Benjamin Studebaker

Since Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal”, we’ve pretty much taken equality as a given. The last couple hundred years of history could be viewed as one prolonged struggle for equality, whether taken from the perspective of colonists, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, the working classes, women, and so on down the line. But how equal are we, really? And what, precisely, are we equal in? Too often we ignore these questions and resort to Jeffersonian platitudes. Not today.

“All men are created equal” is, at least under any literal interpretation, obviously false.

Firstly, people are not created in the first place–anyone who has taken middle school science may remember the law of conservation of mass. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Human beings are compiled. But this is tangential and pedantic.

The real problem with the phrase is that we very plainly are not initially equal. Some of us are naturally bigger, stronger, smarter, more creative, faster, more attractive, more sociable, and so on down the line. We are not equal in aptitude. Some of us would make for better professional basketball players, some for better accountants, some for better political theorists, and so on.

Not only are we not equal in aptitude, but we are not equal in usefulness. In a hunter/gatherer society, a physical specimen capable of killing or capturing what others could not kill or capture could be the difference between life and death. In our modern society, all being very athletically gifted is good for is entertainment. The same is true of all sorts of traits. Having bad eyesight would have doomed you several thousand years ago, but in modern society, it’s not a problem. Usefulness is context-specific, and not all people are equally useful in a given context.

There are also people who are less useful in almost any context due to deeply inferior aptitudes. The severely mentally handicapped universally require more help from others than they are capable of providing. Other people have mental illnesses that make them violent or uncooperative. Still others are physically broken such that they need extensive assistance. In the absence of Stephen Hawking-style mental gifts, such people are not equally useful to others.

Inequality of aptitude and usefulness is not all there is. There is also inequality of upbringing. One’s parenting, peer group, and other sociological influences can cause aptitudes to be developed or undeveloped. They can mould the personality in a socially useful or damaging way. There are many brilliant criminals and lazy people whose defects of character were brought on by environmental rather than inherent factors.

So we are not equal in aptitude, we are not equal in upbringing, and we are not equal in usefulness. What are we equal in?

The answer I would provide is that we are equal in what we deserve. This requires an assumption, however. In order for people to be unequal in aptitude, environment, and usefulness, we must hold to the view that aptitude, environment, and usefulness have nothing to do with what people within our moral community deserve. In order to hold that view, one must believe that we have no control over our aptitude, our environment, or our usefulness. This requires a denial of any kind of free-floating, biologically disconnected will, spirit, or soul. If we possess in us some supernatural capacity to change our life outcomes independently of our nature and nurture, then our usefulness would not merely be the product of nature and nurture, it would be the product of nature, nurture, and our will. Consequently, a lazy person or a criminal would have to be viewed as someone who was wilfully malevolent.

I deny that people can be wilfully malevolent. People are the product of their nature and nurture and nothing else, and so what they do not own what they are. If you are a lazy person, you are not a lazy person because you choose to be a lazy person, you are a lazy person because you are defective, either in your nature or nurture or both.

Having taken this view on board, I am now free to say that all people are equal in what they deserve. Every person, smart or stupid, strong or weak, hard-working or lazy, kind or cruel, is equally deserving of a happiness, welfare, resources, whatever it is we choose to distribute.

However, this does not mean that we are required to be communists and actually distribute everything equally. Everyone is equally deserving of consideration, but a proper view of consideration will not result in an equal distribution. Why? Because an equal distribution does not reflect equal consideration.

Consider the following scenario. We have a group of woodworkers and a group of handless people. When given wood, the woodworkers make wonderful things that make everyone happy. The handless people, on the other hand, make nothing, because they are incapable of woodworking. If we give the handless people the same amount of wood as we give the woodworkers because the handless people deserve welfare just as much as the woodworkers do, we deny the potential welfare to be produced by the interaction of the woodworkers with the wood. It might look something like this:

In the first case, the woodworkers get all the wood, and they make lovely wooden things out of it. In the second case, we interpret equality crudely and give half the wood to the handless people and consequently get only half the lovely wooden things.

If we make the distribution equal in this case, we are not honouring the equal status of the handless people, we are dishonouring the equal status of the people who benefit from the lovely wooden things.

The proper way to view equality of desert is to award benefits impartially, giving them to whoever will derive the most benefit from them for himself or for other people more broadly. If I have a hard-worker and a lazy person before me and I am deciding to whom I will assign the benefit, the only reason I may resort to for assigning it to one or the other is the amount of utility each would derive from it. The hard-worker is not more deserving purely because he works hard–that is an accident of nature and nurture. So if the lazy person gets 6 utility points from a given thing and the hard-worker gets only 4, the lazy person is the one who ought to be awarded the benefit.

The only grounds for giving people larger benefits because they are smart or hard-working or what have you is to provide incentive so as to encourage the development of those socially useful traits. If we paid doctors the same amount or less than what we paid truck drivers, why would people choose to spend years in medical school to become doctors rather than work as truck drivers? A handful might do so just because they really love the idea of being doctors, but the eventual result would be a shortage of doctors. This would have devastating consequences. It would result in grave harm for sick people. We must take a long-term view, and observe that when we corrode the social incentives to do necessary yet tedious or time-consuming work, we may harm others, and we must take those potential future harms into consideration when we make distributive decisions today.

So when we decide to pay doctors much more than we pay truck drivers, even though a truck driver would probably benefit more from much of the doctor’s salary than the doctor would, we do so not purely taking into account the benefit to doctors and truck drivers, but the benefit to the potential patients of paying doctors more as opposed to the harm to the potential patients of paying them less. The decision might look something like this:

In this scenario, if we only considered the benefit to truck drivers and doctors, we would redistribute income in favour of truck drivers. 12 is better than 11. However, once we take into consideration the effect that this redistribution would have on wider social utilities, we see that what appears to be a beneficial move would actually ignore the equal status of patients in this equation. Everyone who is affected by a decision should have that effect taken into consideration and weighed equally by the decider. That’s what equality is really about. There is, of course, already a name for this method of distribution–utilitarianism.