Today, everyone seems to be fighting for “equality”. But what does it mean to say that everyone is equal? The answer below is offered by the Dutch philosopher Thomas R. Wells.
“It does not mean that everyone has (or should have) the same amount of nice things, money, or happiness. Nor does it mean that everyone’s abilities or opinions are equally valuable. Rather, it means that everyone has the same – equal – moral status as everyone else. It means, for example, that the happiness of any one of us is just as important as the happiness of anyone else; that a promise made to one person is as important as that made to anyone else; that a rule should count the same for all. No one deserves more than others – more chances, more trust, more empathy, more rewards – merely because of who or what they are”.
This ideal of equality is a point on which pretty much all moral philosophers agree, and it is also the ideological foundation for liberal states. In the last centuries, much progress has been made in realising it in institutions like universal suffrage, the rule of law (where justice is portrayed wearing a blindfold), and impersonally (bureaucratically) administered social insurance systems. But this equality revolution remains an incomplete and fragile achievement. It is in perpetual conflict with our all too human moral psychology, which evolved to manage the micro-politics of small groups and is highly focused on personal relationships and social status; with assigning privileges rather than recognising rights.
Who you are known to know still counts for far too much in how we get treated. Within the state and between the state and those it governs, personal relationships are much less significant than they used to be after a centuries-long effort to redescribe them as ‘corruption’. But they are merely down; not out.
In the day-to-day functioning of the bureaucratic organisations essential to modern society, relationships still matter, because they matter to people. They also persist at the top, in the mutually self-serving reciprocity between donors and lobbyists and politicians, although generally unofficially and on the margins. Occasionally, one also sees them breaking through into the direct treatment of individuals by the state. However, this challenge to the equality revolution, though real, is well known, and is the focus of much scrutiny and resistance.
Another challenge – the connection of social to moral status – has gone far less recognised, and may even have grown worse under the guise of ‘meritocracy’. Consider what happened around Covid. The most dangerous jobs were those deemed essential, and were done by people of low social status, such as factory workers.
When we link people’s social ranking to their moral value, we systematically mistreat them. Some get much less than the merits of their case should deserve. Prisoners get less access to basic healthcare because they are taken to be less deserving, and so their needs count for less than a real person’s. Low status victims of sex crimes are taken less seriously by the general public, as well as by police and judges; are forced to bear a heavier burden of proof if they dare to use the criminal justice system; and find their complaints about this mistreatment also ignored. Others get more than they deserve, as in the high-status perpetrators of sex crimes, who are granted unfounded epistemic authority or are given extra chances because people find it easier to empathise with their situation and care for their future.
Obviously, this social ranking is intimately entangled with any systematic injustices a society may have, such as the rules and values associated with gender and race. However, the real problem does not lie in any particular social ranking system, such as associated with racism or sexism, but in our intuitive attraction to thinking of moral status as hierarchical. Our goal in completing the equality revolution should not be to find the right social hierarchy on which to arrange people’s moral status, but to remove any link between the two.
