The principle of human equality

I continue to disagree with Wesley J. Smith ( here and here ) that the near universal assent to a norm of human equality is likely to help much in making the case for all the positions that Smith and I agree in supporting.

As I said in my previous post, when people invoke a principle of equality, all the real intellectual work is being done by further premises that give that principle its real content. For no one understands the norm of equality as requiring us to treat everyone exactly alike in all cases. Rather, the idea is that we may not treat one person differently from another unless there is a morally relevant reason for doing so . The game then becomes determining what kinds of reasons are morally relevant in which contexts.

For example, because we think that race is morally irrelevant in employment decisions, we think racial discrimination in employment is immoral, but because we think race is morally relevant in stopping a race riot in a prison, we think prison officials may segregate prisoners by race for a brief time in order to let tempers cool and prevent renewed violence. Similarly, we think sex is morally irrelevant to a person’s ability to participate intelligently in democratic government, and so we think it immoral to restrict suffrage on the basis of sex; on the other hand, we think sex is relevant to one’s ability to perform certain extremely difficult physical activities, and so we do not allow women to become Navy SEALs. Or again, we do think that age is irrelevant when it comes to a right to inherit from intestate parents but very relevant when it comes to controlling wealth; hence, all children of an intestate parent inherit equally regardless of age, but children below a certain age have guardians appointed to control the inherited wealth until they reach majority.

The lesson here is that equality, taken abstractly, means no more than that we ought to treat like cases alike and different cases differently, i.e., that we should treat people equally unless there is a morally relevant reason to treat them differently. The question remains open, however, as to what is a morally relevant reason in any particular context. Sorting out which differences among people are morally relevant for which purposes requires a complex moral conceptual scheme and, often enough, a great deal of factual information. Neither of these can be extracted from the single word "equality."

So consider Smith’s argument about abortion. He seems to think that, since human embryos are undeniably, as a matter of biological science, members of the human species, the principle of equality entails that it is as immoral to kill them as to kill an adult member of the species; to avoid this conclusion, he says, defenders of abortion are forced into the scientifically unsupportable assertion that human embryos are not human beings. It looks like, if you want to say abortion is morally permissible, either you give up on human equality or you make some rather ridiculous scientific mistakes.

But it’s not really this way. Some slipshod thinkers do indeed fall into this kind of gross scientific error in defending abortion, but philosophically sophisticated people do not. As Smith knows, they usually distinguish between human beings, who are members of the species homo sapiens , and human persons, who are human beings with some kind of developed capacity for mental functions that embryos still lack (the particulars of the distinction vary with the philosopher making it). Such philosophers then say that only human persons, and not human beings qua human beings, are entitled to moral protection.

But in distinguishing classes of human beings¯the persons versus the nonpersons¯don’t such philosophers deny human equality? No, not at all. Such philosophers agree as much as anyone with a principle of human equality. They are merely saying that the possession of a certain capacity for mental functions is morally relevant in the context of the taking of human life in a way that justifies differential treatment as between those who have that capacity and those who do not. The principle of equality, stated abstractly and in a manner that commands wide assent, does not tell you which differences among people are morally relevant for which purposes. It does not tell you that the possession of some degree of mental capacity is irrelevant in the context of taking a human life but highly relevant in assessing degrees of guilt in a criminal defendant. If you insist that a principle of equality does settle such issues, you’re smuggling into the principle of equality additional moral judgments that, were they articulated, would prove to be very controversial and certainly would not command the broad assent that the principle of equality, stated abstractly and without reference to such further moral judgments, in fact commands. We get broad agreement on equality only by abstracting from these further moral judgments about which people vehemently disagree.

Smith mentions that, after Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1994, many people feared a wave of support for euthanasia across the country, and he recounts how disability activists made common cause with moral traditionalists to prevent this. Such activists, he says, are largely secular in outlook and support abortion rights, and he attributes their making common cause with moral traditionalists to a shared commitment to equality. That’s not how I would read this situation. I would say that, in arguments about assisted suicide and euthanasia, what matters is not equality but whether a person’s having a disability is morally relevant in determining the value of his life. On this point, moral traditionalists and disability activists agree in answering in the negative; supporters of assisted suicide and euthanasia generally answer in the affirmative. It is this more particularized agreement, not any agreement about equality, that allowed the traditionalists and the disability rights activists to work together. When such particularized agreement breaks down¯as it does between pro-abortion disability activists and moral traditionalists¯the coalition breaks down as well, any shared commitment to a norm of equality notwithstanding.

Another way of seeing that equality, taken abstractly, gives us very little is to notice that different moral systems give us very different notions of equality. In virtue-theoretic systems like those of Aristotle and Aquinas, human nature is naturally ordered to one definite final end, and the principle of equality can plausibly be understood as meaning that all human beings are equally ordered to one and the same end. In systems like these, what’s right and what’s wrong will depend in important part on what one takes the final end to be and not merely on the fact that everyone has the same final end. In Kantian systems, which are often based on a notion of moral rules arising from human dignity (the details vary considerably depending on which Kantian one follows), human equality is naturally understood as meaning that one and the same set of moral rules binds everyone equally, with no special exceptions in favor of anyone. Here, of course, what’s right and what’s wrong will depend on exactly which moral rules are the correct ones, not merely on the fact that the same rules apply to everyone. Even utilitarianism, pace Smith, has its own proper understanding of equality. In the famous dictum attributed to Bentham, in the utilitarian calculus totaling up the pleasure and pain resulting from a contemplated action, everybody is to count for one, and nobody for more than one, which, as Sidgwick points out, is a principle of pure equality. But what, in such a system, will be right and what wrong will depend on how much pleasure and how much pain various individuals get from certain actions, not merely on the fact that, in summing these up, we treat each individual’s pain and pleasure on the same basis as that of everyone else.

In other words, all the major moral systems have, on their own terms, plausible accounts of human equality. They nevertheless differ systematically on the meaning of equality (as well as other key moral terms) and differ, in some very important ways, as to which actions they regard as moral, which immoral. The result is that an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and a utilitarian can all affirm a principle of equality, but no two of them mean by it anything like the same thing. This is one reason I think that verbal agreement on a norm of equality is not likely to support much agreement in practice.

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