The Concept of Equality

Equality is, of course, an ethical and legal principle with very deep roots in humankind that can
be traced back even to our pre-history as a species. It is now generally accepted that our remote
ancestors lived in small egalitarian groups that shared the benefits and burdens of cooperative
social life and collectively resisted any individual tendencies to assert dominance or obtain
special advantages. This pattern has been called a reverse dominance hierarchy by the
anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who has documented a similar social pattern among
contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. (1) Likewise, anthropologist Donald Brown, in his more
comprehensive study of human universals (the title of his landmark 1991 book), found that
cooperative decision making, personal rights and obligations, empathy, and sharing exist in
every hunter-gatherer society, regardless of the superficial cultural differences between them. (2)

In more complex modern societies such as our own, the concept of personal equality has been
manifested in many different ways. In Western religions, equality in the sight of God is a
bedrock principle. Equality before the law is deeply embedded in our legal tradition. Modern
democratic electoral systems generally espouse the principle of one man, one vote, even
though they often fall short of this ideal in practice. In English and American common law there
is also the public trust doctrine, the idea that some resources are held in common for the equal
benefit of every citizen. The concept of personal equality is also enshrined in the American
Declaration of Independence (1776), which famously asserts that all men are created equal, and
are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights This foundational premise has
since been echoed in many other constitutional and political contexts.

In the modern era, equality has also assumed an immensely important economic connotation as
well. Ever since the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern capitalism with its
extremes of wealth and poverty inequality in the distribution of income and wealth has often
been a flashpoint for social and political conflict in different societies. Indeed, the modern
socialist ideal of economic equality arose as a response to these deep economic disparities.

The roots of socialism can be traced back to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and his most famous essay, The Social Contract
(1762). (3) Rousseau was appalled by the decadence all around him in pre-revolutionary France
and was outraged that a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving
multitude lacks necessities.(4) He believed passionately that humans are naturally good and
cooperative and that they are inherently social beings who are suited by nature for living in
communal (and moral) societies. Rousseau argued that existing societies had become corrupted
by the unbridled pursuit of self-interest. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, he
famously declaimed.(5)

To Rousseau, the community as a whole has a higher moral status than our individual property
rights. The right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right
which the community has over all. While he was not opposed to the idea of private property,
Rousseau rejected the assertion that it constitutes an inherent natural right, as some theorists
had claimed. Indeed, the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other
rights.(6) Rousseau also developed the idea of a general will a term that is roughly
equivalent to our concept of the public interest to characterize his moral claim on behalf of the
community over any private rights, and he called for a return to small, democratic communities
sharing a common language, culture, and common property. (It seems Rousseaus intuition about
our remote ancestors was essentially correct.)

Needless to say, Rousseaus conclusions had revolutionary implications. It is not surprising that
his books have sometimes been banned, or burned. He also provided the conceptual and moral
foundation for Karl Marxs vision of a communist society and for the brutally effective
rationalizations that were used by Lenin, Stalin and Mao during the two great communist
revolutions of the twentieth century, as well as an assortment of more moderate socialist
reformers, from T.H. Green and the Oxford Idealists to the Fabian socialists, socialist political
parties in various countries and, more recently, the self-defined Communitarians.

For succeeding generations of socialists and capitalists alike, the heart of the political debate has
always involved property rights (and the claims for self-interest) versus some conception of the
common good or the public interest. On the one hand, the philosopher John Locke argued
that private property was justified when a man mixes his labor with the land (say a farmer) and
makes it productive.(7) On the other hand, the early socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, focusing
his anger on the hereditary property holdings of the landed aristocracy (who often received their
land as gifts from a grateful monarch), wrote a book length rant against private property.
Property is theft.Property is despotism. [Socialism] is an aspiration towards the
amelioration of society, he asserted.(8) Among other things, Proudhon argued that land rents
were unearned and therefore were not justified. Proudhon also envisioned an egalitarian
redistribution of wealth among the peasants and workers.

Karl Marx came to a similar vision of a communist society but via a different route. The moral
foundation for Marxs call to redistribute the wealth was his theory of surplus value and his
charge that the working class in the capitalist industrial system was being irretrievably
exploited. Marx argued that it is labor, after all, that is primarily responsible for the production
of material goods and services. So, to simplify a bit, if the workers are able to produce
surpluses (i.e., profits) that exceed what is required for their subsistence, and if the property
owners appropriate these excess profits for themselves, they are in effect stealing it from the
workers.(9)

Modern economists reject Marxs argument, of course. Many factors contribute to the
production of profits in a complex business enterprise. Investment capital and entrepreneurship
are extremely important ingredients, and so is technology, organization, management and,
needless to say, the benefits of a division of labor (or, as I prefer to call it, a combination of
labor). The value of any product or service is therefore not a simple function of the quantity
of labor involved.

Marxs argument is untenable, but so is the capitalist claim that a capital investment and the risks
associated with it, necessarily confers exclusive ownership rights and therefore entitles the
investor to whatever surpluses/profits are produced by the enterprise, or the firm. (The related
accusation that taxes on wealth are a form of theft is equally untenable.) It is certainly true
that this is very often the way capitalist economies work in practice, and an enormous body of
laws and legal precedents undergird this system. But it is certainly not a reflection of some
natural law. (Note that, in each of the cases cited above, the justification for how the wealth
should be distributed hinges on what is considered fair, or just. We will return to this important
point below.)

Equality in the Fair Society Model

In the Fair Society paradigm, the term equality has a very different meaning and, I believe,
makes a more compelling moral claim. It is focused on our basic needs. The argument, in a
nutshell, is that every society must give priority to meeting the basic survival and reproductive
needs of its people as an equal social right. This right is grounded in a biological imperative, yet
it is also circumscribed and limited. I call it our prime directive. The reasoning behind it is as
follows:

The ground-zero premise (so to speak) of the biological sciences is that survival and
reproduction is the basic, continuing, inescapable problem for all living organisms; life is at
bottom a survival enterprise. Furthermore, the survival and reproduction problem is multi-
faceted and relentless. It is a problem that can never be permanently solved. Thus, an organized,
interdependent human society is quintessentially a collective survival enterprise. This tap-
root assumption about the human condition is hardly news, but we very often deny it, or
downgrade it, or simply lose touch with it. Our fundamental collective purpose is to provide for
the basic survival and reproductive needs of our people past, present and future. In effect, we
are all parties to a biologically-based (albeit implicit) social contract. In fact, humans are not
unique in this respect; all other socially-organized species in the natural world have a similar
kind of tacit biological contract.

This biosocial contract, and the imperatives associated with it, encompasses the preponderance
of human activity, and human choices, worldwide. To be sure, survival per se may be the
furthest thing from our conscious minds as we go about our daily lives. Nevertheless, our
mundane daily routines and preoccupations are mostly instrumental to meeting the underlying
survival challenge. They reflect the particular survival strategy the package of cultural,
economic, and political tools through which each society organizes and pursues the ongoing
survival enterprise.

Accordingly, the first and most important generalization about human nature is that each of us
is defined, in considerable measure, by an array of some fourteen categories of basic needs that
are essential to our survival and reproductive success, and we come into the world being oriented
to the satisfaction of these needs.(10) The fourteen primary needs domains (so called because
a number of them are multi-faceted) include a number of obvious items, like adequate nutrition,
fresh water, physical safety, physical and mental health, and waste elimination, as well as some
items that we may take for granted like thermoregulation (which can entail many different
technologies, from clothing to heating oil and even air conditioning), along with adequate sleep
(about one-third of our lives), mobility, and even healthy respiration, which cannot always be
assured. Perhaps least obvious but most important are the requisites for the reproduction and
nurturance of the next generation. (A more detailed discussion of these points can be found in
Chapter Five of The Fair Society.)

In the Fair Society model, a basic needs guarantee is advanced as a social right. The
justification for this societal obligation is as follows: (1) our basic needs are increasingly well
understood and documented; (2) our individual needs vary somewhat, but in general they are
equally shared; (3) we are (almost all of us) dependent upon many others, and our economy as a
whole (the collective survival enterprise), for the satisfaction of these needs; and (4) significant
harm will result if any of these needs are not satisfied. (It is worth noting that no conservative
theorist that I know of would defend individual property rights when they cause harm to
others. Even John Locke, the patron saint of property rights, observed that the Fundamental,
Sacred, and unalterable Law of Self-Preservation forms the very basis of society and creates a
responsibility for government to protect this right.)(11)

The idea of providing a basic needs guarantee may seem radically new a utopian moral
aspiration, or perhaps warmed over Marxism. However, it is important to stress that a basic
needs guarantee is not about providing an equal share of the wealth, nor does it involve an open-
ended social commitment. It involves a specific and ultimately limited set of criteria for social
action, with measurable indicators for assessing the outcomes. Moreover, it is not an
unattainable goal. Some societies Norway being perhaps the premier example have already
achieved this objective through a rich mixture of full employment, generous social welfare
programs, a well developed infrastructure, and supportive public policies and practices.

In sum, the principle of equality in the Fair Society model relates specifically to fulfilling the
widely-accepted, self-evident moral principle of a right to life. The right to life does not
end at birth; it extends throughout our lives. Moreover, it is a prerequisite for any other rights,
including liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right to life necessarily implies the means
for life. Otherwise this right is meaningless. It is also a concrete floor where everyone is
approximately equal and where everyone is equally deprived if any of their basic needs is not
satisfied. And because (to repeat) almost all of us are dependent upon the collective survival
enterprise to obtain the means for our personal needs, the right to life therefore imposes on
society and its members a life-long mutual obligation to provide for one anothers basic
needs. This is the fundamental promise of the biosocial contract, and it ultimately trumps
individual property rights.

Fairness and the Principle of Equity

The second of the three pillars of the Fair Society paradigm involves the principle of equity, or
merit differential rewards for the many differences among us in terms of talent, hard work,
achievement, and, as the saying goes, playing by the rules. While the equality principle takes
precedence under the biosocial contract, the merit precept is concerned with how to fairly
distribute the economic surpluses of a society the excess beyond what is required to provide for
our basic needs.
The merit idea traces back at least to Platos great dialogue, the Republic. (12) For Plato, social
justice consists of giving every man his due (and every woman, of course). There have been
countless debates through the centuries over what Plato meant by the word due, but a common
sense interpretation is that the rewards provided by society should start with a persons all-
important basic needs but also reflect their contributions to society (and, by the same token,
should include punishments for any misdeeds). Plato clearly did not mean equality per
se. Rather, he meant an equitable portion in accordance with some criterion of fairness a fair
share. In other words, for Plato it was important to recognize differences in merit and to reward
(or punish) them accordingly. His great student, Aristotle, used the term proportionate
equality. (There is also a voluminous scholarly literature, especially in welfare economics, on
Aristotles related concept of distributive equity.)(13)

Socialist theory, given its strong egalitarian emphasis, has not as a rule shown much concern for
the moral claims associated with merit. But, in the Fair Society paradigm, the principle of
equity, or merit, cannot be discounted. The equity principle reflects what could be called the
deep psychology of fairness our strong desire to be recognized and honored for our efforts and
achievements (see The Fair Society, Chapter Four). This recognition may or may not take the
form of material rewards. Non-monetary forms of acknowledgement from audience applause
to Boy Scout merit badges and mass-produced, low-cost sports trophies are often sufficient as
rewards; social approval by itself is a powerful motivator of human behavior. But in the
economic sphere, income is obviously of primary importance.

The question is, how can we be fair-minded about rewarding our many differences in terms of
merit, or punishing our transgressions? Merit, like the term fairness itself, has an elusive quality;
it does not denote some absolute standard. It is relational, and context-specific, and subject to all
manner of cultural norms and practices. In general, it implies that the rewards a person receives
should be proportionate to his or her effort, or investment, or contribution. For example, no sane
person would ever claim that he won the lottery on his merits. Nor is theft considered
meritorious, no matter how skillfully it is executed.

Indeed, in the economic sphere, merit is not simply a matter of what the plaintif thinks is fair
treatment but what is socially acceptable. As is the case with fairness in general, merit very
often has to split the difference. When you are asking others to reward you for your efforts, they
are entitled to be stakeholders in the decision. Markets often do this in an impersonal way. If
you are running a business, your sales volume is a direct measure of how other people value your
goods and services, though there can also be many distortions and biases even in this supposedly
objective indicator.

The great virtue of capitalism, for all its faults, is that it encourages and rewards innovation,
entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and the blood, toil, tears and sweat (to borrow some rhetoric
from Winston Churchill) that are required to create and run a successful business
enterprise. Capitalism provides material incentives for behaviors that, ideally, serve the public
good. At least, this is the economics textbook version of the story. The bottom-line justification
for capitalism has always been that the wealth it creates is earned by the owners and is therefore
deserved (merited). Moreover, it also benefits society, though it is not equally shared, of course.
Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it is not. The wealth that is generated in a given economy
may be unearned by any reasonable definition of the term merit and, in the extreme, may
actually cause harm to the rest of society. The many real-world shortcomings in the idealized
capitalist model what is sometimes termed utopian capitalism have been given various
pejorative labels: predatory capitalism, crony capitalism, casino capitalism, and the like. Indeed,
it severely deflates the value of merit when an outcome is unearned, or unfairly
attained. Cheating on a final exam is one obvious example. Nobody, including the cheater, has
any illusion that the resulting grade is a measure of merit.

So it is important to reserve the term merit for outcomes that are earned. A persons rewards
should ultimately reflect contributions that benefit others, or the general welfare. The merit
precept stakes a moral claim; it poses the right question. However, there is no simple formula
for determining what is fair. Public norms, the marketplace, our representative democratic
government, and our complex legal system can and do play a vital role in the imperfect art of
determining what is merited in various contexts. (The important social science research domain
known as equity theory also has much to say about the how to achieve equitable outcomes in
the myriad of every-day, real-world fairness decisions.)(14)

In the Fair Society model, there must be strict adherence to the principle that the economic
rewards should be based on merit, with the ultimate criterion of fairness being public
acceptance. Often this will lie in some middle-ground between what the actor believes is fair
and what society will accept as fair. Anything less may invite public cynicism, varying degrees
of social antagonism, active opposition, and, in the extreme, even a violent revolt. But, to repeat,
the provisioning of our basic needs is our first responsibility, and differential rewards for merit
must be confined to our discretionary income as a society to use a textbook term or else it
converts the social contract into a zero-sum game, where merit is rewarded at the expense of our
basic needs. To cite one obvious example, in the United States today, approximately one-quarter
of the population are living in more or less severe poverty, and the extreme income inequality in
our society is a major culprit.

Fairness and Reciprocity

One possible objection to providing a universal basic needs guarantee is that it might lead to
rampant free-loading and produce an indolent class of economic parasites, or defectors (to
borrow a term from game theory), who would exploit the rest of us. This would obviously be
unfair. Indeed, the collective survival enterprise has always been based on mutualism and
reciprocity, with altruism being limited, typically, to special circumstances under a distinct moral
claim what I refer to (using an insurance industry term) as no-fault needs. So, to close the
loop and balance the scales, a third principle must be added to the biosocial contract, one that
puts it squarely at odds with some of the utopian socialists, and perhaps even with some modern
social democrats as well. There must also be reciprocity in the relation ship.

When a disciple of Confucius asked him for a single word that would describe the basic principle
of social life, he is reputed to have answered reciprocity. Reciprocity is most often associated
with fair exchanges of goods and services, or tit-for-tat, but it also means that you must pay
back a kindness or a favor. Otherwise, you are tacitly exploiting others and benefiting unfairly
from their labors. Not only is the norm of reciprocity, in sociologist Alvin Gouldners term, a
universal ethical principle in human societies but it can be observed in some primate societies as
well. Humans keep score of the favors they do for one another, although the material value is
often less important than the role of these exchanges in building and maintaining personal
friendships and mutual trust, and in signaling a willingness to cooperate and assist one
another. Sometimes even a simple expression of genuine appreciation can be reciprocity
enough. Reciprocity is, in fact, a form of psychological glue that bonds together our friendships,
our families and our communities. (The extensive research in recent years on the biological roots
of reciprocity is discussed in The Fair Society, Chapter Four.)

In the Fair Society paradigm, reciprocity also plays a more formal role. The very idea of a social
contract implies that there must be obligations, or costs as well as benefits, with all parties being
contributors. Without reciprocity, the first two fairness principles would seem like nothing more
than a one-way scheme for redistributing wealth. A clear implication of the reciprocity principle
is that we are also obliged to contribute a fair share to the collective survival enterprise in return
for the benefits we receive. This directive applies to the rich and the poor alike to both wealthy
matrons and welfare mothers. We have a duty to reciprocate for the benefits that our society
provides. Otherwise, we are in effect free-riders on the efforts of others; we turn them into
involuntary altruists.

However, the reciprocity principle also begs the question. What is a fair share? And how can
the obvious differences in our ability to contribute be weighed and factored in? As is the case
with merit, there are no easy formulas, but societies have worked out many different ways of
making such collective decisions from market transactions to legislative mandates, tax codes,
cultural norms, social pressures, and more. The norm of reciprocity is also typically backed by
sanctions of various kinds, ranging from ostracism to fines and more or less severe forms of
punishment. Indeed, policing the biosocial contract is at once a matter of necessity and a matter
of fairness, and it is also consistent with the emerging scientific understanding of human nature,
most notably in the research on strong reciprocity theory. (15) (A detailed discussion about
how to strengthen the reciprocity principle in our society ranging from a full employment
program to provide useful work for everyone to a top-to-bottom reform of our tax code and a
national service program can be found in Chapter Eight of The Fair Society.)

Conclusion

A society that cannot achieve a proper balance between the three indispensable fairness
principles is a society in peril. Indeed, extremes of wealth and poverty have been the seed-beds
of revolution historically. In the first (known) empirical study in political science more than
2,000 years ago, Aristotle and his students compared some 158 ancient societies and found that
the greatest cause of civil unrest and violent revolts in the ancient world was due to extreme
economic inequality. Needless to say, these findings have been confirmed many times
since. Aristotle warned us that no political order is immutable, and modern game theorists,
whose research has done so much to illuminate the foundations of social cooperation in
evolution, have shown unequivocally that mutual benefits are an essential requisite for a viable
social contract. Defection is the likely response to an exploitative, asymmetrical
relationship.(16)

To be sure, coercive force is often used to prevent reforms and to sustain a dysfunctional
political order in human societies, but the costs and risks are always high, and the long-term
results are problematical, to say the least. The recent violent revolutions in the Middle East have
once again demonstrated that a society may ultimately awaken from its social amnesia, as
sociologist Barrington Moore called it, forcing convulsive changes that are uncertain and often
destructive.(17)

As Plato sadly noted in the Republic, Any State, however small, is in fact divided into two
one the State of the poor, the other that of the rich and these are [always] at war with one
another. (18) We now know that this outcome is not inevitable. There have been enough
exceptions to Platos pessimistic prediction over the centuries to suggest that there is a viable
alternative. The vision of a fair society is an attainable objective. Some contemporary societies
(like Norway) provide inspiring examples. Whether or not these are exceptions to the rule, or are
sustainable for the long run, remains to be seen. The alternative, in any case, is a much darker
future for humankind. If so, the tragedy will lie in the fact that it was avoidable. Ultimately, it is
a matter of choice.