Foundations of Human Equality

Trigger warning: this is probably just a masturbatory pseudo-blog entry with no real point and gratuitous latin phrases. But no one can stop me, so I'm writing it anyway.

This is also just a continuation of the ruminations that led to the thread about natural rights. Philosophically, "rights" being social constructs doesn't really pose much of a problem to me. But "equality" seems hairier, somehow. Maybe it shouldn't.

Given my religious background, if you'd have asked me 10 years ago about what it meant to say that "all people are equal", I would have given an answer similar to Augustine:

This leads to the same idea as that we are endowed by a Creator with natural rights. We are foundationally equal because we are all capable of God. What seems appealing to me about Augustine's concept of humanity as capax Dei is that it rests the fundamentally equal worth or value of human beings outside of our more mundane abilities -- our economic productivity, intelligence, even our moral worthiness. Even the worst human in this religious view has a fundamental value and dignity, because they are created in the image of God. This way of thinking avoids reducing humanity to Hοmo Economicus only.

But, now I'm an atheist, so this explanation is no longer intellectually satisfying. Yet, alongside the slow secularization of western society, our politics has become even more concerned with equality -- what it means, how to create it, how to sustain it. This is a good thing in my view, but it seems to present a philosophical challenge for humanists to solve.

One of the things that got me thinking about this is a few conversations I've had recently that touch on equality, particularly one that was about the use of "ableist" language. In that conversation, an argument was made that colloquialisms like "blind spot" should be avoided, because they are ableist in the sense of treating blindness (and etc.) as undesirable. I can understand that people who are blind, or deaf, or born with various physical conditions also need to share in a sense of human dignity and equality -- that they too are "made in the image of God" (so to speak). But the argument against language like "blind spot" doesn't quite seem right to me. Ceteris paribus, it really is preferable to be able to see, to hear, to walk, and so on. Those conditions really are disabilities. I don't see how to avoid that.

So it seems to me that the problem goes back to how we conceptualize human equality in this most basic sense. In the argument against "ableism", is the unspoken premise that what gives a person value is their abilities -- their social and economic productivity in particular? So that to say someone has a disability is to call into question their fundamental equality with other people? If so, this seems like a pernicious definition of equality, because there will always be important differences in ability between individuals.

This, to me, highlights the usefulness of the idea of man "made in the image of God." Under this conception of equality disability is not a disadvantage or something that makes a person fundamentally unequal or less valuable.

But what is the humanist equivalent? Could we invent one, and if we did would it be beneficial also to our politics? There are so many political debates that hinge in some way on what equality ought to mean. Equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunities, equal protection under the law, how to measure and understand issues of disproportionate representation in different contexts, and so on. I'm not saying we have to get too philosophical to make progress on many of these issues (I did warn that this post was masturbatory :P) but the conversation about ableism makes me wonder if a more developed and shared understanding of equality would help guide those debates.