I've recently become interested in egalitarianism and debates on equality as an ideal. My personal experiences led me to the intuition that people should have a common solidarity, and pursuing equality is a worthy goal. However, simple intuitions are not the same value as well-thought-out, in-depth arguments. Often, when invoking intuition as a justification, it’s just as easy for the opposition to point to discrete circumstances, periods of time, or hypotheticals in which a simple intuition does not offer the depth of applicability that we might originally figure.
Given this, I’ve spent the last several months refining my intuitions and tackling the various arguments for and against equality as an ideal. Through this research, and in nearly every instance where I argue my egalitarian viewpoint, I'm offered a simple refrain - In what realm(s) should individuals be equal, and how do we measure and enact equality? This is perhaps the most foundational question for egalitarians to answer, but it’s hardly the best argument against the various forms of egalitarianism.
Equality is Arbitrary, Vague, and Impractical
My recent article makes the case that political equality is a value worth taking seriously, and one of the ways society can work towards a more perfect political equality is by limiting, or abolishing altogether, the influence of money in politics. I briefly appeared on a stream discussing the influence of money in politics and, specifically, whether Elon Musk’s recent attempts at buying influence in our political process were concerning. I appeared on stream for a little over twenty (20) minutes and encountered the following, all too familiar, anti-egalitarian arguments:
If money in politics is bad because it gives certain individuals undue/inequitable influence over politics, what about all the other things that give individuals undue/inequitable influence over politics? Are some people, by luck and circumstance, not better rhetoricians who are more able to effectively convince the masses of ideas relative to people who unjustly do not have the same skill? Why not care about this inequality as well?
Instituting a system of perfect political equality is impractical because of discrete, principally ambiguous circumstances. For example, what if an individual purchases a hat to support and advertise their chosen candidate? Is that not an example of an individual with excess income disproportionately influencing our politics? Shouldn't we regulate this out of existence if we really care about money-derived influence on politics?
These arguments are bad because they assume the egalitarian is developing an all-encompassing monist framework that is not concerned with human behavior, practicality, or competing values.
On the first argument, that egalitarians ultimately cannot achieve their ideals because certain domains of inequality persist - Egalitarianism is but one value in a jumble of values reasonably weighed against each other. It is not unreasonable to sacrifice strict egalitarian ideals in favor of balancing other ideals such as community, solidarity, liberty, freedom, utility, and so on. A practical concession on egalitarian ideals is not a statement on the value of equality as a principle. I might think a good governing framework for society is the equality of all peoples’ welfare, but I might also recognize the behavioral limitations of my egalitarian ideal as weighed against my ideals surrounding freedom and privacy. In establishing the potential trade-offs between maintaining an equality of welfare ideal and the likely need for state surveillance, G.A. Cohen, in On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, quips, “Hi! I'm from the Ministry of Equality. Are you, by any chance, unusually happy today?” He later says the surveillance implications of an equality of welfare standard would be a reason to prefer equality of resources instead, when considering competing values.
Those values constituting our value system in a pluralist framework are independently important, but sometimes a value might counteract another, and it is up to the individual to have a reasoned framework for weighing the application of values against one another when difficult applied questions present themselves.
It’s also important to meet people where they currently, materially, exist. It might not be ideal that certain people do not have the capacity for rhetoric such that they can accomplish their policy goals equally to someone of lesser merit but who has greater rhetorical flourish, but I might prefer that to a strict egalitarian framework where rhetoric is legally disallowed, insofar as my other values are being satisfied to some greater magnitude or synthesis. In this choice, I am denying a full realization of my egalitarian ideal, while ever presently committed to searching for a means to justly collapse the inequality associated with differing levels of rhetorical skill. In an ideal society, inequalities of skill in rhetoric would be a result of the free and equally available choices of people, and is true despite the recognition that the means to achieve this ideal do not currently exist in perfect form, with respect to my other values. Though, as an aside, the present level of inequality pervasive in various aspects of society is far from justifiable when weighed against my other values.
On the second argument, that establishing egalitarian ideals would face difficult to evaluate circumstances - this is not a statement on the morality of the directional choices we make within select domains of equality. Sure, it’s easy to poke holes in the nitty-gritty details of an actually existing set of laws or proposals, but we could do this with literally any set of laws. For instance, it is a very complicated and imperfect process to determine whether or not someone is guilty of murder, and it is equally complicated and imperfect to determine what a murderer’s consequences should be. Despite this being true, this is not a statement on whether or not society should consider murder immoral or engage in steps to prevent murder, punish or rehabilitate those who commit murder, and generally provide maximal justice in response to murder. Certainly, the response to a debate on the morality of murder and the necessity of societies to tackle the applied questions surrounding murder shouldn’t be "Well, what if a person is actually innocent? What if criminal justice systems can’t catch every murderer? What if someone doesn’t murder but they do something else immoral like assault?”
These are reasonable questions to ask when faced with building institutions that reflect our values, but they aren’t great arguments against the moral position of being against murder, nor are these questions great arguments against the attempt to build societal frameworks to prevent murder from occurring and react to murders that happen. Even if a value is entirely impractical to build legal institutions around, that still does not necessarily impugn the value itself, for it might prove so impractical for the government to enforce a system of values that we decide the government shouldn’t make the attempt in the first place, relegating certain values to interpersonal realms, such as being neighborly, courteous, honest, etc.
On the egalitarian ideal specifically, that it would be undesirable given the practical ambiguity in the application of egalitarian principles - this is, again, not a statement on the desirability of egalitarianism as an ideal. On the murder example, there might be some instances where it is difficult, and perhaps controversial, for relevant entities to define a specific instance as murder. There have been innumerable times in which a prosecutor refuses to prosecute someone whom many ordinary people might consider a murder deserving of punishment or rehabilitation, or the reverse might happen, where a prosecutor decides to prosecute someone for murder despite many ordinary people agreeing the person is not guilty of a morally incorrect act. The ambiguity at the depths of our applied ethical framework is not a reason to ultimately toss the value that the equality of people is ideal, and society should seek out ways in which to achieve this ideal.
Perhaps we should ask whether (1) campaigns or external entities should be legally allowed to sell campaign merchandise and (2) whether we should empower individuals to purchase that merchandise when concerned with money-derived inequalities in politics. It is also reasonable to think about the various domains that create inequalities in capacities for political advocacy, such as skill in rhetoric, but these questions do not give the egalitarian much reason for pause. (1) The egalitarian can reasonably commit to equality in only certain domains, given competing values or potential impracticalities, and (2) the egalitarian can advocate for less than perfect policy so long as the net-direction of society is positive.
Econoboi W
Hi Sir,
I was on this podcast (James Meece / Nexusrage).
One high level question for you; Do you believe the wealth pie is fixed or does it grow?
I find the answer to this questions is at the root of a lot of other beliefs. I believe it grows.