Equality!

Equality Time Machine

Having a Family/Private Education Are Unfair Advantages

Philosopher Adam Swift knows that having a family gives children an advantage.  But lockstep with progressive ideology hellbent on upsetting traditional values, he follows it to its (il)logical conclusion: for the sake of the egalitarian utopia, we should be concerned about reading bedtime stories to our children because it gives them an unfair advantage; furthermore, private education should be abolished.  This is not the Onion, folks.  This is reality.

Read the entire excerpt::

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’   

‘It’s the children’s interest in family life that is the most important,’ says Swift. ‘From all we now know, it is in the child’s interest to be parented, and to be parented well. Meanwhile, from the adult point of view it looks as if there is something very valuable in being a parent.’ [So instead of abolishing the family...]

‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. [TB: Care to give an argument for that?] So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’

‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.

‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’  [TB: Oh, good, seems we're in excellent hands.  Thanks for pulling us back from the ledge of lunacy.  The rational cutoff, according to our family expert, isn't two but nine.]

As I have noted numerous times on this blog, progressives like Swift conflate ("social") justice with fairness as well as equality.  But justice, fairness, and equality are not the same.  Judgments about fairness and equality necessarily involve making comparisons, whereas judgments about justice need not.  I can judge that I have unjustly given you too little money simply by noting that I have given you less than what I promised for the work that you did irrespective of what anyone else has made. You can judge whether I gave you an unjust grade simply by looking at your work and my rubric in the course syllabus irrespective of whether I gave a fair/equal distribution of grades to the entire class (e.g. everyone including you got a "C").  

Instead of fretting about reading bedtime stories to his children, perhaps Swift should consider reading them this Bible story.

Robert Nozick on Equality

The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note that in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent holds less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p percent (where p is vastly greater than n), and so forth.  They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered.  On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at a distributional profile or at facts such as these.  It depends upon how the distribution came about.  Some processes yielding these results would be legitimate, and the various parties would be entitled to their respective holdings.  If these distributional facts did arise by a legitimate process, then they themselves are legitimate.  This is, of course, not to say that they may not be changed, provided this can be done without violating people's entitlements.

The entitlement conception of justice in holdings makes no presumption in favor of equality, or any other overall end state patterning.  It cannot merely be assumed that equality must be built into any theory of justice.  There is a surprising dearth of arguments for equality capable of coming to grips with the considerations that underlie a nonpatterned conception of justice in holdings.  (However, there is no lack of unsupported statements of a presumption in favor of equality).

                      ~Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), pp. 232-3.

Democratic People's Love of Equality Over Liberty

Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and Enduring Love of Equality than of Liberty

Suppose that all citizens take part in government and that each has an equal right to do so.  Since no man will then be different from his fellow men, no one will be able to exercise a tyrannical power.  Men will be perfectly free, because they will all be entirely equal, and they will all be perfectly equal because they will be entirely free.  This is the ideal toward which democratic peoples tend.
[...]
Liberty has manifested itself to men in various times and forms.  It is not associated exclusively with any social state, and one does not find it only in democracies.  Hence it cannot constitute the distinctive characteristic of democratic centuries.  The particular and dominant fact that makes such centuries unique is the equality of conditions; the principle passion that stirs men in such times is love of that equality.
[...]
If it were possible for a people, by itself, ever to destroy or even diminish the equality prevailing within it, it would require long and arduous effort.  It would have to modify its social state, abolish its laws, renew its ideas, change its habits, and alter its mores.  To lose political liberty, however is easy: fail to hold on to it, and it slips away.
Hence men do not hold on to equality solely because it is dear to them; they also cling to it because they believe that it must always endure.

Political liberty, if carried to excess, can endanger the tranquility, property, and lives of private individuals, and no one is so blind or frivolous as to be unaware of this.  By contrast, it is only the attentive and clear-sighted who perceive the perils with which equality threatens us, and they usually avoid pointing them out.  They know that the miseries they fear are remote and are pleased to think that they will afflict only future generations, for which the present generation evinces little concern.  The ills that liberty sometimes brings on are immediate.  They are visible to everyone, and to one degree or another everyone feels them.  The ills that extreme equality can produce reveal themselves only a little at a time.  They gradually work their way into the body of society.  Only intermittently do they become visible, and by the time they have become most virulent, habit has already ensured that they will no longer be felt.
[...]
Democratic people love equality in all ages, but there are times when their passion for it turns to frenzy.  This happens when a long-threatened social hierarchy finally destroys itself in one last intestine struggle and the barriers that once separated citizens are finally knocked down. At such times men swoop down upon equality as upon conquered spoils and cling to it as to a precious good that someone would snatch from their grasp.  The passion for equality then inundates the human heart and fills it entirely.  No use telling people that such blind surrender to an exclusive passion jeopardizes their most cherished interests: they are deaf.  No use pointing out to them that liberty slips through their fingers while their attention is focused elsewhere: they are blind, or, rather, in all the world they see only one good worth coveting.
[...]
Men cannot enjoy political liberty without making sacrifices to obtain it, and it has never been won without great effort.  But equality offers up its pleasures for the asking.  They seem to arise out of the most insignificant episodes of private life, and to savor them one has only to live.
[...]
I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for liberty.  Left to themselves, they seek it out, love it, and suffer if deprived of it.  For equality, however, they feel an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion.  They want equality in liberty, and if they cannot have it, they want it still in slavery.  They will suffer poverty, servitude, and barbarity, but they will not suffer aristocracy.

This is true in all ages, and especially in our own.  All men and all governments that seek to combat this irresistible power will be overthrown and destroyed by it.  Nowadays, liberty cannot be instituted without its support, and even despotism cannot reign without it.

               ~Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, Vol, II, Pt. 2, Chapter 1                           translated by Arthur Goldhammer (NY: Library of America, 2004), pp. 581-4.