Equality

Equality is one of my three fundamental building blocks for utopian society. While it may be a fundamental it will only be applied in a few specific ways rather than as much as possible throughout the society. I wish to maximise the freedom of all people with my ideal society, which is contrary to an attempt to make people equal in many respects. Equality is not universally a good thing, it is merely an way of approaching a group or system. The intent and results of trying to impose equality will determine how beneficial or detrimental it has been. The human rights movement seeks to gain equality in what rights are afforded to people, which is benevolent in intent and I would also regard as morally justified. The Nazis sought to create a form of equality in that they tried to make all people be of a certain breeding calibre. The motives for this desire were misguided and the results were cataclysmic. I use this rather extreme comparison to illustrate how the tool of equality is morally neutral, it just a way to do something, and so we must be very specific about where and how it should be applied to ensure only good results. We cannot infer anything from equality being a fundamental building block for society until we know the application of equality in the society.

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal" - Aristotle.

It is evident from the outset that people are not all equal, some are taller, some are faster, some earn more money and so forth. I am in complete agreement with Aristotle that any attempt to make humans more equal in their skills, traits and abilities would be abhorrent. Even just to try and disguise and overlook this obvious facet of humanity, as had been attempted to some extents, appears to do only harm and is similarly undesirable. To confine individuality stifles artistic flair, denies personal freedoms and reduces the efficacy of the valuable mechanism of competition. A good maxim to approach the application of equality is to avoid the implementation of equality over any sphere where none is naturally observed. This maxim ensures no racial discrimination or what I deem to be immoral applications of eugenics. It also ensures that systems that operate under the maxim must recognize the desirable variance in humanity. Optimally then a utopia would be a meritocratic society in regards to human variance and use the principles of equality where human variance does not apply.

I would apply the principles of equality upon the following areas of society;

1. Any limit to a freedom of action imposed by society must apply to all members equally. In other words there should be none above the law.

2. The limits a society does impose on freedoms of action should be elected in a way that best represents the will of the people. This suggests a democratic system, ideally far more representative of any that exist presently (To define what I mean best a little more clearly I would suggest that where there are two or more distinct choices that the majority opinion be the prevailing rule however when a scalar difference between options exists, such as weather the punishment be twenty years or ten years, the average of the public opinion is likely the most representative (although does allow for unrepresentative tactical voting)).

3. Restrictions as to opinions or beliefs cannot exist, state may only prohibit certain actions. One cannot increase the overall freedom of people by any kind of restriction of belief and opinion in the same way that restriction certain actions increases the net freedom. To not be equally permissive of all beliefs and opinions goes against the first fundamental of aiming at the maximum reasonable freedom. It cannon therefore be a crime to agree with a crime, only to commit one (or to proliferate one – but that is a grey area and a subject worthy of an essay all to it's self).

3. All welfare, benefits, privileges and freedoms made available by state should be offered equally to all. I do not mean that each person should receive a welfare cheque but rather all members of the society who fall into sufficient poverty to require one should receive equal aid to others in the same situation. Much like the NHS who treat anyone who needs treating or public transport which all may use.

Before I proceed in justifying the above uses of equality I should like to talk about how society enables inequalities to arise that are beyond the scope of our natural variances. While I accept that there is huge variation in aptitude towards productivity or usefulness to society in people, I do not accept the idea that the capitalist system provides an appropriate reward on all accounts, and would describe it as a polarised meritocracy. To equalize wages would serve to create that worst form of inequality but to allow people's earnings to be entirely determined by a capitalist system will tend towards a polarized society where a majority exists relatively close to the poverty line while all the remaining surplus, almost regardless of the societies productivity, will fall into the hands of the few.

In regards the distribution of resources I imagine a scale with complete equality at one end and complete inequality at the other - capitalist societies tend to lie towards the latter end of this scale. Communists saw that this was unfair and unrepresentative but in their efforts to alleviate the problem they created many more by enforcing equality upon a thing which is naturally not so. Utopia is a search for the optimal point somewhere between those two extremes. The optimal point on this scale is what I would call the natural equality as it respects the natural differences in aptitudes but does not allow those differences to acquire disproportionate returns.

A capitalist society requires a mechanism that provides a gradual and continuous equalizing force so as to ensure that as improvements to society are made those improvements do not fall only on the very few. The mechanism I have described already exist in many forms such as income tax and other ways to redistribute wealth, which is a good start but as yet does not provide a strong enough counter to the effects of a capitalist economy. This requirement of an equalizing force is not the application of equality, as that would imply equalized wages, but it does fall into the scope of this essay as more equality is desirable than is presently observed. The route to achieving this is the application of taxation systems that do not result in costing the poor as much or more than the rich proportionally, and that are used to raise the bar of those in the worst condition socially.

My justification for equality of opinion is based on my interpretation of the origins of society. I agree mostly with Hobbes and his ideas about the social contract although I think it all began way before we had evolved into anything close to human! The group exists to allow all members a survival advantage, there is no logical reason not to join a group in evolutionary terms if it is advantageous to the individual. At some stage there was a “choice” made by the ancestors of every social animal to join a group as they felt the trade they were effectively making was in their greatest interest. One can observe in nature lone animals that normally exist in packs, this cannot happen so readily with humans as the things we learn in social life do not prepare us for life in the wild so well. The advantage any individual must gain for it to make sense to join the group is simply greater than that which they would be able to obtain otherwise and is not related at all to the advantage that may be gained by others from being in the group. If this were not the case packs of animals would not have alphas. Humanity however is beyond this stage as our existence in society is so far removed from how we would be able to exist in isolation and so there is much less chance that those who would not gain advantage from belonging to a society would remove themselves from it.

Although the advantages may not be equally distributed to all members of a society in which an individual consents to being a member we can all agree that the properties of this consent are equal. Their consent accounts for one individual as with any others consent, and it agrees to the same rules that others agree to. Consent is an intangible concept and cannot be measured, viewing consent as equal in this regard is the only reasonable way to quantify it. Democratic voting systems attempt to reflect this equality of consent to the social contract with equal weighting on votes for citizens. It is for this reason also that I regard the freedom of opinion and belief to be a part of the topic of equality as much the topic of freedom. While some beliefs or opinions may be more accurate or more beneficial in some regards than others it is not for the entity of society at large to judge as it is only in existence as a result of the beliefs and opinions of its members. It would seem paradoxical to deny the validity of something upon which you are founded. It is the equality of consent that the only “natural” equality that may be found and thus the basis for using equality to reasonably apply to areas of society where variations neither occur nor would be advantageous.

As most of our present societies do not offer a contract by which we agree to the rules in exchange for some benefits and offer us that choice, nor do they aptly enable us to exist outside of society I would argue that it would seem just and fair to ensure that all members willing to contribute to a society were afforded a level of advantage that were as comparable to the other members of the society in relative terms as may be found in social animals in nature. This comparison would be a reasonable approximation of the available offer their ancestors accepted upon the original formations of society in terms of possible gains relative to others. If it was found that top ranking pack animals on average received twice as much food as the lowest in the pack then I would aim roughly at a society where the best-off were about twice as rich as the poorest. This is how I would approximate the optimal natural equality for the variations in people and the advantages a society should confer to them as a result. Food is not the only resource that may be gained in animal societies, mating rights are one of the most significant differences in social animal hierarchies, so this method of approximation can only be a guide rather than an specific set of conditions to aim for.

I would like to reinforce the above argument to justify a move towards making the returns of society more equal for all members with the arguments first put forward by Edward Bellamy. He asserts that ninety percent of the productivity of all human labours was the result of technologies, improvements and tools made by our ancestors stretching all the way back to beyond the stone age. I think on average that figure is now greater than ninety percent but measuring how many man hours it would take a stone age man to build a microchip is not practical to measure nor relevant to understand the point. Bellamy goes on to argue the unfair nature of inheritance in that while a fathers estate may be split evenly between his offspring, when that estate is then split again to the next generation that the portion will only be split evenly when there are the same number of grandchildren for each of the first generation. If we are to suppose that we are all entitled to inherit some benefit from our ancestors in a fair manner then the vast majority of the advantages that can be conferred by society should be available to all as all are pretty near to common ancestry over a decent time period.

Even if one does not ascribe to the assumption of entitlement to inheritance then one must concede that it has only been through the benefits of society that any individual man has managed to make any significant advances. It is therefore the entity that is society that has claim over these advances and thus members of a society should have a share of what the advances may bring by what share of the society they comprise. The difference that should be allowable using this logic to constitute fair apportioning of resources is only the difference in productivity that can be gained from physical difference, the portion that has been gained through improvements made historically by others should be equal. Bellamy oddly concluded that this suggested equal wages, where as I would argue if he were correct that ninety percent of human productivity is due to the advances of society then the variance between the returns members could expect to receive would be about ten percent different to be in accordance with the logic used. I personally think that ten percent difference in returns for labour would not provide enough incentive nor reflect the non-monetary aspects of certain jobs and roles appropriately. Although I have no real justification beyond what I reckon would be a sensible figure for fair variance in returns, nor do I have a very precise figure to offer I will at least state for the record that I think that the correct maximum wealth gap a society similar to any current capitalist one should have is somewhere in the region of double the minimum wage to ten times that value (a single order of magnitude is pretty precise in many scientific schools...). I also err on the narrower end of that spectrum but I suspect that is some of my socialist bias, and even if it were the “correct” value it would be socially damaging to attempt such a huge transition in one go and would be better advised to slowly reduce the gap over a long period.

I have previously discussed how justice is a desirable attribute of a society much like freedom, but that unlike freedom, justice is subjective and cannot be satisfactorily defined. I believe concepts of equality may be used to offer justice to society in a manner which may be clearly defined (as per my four applications of equality in society). The evolutionary emergence of our concept of justice may be used to show how this may be the case. This is an argument first put forwards by John Stewart Mill and assumes (very reasonably) that individuals are self interested and that evolution is the mechanism by which life is re-designed. Self interest ensures we will attempt to help ourselves as best we can when we require something and that we will retaliate against those that would attempt us harm. Empathy allows us to put ourselves in the position of others and feel a portion of what they might feel. This is an emotion that has facilitated the socialization of many animals as it benefits the group when the members are empathic, which in turn allows the group to confer the greatest return of benefits to the individual. Self interest and the benefits of socialization evolved the feelings of empathy. I would describe the feelings we have of justice with a situation where we observe harm being done to another we empathise with. The retaliation we would like to see those causing harm receive if it were us in that situation is what we would call justice. In this case justice is in the form of retribution, however should there be no object causing harm with which to retaliate then we may only pity the person suffering harm. The person which is the object of our pity will receive justice through charity rather than retribution. Each persons own idea of justice is how they would like to be treated in a given situation and will be based on their condition in life. As such we will all have differing ideas of justice, we will never consider any charity just that rises the condition of someone suffering to above that of our own. The equality present in justice is how we come to form our view of what it is, that is by placing ourselves in each situation we wish to judge thus giving us an equal reference frame in each case. Not only do we put ourselves in each situation we also will conclude that justice will be served by bringing the condition of the other closer to that of our selves. While this is not an exact equality it is an equalizing tendency and serves to reinforce the idea of a narrowing wealth gap being just. We always view justice from the same reference point and therefore society must treat everyone the same in the eyes of the law. It is worth noting that the evolution of empathy and justice are the result of self interest and thus must be secondary to it. By this logic we can assume that acts of charity or retribution will not average out to be greater than acts of personal retaliation and self help. This again points towards a natural equality which narrows the gap in social conditions but never reaches a point of actual equality.

The virtues that a society in appreciation of the merits of equality and a desire to be just will be imbued with are that of compassion, trust, mercy, generosity, loyalty, charity, pity, guilt and altruism. The tool of equality is designed, not to be able to provide the best conditions for any specific person, but to provide the best overall conditions for society so that it is able to confer these advantages back to the individual members. In this way it mimics the evolution of empathy and justice, that of secondary facilitators of self-interest. Maximum freedom is a utopian aim to reflect the self-interested desires of the individual where as equality is a secondary support to this self-interest that is able to provide advantages to the individual only through improvement to the society. In my utopian society there of only a few areas that require complete equality and these are derived from the equality of the social contract. These are the equality of law, the equality of opinion (or voting) and the equality of aid and welfare. As an aside, two of these are also the primary reasons we exist in society – protection and security. There are also a few situations where my utopian society desires the use of equalizing forces to create the conditions of a natural or just level of equality to represent only the variance in peoples. These are directed at equalizing power and control of resources which can both be achieved by targeting money. Beyond these few but significant uses utopia has little call for tool of equality. It remains a fundamental despite being secondary to freedom and not sought throughout the utopia because it is a key aspect of the social contract and thus the basis of any society.