Equality Is Moral, Not Mathematical
The Doctrine of Equity as Pseudo-Science
This article is the text of my presentation at a working group on theology and DEI hosted by the Princeton Initiative in Catholic Thought.
Today, there is a confusion of moral equality with mathematical equality. Ethicists and theologians are out; number-crunching nerds - empathic as they may be - are in.
Today it is held - especially by proponents of the doctrine of equity - that those most qualified to speak on the subject of human equality are social scientists: Whether human beings are equal turns on the mathematical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment.
I would like to reclaim equality as the terrain of ethicists and theologians. Why? Because equality is moral, not mathematical.
In particular, human equality is the claim that human beings, as people, are essentially and individually bearers of dignity, unaffected by accidental and empirical differences between them, at individual or group levels.
The doctrine of human equality is latent in ordinary moral discourse, in Christian and post-Christian societies. But its Christian foundation deserves reiteration. After justifying and exploring the claim that moral equality has been placed on the empirical and falsifiable foundation of mathematical equality, I will present a theological foundation for human equality, across five anthropological dimensions. By the end, I hope the presentation will prompt questions about whether and how the doctrine of human equality can be maintained in a secular society.
The Mathematical Doctrine of Equality
How can I say that the proponents of equity think that the doctrine of human equality depends on the empirical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment? Here’s how:
I once was trying to retrieve some artificial flowers at IKEA. As I searched, I asked a woman for help locating the flower section and made a quip about men not knowing where the flower section is. She responded, quite evangelically, that men can be interested in flowers too, so she wouldn’t assume my ignorance of the location of the flower section (though she did direct me there). In the hard edge of her comment, I heard her rationale, “Because humans are equal…you sexist.”
Human equality entails mathematical equality across group means on accidental features - like interest in flowers.
But if human equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality, then social-scientific studies could determine whether human beings are equal. By putting the doctrine of human equality on an empirical basis, this IKEA-goer has made it falsifiable.
Now, if I gathered the relevant data and demonstrated to her that women are, on average, more interested in flowers than men, she would likely respond that this is due to cultural factors.
Once again, however, this puts the doctrine of human equality on an empirical and potentially falsifiable basis. But this time, it is on a basis that requires data to be gathered from a yet-incomplete human experiment: Raising a generation of boys and girls with an utter absence of stereotypes and cultural depictions of women having greater interest in flowers than men.
While technically falsifiable, this puts the mathematical doctrine of equality beyond the range of what will likely ever be tested. It is unlikely that society will purposefully carry out this experiment and gather the relevant data.
Now my claim is not that the difference of interest in flowers between men and women is biological; I lack the kind of expertise to adjudicate that claim.
My claim is that this entire discourse is irrelevant to the question of human equality.
Human equality does not, and should not be made to, depend on the outcome of social-scientific studies or yet-incomplete human experiments. That is too flimsy a basis for a claim as central to Western polities as the doctrine of human equality.
Likewise, the premise that moral equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality is a premise that the cultural left shares with the racial right: Differences in group averages on accidental features are relevant to moral status.
I would have thought that the proper response to rejecting the racial right would be to reject that premise. Instead, the cultural left has assumed the truth of that premise and banked their moral worldview on a falsifiable empirical claim: That human beings, in a utopian, newly-reconstituted Rousseauian state of nature, would have equal group averages on accidental features.
I want to offer a distinct basis for the doctrine of human equality, one independent of the vagaries of empirical, mathematical observation.
The Doctrine of Moral Equality
First, we need a different gloss on human equality itself, the moral rather than the mathematical.
While the mathematical is about the outcome of social scientific studies, the moral is a normative claim about how human beings ought to be treated.
One way to cash out the moral doctrine of equality is by appeal to an old principle of law: “Treat like cases alike.”
Here’s a violation of that: “I would serve a white person in this situation, but I won’t serve this black person. After all, they are different.”
But are they in a morally relevant sense?
This provokes the question what forms of likeness are morally salient. And I would claim that race is not morally salient, but personhood.
Whether you treat them as a moral person possessing dignity and an equal claim on your esteem is determined by whether they are a person, which depends on nothing but membership in the human race.
From this example, I generalize a principle:
Accidental differences between human beings are irrelevant to moral status.
Just as race and sex are irrelevant to the moral status of personhood, more fine-grained differences between individuals and groups on accidental features are all the more irrelevant to moral status. This is not to claim that any particular group differences are natural or biological. It is to claim that no such differences are relevant to the doctrine of human equality.
It is a further and separate question what should be done to help those who suffer and are disadvantaged.
Recognizing that equality is a moral and not a mathematical claim, we see that it has to do with a status man has by nature and not accidental features. We reach contested questions of human nature, essentialism, and meta-ethics.
Contemporary discourse is divided primarily between postmodernists who do not believe in essences or natures at all, and naturalists who believe that nature is without moral significance and, by the way, that things do not have natures or essences.
Western moral intuitions still point to an implicit belief in human equality, but philosophy often conflicts with these intuitions. What can possibly ground the Western faith in human moral equality? A Christian theological anthropology.
Human Equality in Five Theological Dimensions
A Christian theological anthropology maintains the equality of human beings across five dimensions: Human Nature, Responsibility, Sin, Suffering, and Human Destiny.
Human Nature
First, all human beings are equal in possessing the same nature.
Biologically, Christianity teaches, or assumes, that all human beings are the same species. Population-differences, including purported race differences, are not just gradations from species-differences, like the distinction between humans and non-human apes. I’ll leave the details of making this claim concordant with science aside.
So far “equality” would apply to any species. The same, after all, would apply to dogs: All dogs are equally dogs.
To arrive at moral equality, we must introduce a category that is not merely biological but moral: “Person.” We determine membership in the kind person by virtue of membership in the kind human being. Persons are not some kind of advanced being with certain cognitive abilities; they are members of a species which is unique in its cognitive abilities and linguistic capacity, and upright stature, and distinction between feet and hands, and they reproduce facing each other. All of which are reflective of personhood.
The crowning feature of the Christian doctrine of human nature is that the human difference, call it rationality, personhood, or something else, is reflective of our being made in the image of God. All human beings are ultimately moral equals in that they are made in the image of God.
Responsibility
A particularly salient feature of the human difference, of our being in God’s image, is human responsibility. If a dog kills a person, we may put it down; but this is not punishment. If a person kills another person, we hold him responsible for his actions.
Human beings are also equal in responsibility. Equality in responsibility is contradicted by any ideology that frees some groups from responsibility while laying responsibility exclusively on another group’s shoulders.
This occurs in contemporary racial ideology, for example. As Shelby Steele argues, in “The Culture of Deference,” the effect of left-wing ideology and action since the 1960’s has been to put American whites in a relation of deference to American blacks. All moral responsibility is on the shoulders of whites; blacks have no responsibility. Whatever the wrongs of the past, it is the wrong response to treat a group that has suffered as now free from the responsibility that all humans are subject to, equally.
Sin
Human beings are also equal in being subject to the power of sin. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose theology inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, made the doctrine of sin the core of his “Christian realism.” He measured ideologies by whether they recognized human fallibility, error, and mixed motives as universal to human beings or limited to one’s outgroup.
For instance, he praised Marxism for recognizing that people’s beliefs could be motivated by economic factors. But he criticized Marxists for thinking themselves above such criticism:
“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”
Likewise, he praised activists who opposed racism for uncovering elements of human sin. But he criticized activists and African-Americans themselves for absolving themselves of this participation in human sinfulness and, chiefly, pride. The response to race-hatred cannot be race-pride:
“The sins that the white man has committed against the colored man cry to heaven. But might it not be well for the ultimate peace of society if intelligent white men and colored men studied and analyzed these sins not so much as the peculiarities of a race, but as the universal characteristics of Homo sapiens, so called?” (“The Confession of a Tired Radical,” in Love and Justice, Reinhold Niebuhr, 121).
We see strange versions in our own time. Robin DiAngelo teaches in White Fragility that whites are subject to a version of original sin to which blacks are not. Whites must constantly examine themselves for racism, but blacks do not have to. Reverse racism is “A-OK.” The same with the other contemporary race ideologues. Black people can’t be racist. Race pride is in.
Suffering
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “Into what estate did the fall bring mankind? Into an estate of sin and misery.”
As with sin, people often do not believe in the universality of suffering and so, human equality as including conditions of suffering and misery.
There are many examples. Today, people think that suffering only happens to minorities, the “disadvantaged,” the oppressed. Another group can be classified as oppressors and is known to have no suffering (and all sin).
Instead, we need to see people as our equals, their suffering as our suffering, and it goes in both directions on these various scales of oppression or disadvantage. A lot of black people take a very negative view of white people, their lives are free of difficulty. A lot of poor people take a negative view of people who are well-off; they’ve got no problems. These are as much violations of recognizing human equality as are prejudicial views held by the wealthy and white.
Destiny
Nothing secures a belief in human equality like the belief that we will all share in a true, not merely hypothetical kingdom of heaven. The political struggle to realize it on earth is valuable - though whatever we achieve will remain imperfect - but we need a hope that this will be a reality one day. That should not undermine activity today to make it true. It should allow us to be realistic in our idealistic pursuits:
“There are…no solutions for the race problem on any level if it is not realized that there is no absolute solution for this problem. … It is not possible to purge man completely of the sinful concomitant of group pride in his collective life” (“The Race Problem,” Niebuhr, 130-131).
Not Equity, But Equality
The doctrine of human equality rests on the recognition that human beings are, morally, as persons, and theologically, as made in the image of God, equal in nature and status. Human equality is not an empirical claim about the sameness of human beings across groups on accidental features - and therefore, a falsifiable and unproven claim.
Admittedly, recognition of moral equality does not answer the further questions about assisting the poor, including members of previously excluded groups, and finding reconciliation after historical wrongs. Advocates of equity rightly draw attention to these questions.
But our contemporary political problems must be dealt with on the basis of a prior belief in and commitment to moral equality. That commitment to moral equality must not be confused with mathematical equality. Its ground is more certain than the shaky ground of falsifiable social science.
We need a moral doctrine that is a substantive alternative to that of proponents of DEI. And that doctrine should retain an “E.” The E should not be understood as implying a mathematical equality between groups, but a moral equality across races as members of the human species, as people.
Here’s to “E”: Not equity but equality.
What is your position on women’s equality within the church? It seems strange to claim that Christianity is the best basis for women’s equality when churches are perhaps the strongest proponents of the view that women are ideally not equal to men and the church, in particular, is one of the main places where women should not be equal.
As regards racial or economic justice, I think we should note that white and black, or rich and poor, do not need to be equally morally culpable for social injustice in order for us to see both groups as possessing human dignity and human flaws. The Bible is pretty clear that rich people are likely to be in a dire spiritual condition; it’s almost impossible for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Clearly, if we’re using the Bible as our moral example, it is not wrong to point the finger at rich people in particular for certain kinds of sin. The phrase “moral equality” could be taken to imply otherwise, and I think some of your wording does fall into that trap.
Excellent speech.
"I would have thought that the proper response to rejecting the racial right would be to reject that premise. Instead, the cultural left has assumed the truth of that premise and banked their moral worldview on a falsifiable empirical claim: That human beings, in a utopian, newly-reconstituted Rousseauian state of nature, would have equal group averages on accidental features."
My own theory is that social scientists went strongly in this direction after WW2 because they had no answer why, in a new post-Christian morality, groups should be treated equally if they are inherently different. And frankly, they still don't. They could have been working on this issue for decades, but instead their only argument is that all groups should be treated equally because they are indeed 100% biologically equal. Now they are painted into a corner.
The best path forward is what you suggested:
"We need a moral doctrine that is a substantive alternative to that of proponents of DEI. And that doctrine should retain an “E.” The E should not be understood as implying a mathematical equality between groups, but a moral equality across races as members of the human species, as people."