EQUALITY is one of three avowed aims of Compass but to date we haven’t really explored this notion, so I thought I would get the ball rolling, particularly since there is so much confusion over the issue.
Whenever we talk about equality we generally have three types to choose from – Equality of Treatment (EofT); Equality of Outcome (EofO), in the sense of equalising socio-economic means; and Equality of Opportunity (EofOp). But whenever politicians talk about equality they generally mean the latter without any real analysis, so it tends to become a meaningless mantra.
It is difficult, however, to isolate the three because they overlap in important and, sometimes, surprising ways. To show this I will take as an example the entrance qualifications to an organisation – let’s say the Civil Service. The first point to make is that not everyone can become a Civil Servant, so we are attempting to decide who should get what are often described as ‘lumpy goods’. So, we might begin by stating:
1 – EofOp means that no person or group of people should be excluded from a position as a Civil Servant in advance. But the head of the Civil Service might say that it is important to maintain its standards and traditions and the entrance exam is open to any cultural type that qualifies for this role, so EofOp already exists.
2 – But we might respond by arguing that true EofOp cannot exist unless all members of society have an equal chance of fulfilling the condition.
So, the Civil Service switches to an entrance exam open to all.
3 – This is still not good enough, however, because it is well known that social class and upbringing have a huge impact on intellectual achievement.
4 – The answer maybe to lobby for policies that provide extra tuition and intervention in early years – similar to New Labour’s Sure Start programme and would equate to EoO. This still wouldn’t be good enough for true EofOp because those people lucky enough to be better endowed genetically would have a better chance of success, so pure luck would play an uncomfortable role where merit is what we’re seeking.
5 – So now might embark on a programme of genetic engineering to equalise chance or introduce random lotteries to reduce the whole process to chance.
6 – Now, though, we have drifted away from EofOp altogether because merit, which we usually associate with EofOp, is either obliterated by pure chance or becomes less and less significant the more we are equalised through genetic engineering (the latter, of course, has its own ethical problems which we won’t go into here except to note it).
It is important at this stage to notice that (1) involves EofT, something like Peter Singer’s Equal Consideration of Interests and calls on the actions of moral agents.
After that, however, it begins to involve States of Affairs and how to improve them.
But things rapidly go downhill from then on and we end up in the uncomfortable position in which merit appears to play no role at all. To make matters worse, the two ends of the slippery slope split in two. At the top I have referred to as being within the range of Singer’s Equal Consideration of Interests. But that is only one view and one, it should be noted, that does not apply only to humans because non-humans also have interests – and Singer is interested in extending the moral sphere to include non-humans, particularly the other Great Apes. Some philosophers, however, want to find peculiar human traits which exclude non-humans. Jeremy Waldron, for example, develops John Rawls’s notion of property ranges in an attempt to do this in his book One Another’s Equals. For him qualities like rationality, moral agency and autonomy are properties typical of humans that are not apparent in other animals, even though there may be huge inequalities in the range of such qualities within humanity. He gets rounds this by drawing an analogy in geography. We might say, for example, that although there is a big difference in size between Salisbury and Whiteparish, they are both equally in Wiltshire. For myself, however, although I agree that humans are particularly well placed to exercise reason – even if it is not always very well exercised – this is a matter of degree rather than kind and I think it’s very difficult to draw an absolute firewall between us and other animals. The underlying assumption, also, is that the qualities that he privileges automatically mean that humans are in some way superior to those of other animals whose senses, for example, are much superior to those of humanity’s and not obviously inferior in themselves than rationality, moral agency and autonomy. So, I think that Singer’s principle is more appropriate precisely because it is blind to all such characteristics.
At the other end of the slope two positions open up. One might be called equal prospects and the other equal means or in our terms EofO. The first involves equalising regardless of whatever position one might hold in society and involves methods like sortation, random selection and allocation designed to evade the baleful influence of inequality and class, and genetic engineering. Equal means involves anything from remedial classes or intervention in early years (Sure Start again) to attempting to reduce inequality society-wide. Personally, I am in favour of the equal means approach at least in part because of the damage that inequality in itself can do as outlined in the seminal book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. As we have seen random selection may also allocate people into positions to which they are not suited and, in any case, why should adding another layer of chance make things any better? On the other hand, we may spend huge amount of resources on equalising means without any guarantee that it will increase EofOp. It seems that equal prospects are meaningless without equal means and the latter is pointless without equal prospects.
Maybe we can halt the slippery slope somewhere near the top when we are asking agents like employers to consider the interests of applicants equally; and the State of Affairs in which we are trying to equalize means is simply a good in itself, freeing people to realise their potential in any field – what I have called the emancipation of the embedded citizen – and not necessarily always in the pursuit of limited ‘lumpy goods’, even though a more equal society is also more likely to lead to better opportunities. That is certainly the view of James Bloodworth in his little book The Myth of Meritocracy. He says: “Social mobility should be the by-product of a society that treat everyone well, rather than an end in itself…More equal societies tend to have better rates of social mobility.”
Dickie Bellringer
One component of inequality – but a pretty important one – is education. Endless politicians have gone on about raising standards and policies come and go. Recently we have had ‘free’ schools and academies. The fundamental problem though is that those who can afford to send their offspring to the top public schools can ‘buy’ for them a huge advantage in life. This is not just a superior education but all the links and friendships they form in the school and at Oxbridge where a great many of them go.
An ex-education minister, George Walden, wrote a thoughtful book on the subject ‘We should know better’ (4th Estate, 1996). In it he makes the observation that if cabinet member’s children had to attend the schools that their constituents did, the system would change overnight. The great majority of cabinet member’s children go to various fee paying schools and so do not have to endure the sort of squalor that some ‘ordinary’ children do.
‘Yet while the country agonizes about what should be done, the most affluent, articulate and influential people in society will do what they always do when education is debated: having made their private arrangements, they will stand aloof’. (ibid)
But in all the talk about raising standards and the endless debates on TV programmes about it, a basic point is missed. For many parents, education is about competition: it is about gaining an advantage for their child. Many would say that is a natural thing for a parent to want to do for their child(ren). The problem with a competitive approach however is that their are winners as well as losers.
Since we cannot determine the cleverness or otherwise of offspring from their parents, it means that those getting the best education are those on the whole who can afford it. Society needs equality of opportunity – or as near as you can get to it. So that each child gets the opportunity to suit his or her needs.
There is thus an imbalance between the wishes of parents and that of society. To achieve a better equality of opportunity therefore means diminishing the prospects (if only slightly) of the children of the wealthy or well to do. Giving this up will not be easy since the system enables the children of the wealthy to dominate the professions; media; politics and the civil service. Famously, Harold Macmillan looked around his cabinet table and saw many he had been to school with.
The Spirit Level book referred to showed that unequal societies perform less well than equal ones. But achieving a greater equality of opportunity means the affluent and influential giving up some of their advantages and that will not be achieved easily.
Peter
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Equality sounds good, as an ideal. But, like Utopia, it is a practical impossibility. This won’t go down well, but it is better to face it. We need to think in more realistic terms, perhaps guided by our wish for it. What is this wish? Can we describe the wish as some intuitive sense of fairness? Human beings (from infancy, except psychopaths, and even some animals) seem to have this feeling. Of course it is not possible to quantify, even with all our mechanisms of law and justice. But democracy is very useful in providing a means of continually adjusting the laws by which a just equality can (could?) be ever more closely approached.
A rider to my second sentence above: Equality, to be a practical reality, would have to equate not only rich and poor, native and foreign, male and female, black and white, bright and stupid, LGBTQIABC &c&c, but most problematicallv of all, infant, mature and retired people.
Christopher Browne.
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Yes, education is a curious case because at the primary and secondary level, at least in the UK, it is universal and compulsory and, therefore, it should not be subject to the problems associated with Equality of Opportunity. There are no ‘lumpy goods’ except those that we artificially impose on education at this level like grammar schools, private schools, free schools, academies and faith schools. The obvious answer was the comprehensive school, which should have smoothed out these ‘lumpy goods’ but these have come under constant attack. And you’re right, Peter, that the conflict between parents’ competitive demands for their children and the wider common good distorts the landscape.
Of course, a good primary and secondary education does enter the fray when it comes to getting good jobs and access to universities. And even if you have an all-comprehensive system, the better off are able to game the system by buying houses in the catchment areas of schools with a good reputation etc. So we have now descended to a State of Affairs of inequality of means and prospects. The obvious solution to this would be to allocate school places by lot. That this would not encounter any of the objections associated with chance and allocating people into unsuitable situations demonstrates that education at this level, in itself, has nothing to do with EofOp. And yet, of course, the furore such a suggestion would create also shows how far off beam we are – and the strength of parental feeling, at least until their child fails to get into the school they have targeted! At the same time it would be disingenuous to suggest that this has nothing at all to do with EofOp because of the knock-on effect after leaving school. And we haven’t even touched on the effects that environment and genetic make-up have on educational achievements.
So, education is a curious mixture of EoOp, Equality of Treatment and, at the more fundamental level Equal Means and Prospects – and there’s no need to repeat what I think about that.
Christopher, I’ not sure whether you are referring to Equality of Outcome (EofO) or treatment. If it’s EofO, then I would agree that absolute equality is neither possible nor desirable. I think most egalitarians in this sense talk about reducing unnecessary and damaging inequality rather than eliminating it altogether. Pure egalitarians don’t care whether that’s equalizing up or down but pluralist egalitarians, like myself, include a principle like utility in which we argue for equalizing up as far as possible. Some people dismiss equality altogether and go for what is called Prioritarianism in which the least well-off are targeted regardless of whether or not inequality increases ( I think New Labour took this approach). John Rawles had an interesting take on this with his Difference Principle in as much as he said that inequality was unjust whenever it failed to benefit the least well off.
With regard to your last paragraph, I think that the beauty of Peter Singer’s Equal Consideration of Interests principle is that it doesn’t have to specify in advance which interests should be so considered. It allows for decisions to be taken on a case-by-case basis.
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I just received two comments, the second by another ‘Christopher’. I liked the last bit where it mentioned an Equal Consideration of Interests principle which avoided mentioning which interests should be considered. This is more or less the Fairness which I ended up with in the very short and, I hope, clear contribution which I made a couple of days ago. I am wondering why my bit was not seen fit to print. Christopher Browne
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Hello Christopher, your piece did go on the website beneath my original posting and Peter’s response. And in my reply I am referring to Peter’s and your comment. How else could I have done this if your bit hadn’t been published? And the only Christopher on the Equality blog is you!
Dickie.
http://www.salisburycompass.org
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Yes, Fairness, whether of equality of opportunity or anything else, must be on a case-by- case assessment. Also, it is a result of Opinion. This is why , if Fairness could be achieved (Utopia?), it would be achievable in a way that Equality could not. Because Equality is a Principle, and a Principle of Equality has this idealistic impossibility of working in practice among the wonderful variety of human beings.
However, an Opinion is a Voice, and if Voices are heard, you have Democracy. So although Democracy may not immediately (or ever?) lead to complete Fairness………it can lead towards it.
I’m sorry if I caused a stupid confusion earlier. Probably got my emails in the wrong order. Christopher
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