Two central values in American political life are liberty and equality, and the question
is, how do those things go together?
Can you have liberty and equality at the same time?
Usually the question is put this way.
If we want to achieve equality, are we going to have to impinge on liberty?
Well the answer to that depends in part on the definition of those terms.
There’s more than one way to think about liberty.
There’s more than one way to think about equality.
But let’s focus on equality for a second.
There are at least two central different conceptions of equality.
One we might call formal equality, so called because it has to do with the form of the
institutions.
Formal equality is something like equality before the law.
You and I are equal before the law if the law takes no notice of what kind of person
I am or what kind of person you are or what kind of person anyone else is.
If there’s a law against murder, then it doesn’t matter who the person is who committed
the murder, it’s still wrong.
That’s equality before the law.
That kind of equality is perfectly compatible with classical liberalism and indeed is part
of the classical liberal scheme of values.
But there’s a second kind of equality, what we might think of as material or substantive
equality.
That’s much different.
So that notion of equality holds that people ought to be equal in material respects, maybe
in wealth, maybe in resources, maybe various other ways that we can actually measure.
That kind of equality does pose significant challenges to classical liberalism, and I
think it has challenges of its own.
There are at least three central problems or challenges with trying to have a society
based on substantial equality.
The first one is, it might well be impossible.
So think for a second, how would we measure that?
What kinds of things exactly are we going to try to make equal?
Are we going to try to make wealth equal, self respect equal, happiness equal?
Wealth doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, and for many people—if you just take that
one, wealth—for many people wealth is not the most important thing in the world.
So wealth will enable some people to get what they want, and other people it won’t enable
them to get what they want.
So what kinds of things actually are we going to try to make equal?
So first of all there’s this issue of measuring it, but second of all there’s this issue,
even if we could measure it and suppose we want everybody to be equally happy.
Okay, if we could get past the problem of measurement, how on earth are we going to
establish that?
How are we going to actually make people equally happy?
So there’s the issue of potential impossibility.
The second issue is it conflicts, I think, with human diversity.
Human beings are different.
That’s one of the great things about human beings.
They have different talents; they have different interests; they have different schedules and
values.
Those differences get reflected in a free society by a great flourishing of all sorts
of things, lots of different goods and services and plays and musicals and all the different
kinds of activities that people engage in.
If we were going to try and enforce a kind of material equality we’re going to have
to substantially limit that diversity.
Trying to enforce a material equality is going to interfere to a great extent with human
diversity and human individuality.
And that leads to, I think, the third and most important problem facing the attempt
to create a society based on material equality, and that is that it conflicts with human dignity.
What I mean by that is, part of what it means to be a dignified human being, to have human
dignity, is to have the capacity and the freedom to choose, to make choices.
Those choices are reflected in and actually issue in all sorts of different things that
we choose to do.
We choose different ways of life.
We have different schedules of values.
Those schedules of values, those different schedules of values, the things we choose,
those are effects of our free choice.
And respecting those free choices in other people is respecting their dignity.
So the attempt to enforce material equality will end up requiring us to limit human diversity.
That’s really its fatal flaw, because human diversity is not something to be complained
about.
It’s not something to be regretted.
It’s something to be celebrated.