Equality - Still In Short Supply

Once upon a time the concept of equality was hardly an important one. Today it is a touchphrase as frequently invoked and as little understood as "sustainable development". Equality is, apparently, something everyone wants and, moreover, it is something that everyone should want and should have. But what exactly is it?

When the hierarchical conception of the world first started to break down, it was largely thanks to liberal philosophers like Locke and Hobbes who posited that people were morally equal. Locke justified moral equality in more religious terms, focusing on the fact that all offspring of Adam were equal and could not be compelled by another to do something. Hobbes justified it in more visceral terms appealing to the fact that as any man could be killed by either the confederacy or guile of others, they must all be equal. He also observed that there was no greater proof that men were equal than that each thought himself better than his peers.

Both of these early liberal philosophers used their conception of moral equality to underpin theories of state power deriving from a social contract. For Locke, men exchanged their autonomy for the protection afforded by the state but they could regain their autonomy if the state failed in keeping up its end of the bargain. For Hobbes, the only way to escape the "nasty, brutish and short" life of the state of nature was to hand over all autonomy to the state, or as he called it "the leviathan" and there was no regaining of that autonomy as any challenge to the leviathan would inevitably return society to the state of nature.

As there is no evidence for either the state of nature or a social contract, hypothetical or otherwise, contractarianism has largely fallen out of favour. Moral equality hasn't and these days the implications of it are considered to be spread far more widely.

But for all equality's allure to the modern mind, its evidence in the world at large is fairly limited. Yes, if one chooses only to focus on western societies, it seems that people's rights at least are equal. Though, if one digs into it, the supposed equality of the genders has not filtered through to "equal pay for equal work", except in a handful of countries, and one has only to peruse the most basic of stats regarding race in American to realise that racial equality is still an elusive goal.

If one looks at the world as a whole, the situation is only bleaker. Though slightly outdated, Bob Sutcliffe's book "100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World" provides a horrifying look at global data on inequality, no matter which axis one chooses to look at it from. For a South African, perhaps the most compelling are the graphs comparing the Black/White division in South African during Apartheid and the North/South division of the world in the 1990s. Sutcliffe takes the ratios of the human development index, education spending, health spending, infant mortality, life expectancy, industrial wages and income and shows that the division between the north and south is as great, and in some cases greater, that the division between blacks and whites at the height of apartheid.

In a world where moral equality has been enshrined into human rights, how can things have gone so badly wrong? Capitalism and democracy are supposed to be the economic and political systems that best enshrine this idea of moral equality. And yet they fail so badly. Perhaps a Marxist would appeal that the most basic forms of equality is equality of income and the problem with capitalism is that it rewards people unequally. The problem with Marxism is while great in theory, in practice it tends to turn into Maoism or Leninism, which involves the sacrifice of many other forms of equality in order to achieve income equality. And do we really believe that our rights to choices about what we believe, what we do, who we gather with are worth that? Especially considering that capitalism tends to generate higher average incomes anyway.

The problem with capitalism is that while in theory everyone is given the same measure of influence over the economy and so whatever tangible outcome they end up with is a result of their own decisions, in practice people start with such different allocations that the final allocation can't be considered to have been derived solely from their choices. This is the problem with capitalism identified by John Rawls. Rawls agreed that equality of income was itself a weak goal especially if everyone was better off if those with the most to contribute, received the most in return. But he stressed the importance of protecting the most vulnerable in society. He argued that those who ended up as the most vulnerable did so largely because of things they had no control over - the talents they were born with, the social situation of their parents. So why should they be punished and others rewarded for possessing things entirely beyond their own control?

And this really is the problem with the world today - people are primarily punished and rewarded for issues far beyond their control. The child born in Niger has a start on life so dramatically different from that of a child, any child, born in the US or the UK, that any hope of them achieving the same outcomes is almost certainly doomed. And if the child should happen to be female, her chances are even worse.

Income equality is certainly not an end in itself and even equality of opportunity isn't - considering that some people are just born lazy. But a little bit more of both would make a big difference to a lot of people - after all, equality is about each person having the best shot at whatever their perception of "the good" is.