The idea that we can dismiss all characteristics as irrelevant to a person's worth is a circular argument. We start of with the supposition that everyone is of equal worth, and then use this premise to discard any factor that might make people of different worth, and then finally conclude that everyone is of equal worth.
The statement that everyone is of equal worth is false. There is obviously no practical justification for such a statement, so we turn to moral justification. I can't think of any moral premise that can lead us to the conclusion that 'everyone is of equal worth' except by arbitrarily assuming this to be so.
This assumption leads to some interesting conclusions. If everyone deserves the same amount of life satisfaction, then people like myself who are not particularly excitable or happy deserve far more resources than those who provide these things for themselves; or, in contrast, people like myself who are never depressed deserve less simply because of who we are.
Similarly, a hunter who catches three rabbits for every one rabbit another catches is in effect being told that his rabbits are of less value if both get the same outcomes. That's hardly fair treatment.
Finally, ability is not simply inherent to some people, but is multiplicative with effort. If I make the effort to achieve more, giving me the same reward is telling me that effort is worthless. If everyone deserves the same outcomes as everyone else, we are telling people that character and virtue are worthless. This is in stark contrast to many moral theories, whose main aim is to justify the labelling of virtues as virtues.
I know that invoking Karl Marx will make some people automatically disagree, but he agreed with me:
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
Marx is saying that we can have equal rights or equality, but not both. If try to change the natural differences in ability, desire and need then we will treat people very unequally, which would contravene a doctrine of equal rights and equal worth in the eyes of the law. I won't touch further on the idea of taking into account people's subjective wants and desires in order to try to give everyone the same amount of life satisfaction. There are enough problems with that for a post on its own.
People are not practically equal. This is an undeniable fact (as long as you accept anything about reality at all). If we grant them equal moral worth then we make sure that we don't have universal rules that specifically grant more rights or punishment to a pre-defined group of people. That is the essence of giving everyone equal worth: that all are equal in the eyes of the law (to start with).
If we start dealing in resources, rather than simply moral rights such as which actions a person can and cannot take, we move into defining material worth. If we are defining material worth, we cannot escape the fact that people are not materially(/practically) equal.
I refuse to accept that equal moral worth necessitates a jump to enforcing equal material worth. Moral worth is about not denying a person a place on a bus simply because of skin colour. Material worth is unconnected. If a person cannot pay for the bus ride, then skin or not he doesn't get a ride.
If someone is so materially lacking that he is unable to fulfill basic moral rights, such as voting, getting public services that are theoretically available to all and so on, then these things are not available to all, despite the moral contention that they should be, and so our society has passed laws to ensure that they are more accessible. This requires material investment, but it is not a statement of material worth.
A lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction comes from the equation in people's minds of material and moral worth and the observable differences in material worth. The solution is not to attempt to make everyone of equal material worth despite the manifest injustices that would be involved, nor simply to state that it's a theoretical goal that can never be achieved (what a system of morality that would be, that states that the world is immoral, even before any free agent has taken his first action!).
The solution is to accept that it is fallacious to link material and moral worth. If we can expunge this foolish notion from people's heads a great many aspects of life would be avoided. Things like the hero worship of rich men, the hesitance to challenge and stand up to the old and established, the deference to irrationality because it's spoken by a successful businessman... all these things are partly caused by foolish people linking moral worth to other factors. A simple excision of the fallacy of 'the appeal to authority' from the world would be a nice start, including removing the use of (and need for) endless references to old philosophers (like Karl Marx).
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?
is the refrain of the Peasants' Revolt (of 1381). These people were not arguing about whether they ought to receive as much life satisfaction as everyone else. They were simply stating that 'Jack's as good as his master', not in terms of material worth, but in rights. They wanted to be able to travel to different farms and get paid what they could get (because labour was in short supply after the plague), rather than be constrained by area or by fixed prices. This line of radical politics has long been an English tradition, but I don't see it as leading necessarily to equal material worth.
In contrast, I can see an English tradition for pricking pomposity and arrogance. The English as a nation have for a long time had a tradition of marked irreverence for status and authority. It is this radical notion that moral (and intellectualand logical) worth is not linked to social status, power or wealth that has been particularly well-incubated in England, and it is this fact that continues to escape philosophers, politicians, the rich, wealthy and powerful all over the world.
Radicalism need not delve into strange notions of absolute equality. Simple confirmation of what peasants knew 600 years ago would be a good start for modern politics.
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