I stumbled upon an interesting idea in one of my law lectures today: substantive equality is impossible. I say substantive (as opposed to formal) equality in the sense that measures are taken to reduce pre-existing negative social offset by actively promoting disadvantaged persons or sectors of the community. It is not possible because we cannot construct a society of clones.
Formal equality seems the more tenable idea, though it is perhaps useless in effect (equal opportunity amounts to little in the face of unequal capabilities and positions). However, substantive equality – noble though it may be – must ultimately fail; for to be substantively equal, persons must be identical. Any difference between two persons puts one at a slight advantage to the other, perhaps only in certain situations (or perhaps generally, as may be the result of unequal physical capacity). The difference need not be sociological or even physical – it may be due to their differing mental capabilities or very perceptions of the world. So any argument for equality runs into the problem of evaluating discrepancy, and must inevitably compare and hierarchically rank differences between people, which are – at best – incommensurable.
So paradoxically (for its individualist proponents), to strive for substantive equality is to aim to enforce conformity. In law this amounts to the needless segregation of rules into categories whose divisions are ultimately arbitrary. It becomes difficult to draw the line between an inequality which should be actively compensated, and one which should not. Why should one disadvantaged group be favoured and not another? New minorities – those which are not favoured by measures designed to promote substantive equality – are created.
So long as a storm trooper populace is not what we’re after, I think Orwell put it best.
