RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: Roderick Long - Equality: The Unknown Ideal  Sat Jun 27, 2015 10:20 pm | |
| When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of '76, as later generations would call them—that's the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty.
The original draft of the Declaration highlights the importance of equality still more clearly. The final and better-known version states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
But what Jefferson originally wrote was this:
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As far as I can tell, the wording was changed for stylistic reasons rather than substantive ones. The final draft does flow more smoothly. But the original draft is more philosophically precise. By contrast with the final draft, where equality and liberty are presented simply as two fundamental principles, with their relation to one another left unclear, in the original draft the value of liberty is explicitly said to be secondary to, and derivative from, the value of equality.
Yet we who regard ourselves as the inheritors of the principles of '76 do not speak as often, or as warmly, about equality. We talk, instead, about liberty; we call ourselves libertarians, not egalitarians. We don't give our books titles like The Constitution of Equality, or For a New Equality, or How I Found Equality in an Unequal World. By contrast, those who do most often invoke the language of equality in contemporary political discourse tend be the enemies of the principles of '76, as we understand those principles. How could equality be our ideal, if it is also theirs?
The answer, of course, is that we need to specify: equality of what? equality in what respect? Our egalitarian opponents favor socioeconomic equality—sometimes interpreted as equality of socioeconomic opportunity, sometimes interpreted as equality of socioeconomic outcome. (The difference between the two becomes increasingly blurred these days as inequality of outcome is taken as prima facie evidence of inequality of opportunity.) What sort of equality do we stand for?
It is sometimes suggested that the libertarian version of equality is legal equality—equality before the law. And it is certainly true that the ideal of legal equality has been invoked by libertarians against various programs of a socioeconomically egalitarian stripe (such as labor laws and anti-discrimination laws that grant to employees, whilst denying to employers, the right to terminate the employer-employee relationship at will).
But legal equality as such is too limited to constitute the libertarian ideal. Just as socioeconomic egalitarians find legal equality inadequate because (in Anatole France's memorable phrase) it forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, so libertarians likewise would not be greatly cheered if the injustice of military conscription, for example, were extended from one sex to both; this would be an advance in legal equality, but hardly an advance in liberty. As Murray Rothbard writes:
[T]he justice of equality of treatment depends first of all on the justice of the treatment itself. Suppose, for example, that Jones, with his retinue, proposes to enslave a group of people. Are we to maintain that "justice" requires that each be enslaved equally? And suppose that someone has the good fortune to escape. Are we to condemn him for evading the equality of justice meted out to his fellows?[1]
By the same token, equality of liberty falls short of capturing the libertarian ideal. A world in which everyone had the same tiny amount of freedom would not be a libertarian one. We may speak, as Herbert Spencer did, of a law of equal freedom, but that law specifies not just liberty's equalization but its maximization; it's not the equality part that's doing the real work. The law of equal freedom treats equality as, at most, a constraint on, rather than as the foundation of, maximum liberty.
https://mises.org/library/equality-unknown-ideal |
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