This article is the text of my presentation at a working group on theology and DEI hosted by the Princeton Initiative in Catholic Thought (princetoncatho...) .
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 hum...
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