If equality depends on morally relevant sameness, what protects that standard from slowly being redefined by whatever our institutions or moral fashions happen to reward?
To my reading the biggest move you're making is to distinguish between "equality" as a concept vs "equality" as a goal. If you're doing that I wonder whether it makes sense to include "morally-relevant" in the definition.
What if, for example you started with
"states of affairs of non-sameness" and then asked some additional questions (before getting to, as you put it, "the hard work of determining whether any particular morally-relevant non-sameness that we’ve identified — any particular inequality, that is — is the kind of thing that can and should be intervened upon.")
I say that because there may be other questions we want to ask about the non-sameness.
For example:
Are we most concerned about a current non-sameness or about a probabilistic future non-sameness (I ask thinking about "equality of opportunity" as a concept. If there are two young people equally situated with different names, we might observe that the names lead to a probabilistic non-equality).
Or, relatedly, "how much is this equality/inequality dependent on social context?" For example literacy or illiteracy can be of moderate importance in some contexts or crucially important in a different setting.
I'm just saying that there are various ways we might approach the question of, "in what way are we concerned about this non-sameness" and "morally-relevant" is important but not always the first point of attention.
Interesting. I'm arguing here that equality per se is a state of affairs.. Beyond that, going about addressing inequalities likely involves goals.. But i'm not saying that equality itself is a goal?
I read you as saying that most of what gets included in discussions about "equality" is a few steps down the road, conceptually speaking. For example, before you get to a conversation about, "income equality, wealth equality, or consumption equality" you first have to start with some observations about non-sameness.
Thinking about it that way I was trying to observer that deciding, "is this non-sameness morally relevant" will not always be the next step.
For example, in my original comment I was thinking about whether the difference between someone being named "Alice" or "Aisha" is a morally relevant non-sameness, determining that requires deciding what set of assumptions you want to include.
Or, another example that occurred to me in my ride into work. JD Vance has mentioned the non-sameness that some people are part of a family in which multiple generations are buried in the same cemetery plot and others are not. Is this a morally relevant non-sameness? That answer will also depend on what assumptions one includes.
All of which is just to say that I would locate the determination "is this morally relevant" somewhere between the observation of non-sameness and engaging with the question of whether that non-sameness should prompt judgement or action.
There are two problems here. First, the Hayek problem: the knowledge required to manage future inequality simply doesn’t exist in centralized, modelable form. Second, the moral problem: even if it did, we still haven’t said what human good these interventions are meant to serve. Without that, “equality” becomes a technical optimization problem rather than a moral obligation grounded in what human beings are and owe one another.
If equality depends on morally relevant sameness, what protects that standard from slowly being redefined by whatever our institutions or moral fashions happen to reward?
the objective truths of morality!
Link please
Very interesting.
To my reading the biggest move you're making is to distinguish between "equality" as a concept vs "equality" as a goal. If you're doing that I wonder whether it makes sense to include "morally-relevant" in the definition.
What if, for example you started with
"states of affairs of non-sameness" and then asked some additional questions (before getting to, as you put it, "the hard work of determining whether any particular morally-relevant non-sameness that we’ve identified — any particular inequality, that is — is the kind of thing that can and should be intervened upon.")
I say that because there may be other questions we want to ask about the non-sameness.
For example:
Are we most concerned about a current non-sameness or about a probabilistic future non-sameness (I ask thinking about "equality of opportunity" as a concept. If there are two young people equally situated with different names, we might observe that the names lead to a probabilistic non-equality).
Or, relatedly, "how much is this equality/inequality dependent on social context?" For example literacy or illiteracy can be of moderate importance in some contexts or crucially important in a different setting.
I'm just saying that there are various ways we might approach the question of, "in what way are we concerned about this non-sameness" and "morally-relevant" is important but not always the first point of attention.
Interesting. I'm arguing here that equality per se is a state of affairs.. Beyond that, going about addressing inequalities likely involves goals.. But i'm not saying that equality itself is a goal?
Yes.
I read you as saying that most of what gets included in discussions about "equality" is a few steps down the road, conceptually speaking. For example, before you get to a conversation about, "income equality, wealth equality, or consumption equality" you first have to start with some observations about non-sameness.
Thinking about it that way I was trying to observer that deciding, "is this non-sameness morally relevant" will not always be the next step.
For example, in my original comment I was thinking about whether the difference between someone being named "Alice" or "Aisha" is a morally relevant non-sameness, determining that requires deciding what set of assumptions you want to include.
Or, another example that occurred to me in my ride into work. JD Vance has mentioned the non-sameness that some people are part of a family in which multiple generations are buried in the same cemetery plot and others are not. Is this a morally relevant non-sameness? That answer will also depend on what assumptions one includes.
All of which is just to say that I would locate the determination "is this morally relevant" somewhere between the observation of non-sameness and engaging with the question of whether that non-sameness should prompt judgement or action.
There are two problems here. First, the Hayek problem: the knowledge required to manage future inequality simply doesn’t exist in centralized, modelable form. Second, the moral problem: even if it did, we still haven’t said what human good these interventions are meant to serve. Without that, “equality” becomes a technical optimization problem rather than a moral obligation grounded in what human beings are and owe one another.