Logan Albright suggests that equality is “a very, very broad term, with myriad meanings and interpretations.” But it isn’t really very broad in meaning, although its applications are indeed very wide – just as the term ‘red’ refers to the same color, but it is found in a whole lot of very different red things.Normally, we can speak of equality only in contexts where something variable in degree or amount is in question. One amount of something is “equal” to another when their measures are the same. Jones’s age equals Smith’s age if the number of years or other units of time that Jones has lived is the same as the number that Smith has lived; this vehicle goes an equal speed as that vehicle if he number of km or miles per hour that measures the speed of the first is the same as the number that measures the second. And if there is no sense of quantity or magnitude at all, then the notion of ‘equality’ just isn’t applicable.
So, what’s going on with equality of rights? The first thing to point out is that one of the main claims and concerns under the banner of equality has been to insist that all people have the same (basic) rights.You and I and everybody everywhere should have the right to life, for example. This is universality.
But our universally “equal” right is not a right to an equal amount of something: having the same rights does not mean having rights to the same amount of anything in particular, and trouble lurks when we go from the one idea to the other. That’s what contemporary leftists (especially, but they are far from alone) do. They want to infer from the equality of fundamental rights in the sense of the same set of rights, to rights to equality in the narrow sense of a roughly equal amount of something or other, such as income or health or whatever.
Albright is certainly right to point out that humans vary enormously from one another in almost any respect you can think of. Some are bigger or stronger or faster or smarter or more talented than others, and there is no ends to the range of these differences. Now, equalitarians, as he points out, want to steamroller over these differences when it comes to our treatment of each other. They want to claim that we all owe each other equal amount of, say, money, or opportunity, and so on. It doesn’t follow.
Many philosophers (and many other people) talk about “equal liberty” as if that too would be a measurable thing that people can supply each other. Is there any sense in which that is so? Well, liberty is the absence of restrictions or costs imposed by other people on their intended activities. Being essentially a lack of something (interference) rather than a presence of some positive thing, the literal meaning of claims that liberty should be “equal” is that 0 = 0: everyone is indeed entitled to the same amount of interference or imposed cost, namely, None. [Always we have to point out that violations of right do call for imposition and restriction, such as jail terms or fines. But those negative impositions are justified by people’s violations of others’ rights – not by just being different from each other.
Indeed, we can now see that, far from being able to go from there (equality of basic liberty) to equal income or opportunity (etc.) the implication is quite the opposite. For as to what we humans may want to supply to each other, and why, that too will vary enormously. Especially, we are ready to pay each other widely varying amounts of our time, effort, attention, and of course (and therefore) money, for widely varying things. Some of us will pay a lot to certainly people to hear them play the piano, or football; others are not interested in those things and will pay nothing for them. And since people vary hugely in their musical and athletic abilities, the lack of restrictions that we should all equally have, implies that people interested in music will pay more to people of greater ability, or of football in athletic ability. Now, our equal right to liberty means that such variations in supply of all sorts of things to each other for all sorts of reasons will be perfectly OK rather than, as the egalitarian insists, wrong. Instead of all of us having a right to the same thing from each other, equality of liberty leads to us having the right to treat each other very differently in many important respects. In our differing views on such matters, different people will get widely varying amounts of, for example, affection, or incomes, from each other, and our equal liberty says that’s just fine.
So as Albright rightly says, the State trying to force us all to bring it about that we have equal educations or whatever is a violation of the equal basic liberty to which we libertarians think we are all entitled.
It’s not due to difference of meaning of the notion of equality, then, that we encounter egalitarianism, but rather to their making an erroneous deduction from the equality we properly should be thought to have.