Some personal thoughts. Not comprehensive. Written from a perspective of privilege. Will be interesting to read with fresh eyes in the future to see whether/how my views have changed. Constructive thoughts welcome.

I’ve noticed that when people talk about economic or social equality, they’re often talking past each other. This is because they are referring to different types of equality.

One view is that equality represents equality of outcomes. Another is that equality represents equality of opportunity.

Maybe there are people out there who believe that there should be equality of outcomes, so that everyone gets the same outcomes as everyone else. I personally haven’t met anyone, and I struggle to imagine a serious person making this argument. I read and hear this attacked regularly, but only ever as a strawman.

A more common belief is that we should have equality of opportunity. That is, everyone should have the same opportunity to live the life they want to live.

If someone is trying to make a thoughtful good-faith argument for equality, this is usually the type of equality I assume they’re supporting.

It reminds me a bit of the Rawlsian argument about thinking behind a “veil of ignorance”. That is, what type of society would you want, if you didn’t know what the circumstances of your birth would be? Presumably, you’d want a society where everyone had the same level of opportunity to thrive.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become jaded on the concept of equality of opportunity.

It’s something we can aspire to. We can aim for something resembling equality of opportunity. But to pretend that we’ll ever get anywhere near equality of opportunity? That seems far-fetched to me.

There’s the cultural or economic argument, that your parents will have a significant impact on your long-term prospects, and there’s no way that parents will allow their children to be kneecapped for the benefit of others. Which I’ll get to.

There’s also the biological fact that we are different, and are born with a different range of personal characteristics.

Some of us are lucky to be born into a body that enjoys good health and seems to be be built for longevity. Of course, there are things we can do to improve or reduce our odds of good health, but genetics play a significant role. Some people are born with congenital health issues, develop health issues that are largely pre-ordained, or have accidents.

Some of us are born with a higher or lower natural IQ, or G. Some of us find it easier or harder to learn and retain new information and skills than others.

Some of us are even more motivated than others. There are domains where I’m more motivated and conscientious than others. But there are many others – sports, notably – where I don’t have a killer instinct. If I’m playing tennis, my instinct is to keep the ball in court, rather than destroy my opponent.

As a parent, I’ve come to realise that one of the things that drives a huge amount of human behaviour is the desire for parents to do their best for their children. That is – to provide them with opportunities. I’ve done the maths, and in a sense, the main reason my wife and I work as hard as we do, is so we can support our children now and in the future.

How do you reorient society in a way so that parents don’t try to provide opportunities for their children? I don’t think you can.

How do you raise people without opportunity, to have the same level of opportunity of those who have the good fortune of being born into it? Because I definitely don’t want a scenario where we are knee-capping people by taking away opportunities.

The world is a fundamentally unfair place.

People who work hard should be rewarded for it.

People who took risks that paid off should be rewarded for taking these risks.

People who provide outsize value to the world should be able to reap some rewards for doing so.

There are jobs that are hard, where the stakes are high and where we want the right people in those roles, that require a lot of training and personal sacrifice. We need to incentivise these sorts of roles and reward these people, otherwise these jobs won’t get done.

We’re a competitive species, and in a lot of areas we live in competitive environments.

When I think of “equality”, my automatic thought is to think in terms of equality of opportunity, and to think of it aspirationally.

There might even be a point where aspiring towards greater equality of opportunity becomes undesirable because it stops motivating people to add value to the world for the benefit of their kin. But I think we’re a long way from there, and I find it hard to imagine living in a world where we can seriously have that conversation.

I think of equality of opportunity in terms of helping people who are disadvantaged, and lifting them up. Anything that pulls people down is self-defeating.

In the same way that aiming for utopia is unrealistic (and probably impossible, since we all have different – and conflicting – views of what constitutes utopia), we can aim towards protopia; that is, something that is better than today.

Equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are not the only forms of “equality” out there. Maybe I’ve missed one or more fundamental ones that people think of during these sorts of conversations – and I’d be interested to hear from anyone if that’s the case.

Before I end, however, I want to tip my hat at another form of equality that I think is important. Which is equality of dignity. I think we owe everyone a certain level of dignity by virtue of their humanity.

In some ways, this is codified in legislation like New Zealand’s Human Rights Act 1993 , which prohibits certain types of discrimination in a wide variety of areas. In effect, this levels the playing field for people by virtue of their humanity.

It’s worth noting that the Act only prohibits some forms of discrimination. There’s nothing stopping someone from being discriminated on based on their qualifications, or intelligence, personality – or even physical attractiveness (although it can get murky, since in some cases that might be related to age, which is a prohibited ground of discrimination.)

Even where discrimination is prohibited, there’s a clear recognition that there is always going to be some form of discrimination. This is obvious if you think about an employee selecting candidates for a job, for people selecting other people as friends, or as sexual partners.

At the very least, however, I aspire to a society that gives some certain level of dignity to everyone, by virtue of their humanity.

(Which can itself turn into a rabbit hole, because perhaps there might be other characteristics that justify dignity – such as consciousness (which might be experienced by other creatures), or capacity for suffering (many animals). (This in turn can create recursions, where we might need to afford gradated levels of dignity depending on level of consciousness and/or capacity for suffering – which might help us distinguish between different creatures, but also might create distinctions in humans. Consciousness for the median adult is arguably qualitatively different to someone with dementia or a child; there are also people who have congenital insensitivity to pain and anhidrosis (CIPA).)

In summary:

  • In most situations, when people talk about “equality” I interpret as meaning “equality of opportunity”.

  • I consider “equality of opportunity” to be something positive to aspire to. I accept that complete equality might not be desirable, but I think we are a long way from that.

  • I believe in increasing equality of opportunity by helping people who are disadvantaged. Broadly speaking, I disagree with reducing opportunities to others.

  • I also believe that it’s important to recognise some level of dignity to people by virtue of their humanity – a form of “equality of dignity”, as it well.

  • This topic is more complicated than it seems, and anyone who tries to simplify it and argue against strawman arguments lose my respect (either because they are not arguing in good faith or have not thought about this in detail). Truth is, I feel like my views are far too rough, and lack nuance.