University of Southampton

"There is no good reason to treat people as equals
because they are manifestly unequal." Discuss.

by

Lucia Schuster

Injustice arises as much from treating unequals equally as from treating equals unequally.

Aristotle

Humanity went through centuries of slavery, Nazism, neglecting of women rights and discrimination of disabled. All those issues, now regarded as unquestionably wrong in the Western Hemisphere, were often based on arguments of manifested differences between people. Even though people are still as different in characteristics, endowment and lifestyle as they ever have been, the attitude of many societies towards those topics drastically changed over the last centuries. There must be some significant reasons to regard humans now as fundamentally equal although they are dissimilar in so many ways. The question is still a fascinating one: Is it therefore justified to treat all people equally and is that a goal worth achieving? It is legitimate to consider people equal in certain areas whilst unequal in others. I will argue that there are good reasons to treat people equally as they are equal in some respects and treat them unequally because they are unequal in others but also to treat people equally although they are unequal. However for this purpose my essay will be organized in three sections. In the first passage I will defend equality of rights, equality before the law and equality in politics, backed up by the principle of Equality of Respect or Universal Humanity. Starting of with equality of resources in the second part, I will also examine equality of happiness and welfare. In the third paragraph the debate over equality of opportunity and equality of a basic living standard marks the end of my discussion.

Contemporary moralists and political theorists agree on the fact that humans are essentially equal, of equal worth or how Bernard Williams puts it, equal “merely in their being men: it is their common humanity that constitutes their equality” (Pojman L., p. 91). This is strengthened by the Christian conception that every individual is believed to be equally loved by God. It follows that every being has exactly the same right to exist and each person’s interest therefore has the same weight. The important Christian philosopher Kant stated:

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