Against Equality

We shouldn't pursue equality of opportunity nor equality of results

What are we arguing about?

Should we worry about equality of opportunity (EoO) or equality of results (EoR)? I rarely hear anyone explicitly endorse the latter explicitly, though I’ve seen many conservatives quip  “we need equality of opportunity, not equality of results” in response to some left-leaning policy. Arguments for EoR come in the form of equity, such as the comic where all three people get the boxes they need to see a baseball game. We see EoR-esque arguments when liberal commentators note racial or sexual disparities in income, COVID morality, or test scores. On the other hand, EoO supports may making programs blind to race, sex, and other similar categories. The government ought to ensure everyone gets the same shot, and it doesn’t matter if people reach different outcomes thereafter. They may believe in government programs that reduce poverty, but such a policy would exist so that everyone has the opportunity to succeed, not to reduce the Gini Coefficient.

Both make some immediate sense. For EoO, it makes sense that we should all have an equal shot at success. If Newton or Einstein lacked opportunity, we would have missed some important scientific discoveries. We will never know what we have lost from the lack of past opportunity. For example, there one could imagine a woman from Newton’s time who never received consideration from academic institutions because of her sex. Selecting roles on non meritocratic grounds can also lead to the wrong person serving an important position. Nepotism, for instance, has probably put the wrong person in Hollywood leading roles and imperial thrones. Even ignoring the consequences of labor mis-allocation, their opportunity seems to hold a moral value. Maybe professional baseball would not have been any more enjoyable to watch if they integrated the league in the 30s and 40s. Still, it just seems unfair that white players could make The Show while black ones couldn’t 

With respect to EoO, I share the moral outrage at unequal results. A monkey study illustrated the problem with inequity. When researchers gave two monkeys cucumbers, they did not protest. However, when one received a cucumber and the other a grape, the monkey that received the cucumber lashed out. Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to fit in a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. I agree with Jesus and monkeys. It doesn’t seem right that a CEO makes 1000 times more than the front-end employees. It also doesn’t seem right that some people live without a home in the same city where others own multiple mansions. For the sake of argument, imagine that the homeless people and the mansion-owners started with full equality of opportunity. They’re all identical twins, raised by the same parents and their different outcomes resulted entirely from their work-ethic and choices. Even then, these unequal results don’t seem ethical.

However, I think both frameworks fail to provide proper goals or solutions to reach those goals. I will argue that the two frameworks are difficult to distinguish, impossible to achieve, and not desirable to achieve. I will then present alternative frameworks for analyzing political issues.

Equality of Results Isn’t Desirable

Consider two examples that have yielded unequal results: college graduation and COVID. In the United States, women used to graduate from college at a much lower rate than men. Today, women researchers now surpass men in college graduations. Similarly, we know a disproportionate amount of non-white Americans died from COVID compared to white ones. This is an outcome, but it indicates an inequality in opportunity to avoid COVID, such as minorities being more likely to work service jobs. I don’t think we should aim for equality in either case. For gender differences in graduation, we could have achieved equality by graduating fewer men. Yes, I know, this sounds like a tired libertarian trope. We’ve listened to Rush’s The Trees and heard the lazy “equally poor” quip in response to a progressive policy. While I don’t think it’s a good argument against redistributive policies, it does work against the EoR framework. Graduating fewer men would have equaled the results, as would graduating fewer women today. Yet, I don’t think expelling people for their gender would satisfy anyone. The same holds true with COVID. The virus disproportionately killed black and Hispanic people, but would have preferred it to proportionately kill black and Hispanic people? I’m citing demographic cohorts here, but it makes even less sense on the individual level. Should everyone graduate college? Should no one? Should everyone get COVID to keep it even? 

Rather than focusing on equality, I think both cases involve a negative outcome that we want to avoid. COVID is bad. We want the fewest people possible to get COVID, and we want all those who get it to have the mildest case possible. Sexism is bad. We don’t want men or women to have their lives hurt by gender expectations. Sexism that bars women from college is bad. It’s also bad if sexism encourages women to attend university when they don’t want to. We can expand this logic to poverty, pollution, lack of internet access, or hundreds of other negative outcomes. A better society would avoid all of these negatives, regardless of their distribution.

Equality of Opportunity Isn’t Possible

While EoR appears undesirable, EoO is impossible. Equality of opportunity doesn’t make sense in a world of parenting, genetics, geography, and the other aspects of life that shape people. Equality of results (or equity) doesn’t make sense in a civilized world with specialization of labor. For team opportunities, I would point to the research on genetics. People with higher IQs obtain higher grades, commit fewer crimes, score higher on the SAT, and perform more effectively at work. The big-five trait “conscientiousness” could also improve job performance. For both traits, roughly half the variance is genetic. In other words some people are hard-wired to perform better at the sort of technical and managerial tasks that pay the most. I’ve seen Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergerson cited to criticize team outcomes, but I think it works just as well against team opportunity. What would we do with the higher IQ people? I agree that we can improve opportunity for the half that isn’t heritable, but I don’t think we do much about the half that is. I cite IQ only as one example. The same applies to disabilities, we can provide hearing aids to the hearing impaired, but how do we level the playing field for the deaf?

A small subset of people will argue against any sort of genetic influence. Though I find a pure rejection of genetics unscientific, I’ll consider it for the sake of discussion. If the gaps come mostly from social pressures, that does not imply that we can close them. In other words, it’s hard to legislate culture. We all grow up learning prim-and-proper Standard Written English and General American in school, but none of us talk that way in our private lives. Language will change as it has for thousands of years. Similarly, I don’t see how public policy can dramatically change the way our society understand sex. Key word here is “dramatically:” I think we can change a little. One can also imagine a world with greater gene selecting (or even gene editing) technology. In that world, it might be easier to change genes than culture. People can already do a low-tech version of this by preferring a partner with certain highly heritable traits (e.g. a high IQ). In summary, I don’t think nature vs nurture matters much when we can’t (or shouldn’t) change the nurture very much. Even if parenting (rather than nature) causes IQ differences, are we going to legislate parenting? 

Difficult to Distinguish

I’ve argued against both forms of equality, but I think there’s one more issue worth mentioning. While one can easily debate EoR and EoO in the abstract, they’re difficult to disentangle in specific cases.  Let’s take a highly debated topic in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections: universal healthcare. In its purest form, Medicare For All would abolish private insurance and place everyone on a government-run plan, similar to the NHS in the UK. Bernie Sanders, the policy’s  most vocal advocate, mentioned equality throughout his campaign though I don’t think he specified which kind. After all, which type of equality does universal healthcare create?

Does Medicare For All create an equality of outcomes? Under the current system, some people have no healthcare, some people have medicare or medicaid, and most receive their healthcare through their employer. Among these employer sponsored plans, more expensive ones might provide lower deductibles, lower copays, or access to better facilities. Different companies also offer different plans, leading to another layer of inequality. I don’t know what healthcare plans Google offers, but they’re probably better than the ones I have. We also have a private healthcare market, where costs vary on age and other medical details. Under an NHS-style system (or at least, one where the NHS lacked private alternatives), the CEO of Google would not have better health insurance than his Uber driver. 

So, it’s a EoO policy, right? Maybe not. Medicare For All wouldn’t be providing the same healthcare to all people. The state wouldn’t provide the poorest people “more healthcare” since they would get allotted the same plan as their CEO. In Harris’ analogy, everyone gets the same rope. It would also provide additional opportunities to sick people. Many people probably have untreated diseases or disabilities that prevent them from climbing the social ladder. A universal healthcare program could alleviate these problems and allow them to compete in the meritocracy.

Maybe it’s EoO in theory and EoR in practice. The plan could allocate more resources to low-income people. there’s a correlation between income and various health outcomes, and working class people are more likely to work hazardous jobs. This would equalize outcomes. However, we can also imagine a scenario where social norms lead wealthier people to schedule more doctors appointments or get more surgeries. One could imagine that working class people prefer to tough it out while us hypochondriac soy boys clog the queues. I don’t think this would occur, but we’ve seen a similar dynamic with vaccines. I’m doing a bit of guesswork here, but I never got that sense that people support Medicare for All because it equalizes outcomes. I don’t see people angry that some people get more healthcare than others. Of course, progressive taxes would pay for a universal healthcare plan, but so could regressive VATs (as they do in many European countries). Instead, it seems like people want access regardless of their income or wealth. 

We could run through a similar analysis with other policies. Is Affirmative Action about equalizing black-white outcomes? Or is it providing opportunity that racial minorities have been denied? Legalizing marijuana would reduce racial and class disparities in the criminal justice system. Is that equality of outcomes or results? What about social security? I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think we need them. I’m not trying to criticize politicians who discuss inequality. If politicians find that the term “inequality” polls well, they should use it. Politics is about gaining votes, not about defending a philosophy dissertation. Rather, I just don’t think that it helps us understand these issues.

We Don’t Use This Framework Elsewhere

In the 1990s and 2000s, NBA offenses ran stale. Fans grew tired of endless post and isolation and play. Throughout this time period, the NBA introduced some rule changes to improve the product. For one, they reduced the amount of time a player could put his back to the basket. Big guys like Barkley could no longer back their poor defender down for as long as the shot clock permitted. The league also phased out hand-checking, giving smaller players a better chance to create offense. The rules changes opened the game for guards. While the tiny (by NBA standards) Steve Nash made multiple All-Star Games in the hand-checking era, he earned multiple MVPs afterwards.The sport became the faster, higher scoring, small-guy-dominated game we know today.

Did this create better equality of opportunity? Smaller guards (like Nash) gained a new opportunity to compete. However, clumsier big men and hand-check-dependent defenders lost opportunities. Did this equalize results? These rule changes redistributed money from the larger players to the smaller ones. That would constitute an equalizing of results with respect to height, if that’s something we care about. On the other hand, the world contains more men with guard-level heights than men with center-level ones. Thus, the changes equalized the world population’s odds of making it to the NBA. Isn’t that opportunity though?

I doubt the NBA asked these questions. I don’t think the MLB did either when they lowered the mound, nor did the NHL when they legalized the two-line pass. The NBA didn’t change the rules for equality, they changed the rules to improve the game: more scoring, faster pace, less isolation plays, etc. We can apply the same thinking to politics. Rather than aiming for equality, we could aim for metrics like a lower poverty rate, less carbon emission, greater GDP per capita, or a million other things. 

Four Different Frameworks

Having rejected equality, what should we use instead? How do we determine which healthcare policy to support? Below, I’ll present a few different frameworks that don’t rely on EoR or EoO. Note that some of these involve a sort of equality like equal protection under the law or the equal value of every person. I’m not arguing that we should never commit ourselves to the equality of anything. I just don’t like EoR or EoO.

Nozick and Property Rights

When COVID first hit, I emailed my state senator asking if he would consider suspending rent. This was a pretty stupid email, but I guess I didn’t have anything better to do. Politely, he responded by explaining that he understood my concern, though he didn’t think the government should cancel private contracts, and any court would strike down such a cancellation. He’s right, we don’t consider egalitarian concerns when it comes to contracts. If a poor man stole a car, he could argue that doing so increases both equality of outcomes and results. However, he still has to give the car back and face incarceration. Neither form of equality matters in this case.

Legally, federal and state governments have some ability to override personal property rights: taxation, eminent domain, enforce drug laws, etc. Philosophically, however, a full commitment to property rights might not allow any of this. In Robert Nozick’s Parable of the Slave, for example, he equates democratic redistribution of wealth with slavery. This political philosophy provides a simple answer to universal healthcare and other progressive policies: no. Personally, I’d immediately try to escape from a Nozickian society, but I can’t deny the internal consistency.

Marxism

Despite many of his invocations in American (particularly right-wing) media, Marx did not write in favor of equality. He explicitly rejected equality, instead focusing his analysis on capitalist exploitation. Marx concerned his work with the surplus value capital took from labor. Despite what you might have heard at CPAC, he didn’t write in favor of people earning equal incomes. I don’t know enough about Marxism to write much more here, but I wanted to note that the most influential left-wing political ideology does not prioritize equality. 

Singer and The Life You can Save

I don’t consider this a political framework, but it can help us provide a moral framework to political issues. Philosopher Peter Singer asks us to imagine a child drowning in a shallow pond. Now consider an adult who walked by that pond, saw the child, but didn’t save him. When pressed on it, the adult explained that, while the pond’s depth posed no risk, they didn’t want to get their shoes wet. To most of us, this explanation wouldn’t assuage them of moral guilt. However, most of us also don’t donate to help people in dire straits across the globe. With the exception of the broke and poor, most of us could spare some money to donate to these people, but we choose not to. While this feels less monstrous than the shallow pond, it doesn’t seem like there’s any moral difference. Thus, we’re all immoral for spending money on frivolous things rather than donating it. 

In a watered down form, this helps answer some of our political questions. If we have to raise taxes on middle or upper class people to decrease poverty or homelessness, we’d be morally obligated to do so. It might also suggest less government spending on “non-essential” items like NPR, space travel, or education, though these items don’t compose a large part of the federal budget. I mention the water-down form because the purest form of Singer’s morality would call for us to send a significant portion of cash to the poorest people overseas. That might be the ethical thing to do, but I can’t see many people wanting to do that. There’s also the idea of existential risks, i.e. really big ones. Though these don’t directly save a life like donations or the shallow ponds, they have a probability of doing so in the future. We could imagine that having a 10% chance of saving 100,000 lives morally equates to saving 10,000 lives directly. One could have made a Singer-ian argument for heavily funding respiratory vaccine research pre-COVID, for instance. Right now, we might want to put resources into carbon capture or (if possible) reducing the number of nuclear arms. Some more speculative types might also want to get a head start on reducing the future harms of AI. Regardless of how we apply, we can imagine a politics that favors saving lives over frivolities. 

The Veil of Ignorance

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls proposes a thought experiment that can help us imagine a just social contract. This thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance, asks us to imagine building a society that we cannot know our place in. We don’t know if we’ll grow up in a rich family or a poor one or what jobs we will have. Doing so removes our personal bias from politics. I can’t just say, well, I’d give billions of dollars to Substack bloggers named after dead German actors. Rawls concludes that we’d want some EoR to provide people incentives, but we wouldn’t want so much EoR that people at the bottom would suffer. In other words, we’d want the amount of EoR that provides the best results for the people at the bottom.