Comments
whodo-i-thinkiam t1_j4c3a5m wrote
Totally equality would mean everyone is literally the same person. That's not desirable or even possible. Too much inequality, however, and people have a hard time relating to one another, which inhibits social cohesion.
SvetlanaButosky t1_j4ca3vo wrote
I think we need to either redefine what equality means or replace the word altogether, because the modern meaning is more confusing than quantum mechanics.
I prefer the phrase "To each their own".
Different people need different things to live a good life, equality is meaningless if you give everyone the same thing but still cant fulfill people's specific needs, it would be a huge waste and inefficient.
Equality has become a buzzword that lazy activists use to demand for vague utopian goals that are detached from reality and they dont wanna do the actual hard work of finding out what specific people actually need.
whodo-i-thinkiam t1_j4cc2yf wrote
>I think we need to either redefine what equality means or replace the word altogether
I don't necessarily disagree. What do you propose? Maybe just an acknowledgement that people don't all have exactly the same needs but we should still try to meet as many peoples' needs as possible?
That being said, our needs are not necessarily that different. We may not all have exactly the same dietary needs, but we all have dietary needs. We may not all have the same medical needs, but we all have medical needs. We may not all need the same kind of shelter, but we all need shelter, etc.
Plus, there are things that are intrinsically shared, like culture, language, belief systems, etc. Those are things human beings need to live a good life, and those things are social in nature.
bumharmony t1_j4cnc6i wrote
The trick about equality is that it leads to system where inequalities don’t exist. So we don’t need to guess ex post which systems are a result of an equal contracting.
We can measure with Pareto efficiency what is rational in general in a state of nature. It is intuitive and does not even require referring to values. It can be argued for behind the veil of ignorance or not.
But it would require a calculation about how much there is stuff in the world so it can be redistributed.
Ambiguous_Duck t1_j4fyv3o wrote
My justification for equality is that comparing most individuals against human history is that we’re all personally negligible. Sure some of us may be somewhat better but overall individually we’re all practically nothing.
Ace-0987 t1_j5nsvfc wrote
Let's take a pragmatist approach: the politics of equality works.
contractualist OP t1_j4bskvc wrote
Summary: Many have proposed their own justifications for fundamental human equality (rational faculties, moral sense, homicidal capabilities, something metaphysical etc.), although all are insufficient in some way. Yet equality is still not a useful fiction, as others have argued. What we have in equal capacity is our conscious freedom—our experience of agency. This equal freedom ensures that we are equal when bargaining in the social contract. Yet this is the limits to the extent of human equality, as inequalities can be justified in the social contract.