Understanding Human Equality

Human equality cannot be discovered through visual observation of the world. Nor can it be verified by inspecting measurements that correlate data collected on human achievements or behavior.

This is one of the reasons why the ideas of human equality and equal human dignity remain unintelligible to many who are quite intelligent—perhaps even brilliant in some areas. They can claim—accurately enough—that the evidence of both human history and everyday life speaks not to human equality at all, but to the glaringly unequal distribution of human potentialities and talents: physical, emotional, intellectual, creative, and moral.

The inescapable reply to this is that equal human dignity is a spiritual idea; and the data on human equality are spiritual data. (“Spiritual” here, following traditional philosophical usage, means real but not “physical” or “physically observable”).

But how does a person discover these data?

To begin with, it is by living in the flow of culture, with its traditions and heritages communicating—often through images and examples—what meanings and values are to be taken seriously, that someone is prompted to make an inquiry about human equality in the first place. For example, one might see a video of Eleanor Roosevelt or Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking eloquently about equality and also enacting dignity; or hear a song, or hymn, that asks “When shall we all be free?” One reads the statement in the Declaration of Independence (1776) that “all men are created equal,” and the assertion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that all persons are born “equal in dignity and rights.” One is told by Biblically-grounded theology—out of which these modern political notions developed—that every person has been created “in the image of God” and is to be respected as such; and hears in some context or other the Christian teachings that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself (where “neighbor” is understood to mean “anyone”); that one should treat “the least of these” (the most vulnerable, the poorest, the most disgusting and reviled) with the same tenderness one would bestow on the people one cherishes; and that one should “love one’s enemies” (whatever love here precisely means).

Each of these assertions either states or implies that all persons are equal in basic human value.

Presented with such images, examples, and assertions, one might ask the question: what sense do they make?

Or one might brush all this imagery and language aside as meaningless, as residues of moral sentimentalism irrelevant to the way people really are, how people really act, the way the world really works.

Suppose, though, that one does turn to the investigation of their meanings, on the presumption that possibly they express a fact.

Why would one do that?

First of all, because of a certain existential openness—openness of disposition—that is a willingness to entertain the possibility that the teaching that all persons are born equal in dignity is both intelligible and true (not as an assertion about the equal distribution of human talents or virtues, obviously, but in some metaphysical or spiritual sense); and a willingness to entertain the possibility that the moral directive that, for example, you should love your neighbor as yourself (whatever love here precisely means) should actually be ethically determinative for how one aspires to live.

On the basis, then, of this willingness one might be led to seek, not outwardly, but within one’s own consciousness—in intrinsically spiritual data, invisible but apprehensible—the data, and the patterns of meaning in that data, that could render intelligible such teachings and directives.

And then one could have insights that make sense of them, issuing into active commitment to their truth and value.

In other words, there are conditions of interior experience that must be attended to and understood before the idea of equal basic dignity will make sense.

It should be noted that this “making sense” of the concept of human equality is not equivalent to experiencing certain feelings that attract one to images or languages expressing the idea of equality—say, anger because one has not been treated justly in life, or fear that oneself or others will not be treated justly; or outrage and resentment that human history is a continuous spectacle of certain persons or classes or races or nations oppressing and exploiting other persons or classes and races and nations; or the desire to see peaceful relations prevail in social and political life just as they do in friendships that thrive on mutual affection. Feelings like these can serve the crucial role of initiating an apprehension of the “value of persons” that is articulated in the statement that all humans are “equal in dignity.” But such feelings, important as they are, do not of themselves equate to an understanding of what equal human dignity is.

Furthermore, yearning and affection and anger and resentment that may be initial responses to the idea of human equality can be derailed into a support of viewpoints, or an embrace of policies, that contradict genuine respect for equal human dignity.

For example, the longing to establish a community of “universal brotherhood and sisterhood” and the desire to create a “classless society” motivated the Bolsheviks and their supporters to murder or imprison in labor camps innumerable persons who were deemed “enemies of the people” and “historically dispensable” simply because they were born into a certain class (aristocratic or bourgeois) or nationality, or expressed politically heretical opinions, or held certain religious beliefs. Again, anger and resentment that a group of people have historically been oppressed by other groups may lead to the conviction that “equality” will only be achieved when the tables have been turned, when former oppressors become “justly” oppressed. Or again, yearning to see equality manifested can sour from a commitment to help realize a “democracy of freedoms”—a political condition of universally enjoyed liberties and protections—to a commitment to bring about, perhaps through terror, a “democracy of victims,” a leveling, whereby those who have been hurt and frightened will no longer be “unequal” because everyone has been hurt and frightened.

Of course, the symbolism of human equality can also, in a more trustworthy emotional vein, call forth feelings (usually beginning in infancy) of the value of one’s own self revealed through relationships with other persons encountered as Thous (in Martin Buber’s language)—one’s parents first of all, family members, friends, lovers—through whose eyes, faces, speech, and actions one feels oneself unconditionally delighted in and accepted. In these encounters, where each subject is an I for each other’s Thou, one senses the boundless mystery that wells up in every personhood; inchoately apprehends the uniqueness of persons; and receives a hint of spiritual equality. But all this, too, is still just feeling: the self’s affective glimmer of its value as a person, but not that value understood—much less the equality of all persons understood.

So we need to ask: in addition to experiencing certain feelings inspired by language or images meant to convey the idea of human equality, what are some of the further conditions of interior experience that must be attended to for the idea of equal basic dignity to be intelligently grasped and affirmed as true, in such a way that one is led toward judgments and decisions and actions that are genuinely consonant with respect for the equal worth of every person?

The most fundamental of these, it seems to me, is the insight—occurring inwardly and invisibly—that one is, oneself, simply by virtue of being a person, of incalculable and irreplaceable value.

What intelligibility of selfhood is intelligently grasped here? Primarily (though certainly not exclusively) it is one’s ability to feel the value of, and freely decide to perform, good acts that otherwise would not exist in the world; to shape one’s own unique character by performing such actions; and to love oneself as such a being (which is also perforce, whether or not the fact is recognized, to love of the mysterious ground of one’s being).

(Philosophical tradition confirms that it is just this “innate value of the person” that Kant calls dignity: the “incomparable worth,” as he puts it, of a creature “capable of morality.”)

But—when the self intelligently recognizes its own “incomparable worth,” does this not exalt the self: place it at the center of the universe?

Not at all! A worldly creature can recognize that its being is an “incalculable value” only through grasping its participation in a good beyond finite limits, beyond calculation—that is to say, a transcendent value; and it is this value that reality is seen to “center” on.

The insight that one’s own self is an incalculable value reveals a core intelligibility in the symbols equal dignity and human equality because it entails realizing that incalculable value belongs to being a person (which here happens to be oneself). It follows that any person, simply by virtue of being a person, is an incalculable value.

(And we recall: a human being is a person at every stage of human development, self-distortion, or decrepitude. We have arrived, again, at the concept of inherent human dignity that informs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be sharply distinguished from achieved dignity. That human beings exhibit certain capacities is indeed the reason that dignity—incalculable value—is predicated of the creature (as in the imago Dei tradition); but this value belongs to the “being itself rather than any of its specific properties” (Fedoryka). The infant is the person in formation; the evil machinator is personhood perverted; the senior with dementia is the person with neural damage. But to all belong inherent human dignity.)

The alternative to this would seem to be (mis)understanding one’s innate human value to be, not a participation—along with every other person—in absolute, transcendent value, but a manifestation of only relative and “comparable” value: that is, a human value interpreted essentially only in terms of a worldly, hierarchical relation to other human beings.

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