all of humankind.
Yet today, it’s evident that the word ‘equality’ means very different things to different people. What once seemed capable of providing common ground is now just another source of controversy. What explains this shift?
I suspect that the deceptively simple, conceptual language of ‘equality’ has itself played a substantial role. A better understanding of ‘equality talk’ – as the application of this language to human beings and their relations – might therefore shed some light on our predicament. Let’s begin by examining a group of people that generally prides itself on thinking (and speaking) more clearly than most: professional philosophers.
What are they doing when they talk about equality? Often, they’re saying something about human beings: about what we’re fundamentally like, and how we should be treated morally, politically and socially. When an academic philosopher says that ‘all people are equal’, she’s generally saying that, despite differences of race and gender, economic class or individual merit, every person is somehow the same in some fundamental respect(s).
While some philosophers will stress the human capacity for reason and moral agency, others emphasise our mutual vulnerability to suffering and violent death. Still, all generally agree that this sameness – whatever its underlying basis – ought to matter for our social and political arrangements, such that any persistent inequalities between human beings must require some justification or redress. But here, a non-philosopher might wonder why the professionals insist on using the technical language of ‘equality’ as opposed to something more straightforward like ‘sameness’?
One reason, I think, is that they are trading on the former concept’s mathematical resonances of quantitative precision and transcendent truth. Those resonances, in turn, make the problem of inequality seem relatively tractable – as something the existence of which can be measured, hence agreed upon. While other political values, like liberty, resist reduction to a common measure, the quantitative logic of equality thus promises an objective standard against which social progress can be judged.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
