, Equality: Rejecting Morally Irrelevant Differences

Abstract

Moral equality, the idea that people have equal moral value, is often justified by highlighting a key capacity or property that all people possess (like rationality or the capacity to conceive and pursue a life plan or anything else). This view is met with the objection that every human capacity is subject to empirical variability – therefore, we are not actually equal. Some have rejected this objection and emphasized the typological equality of people, that is, the idea that we are all members of the same natural type or species. Belonging to the same type would preclude any request to take account of empirically proven differences. Typological equality will allegedly encapsulate the very notion of moral equality along with the moral requirement of equal treatment. I will show that this strategy conflates equality with identity. A natural type is defined or constructed by reference to a characteristic and distinct property. The requirement to treat each human being equally derives from one’s typological identity and the normative claim that attaches moral value to the property that differentiates the natural type. Such inference makes moral equality a second-order moral principle. There is, however, a more fundamental meaning in which we could express human equality. It is the compelling force of the requirement to reject some differences as morally irrelevant that gives equality such a major significance for moral life. In the first part of this paper, I argue for the separation between fundamental and derivative equality, the latter being inferred from the idea of shared identity. The second part illustrates this first more fundamental sense of equality through the debate on the human races around 1790 by Herder and Blumenbach.