Equality and Humanity
Equality and Humanity
We are told that all men are created equal. This dictum takes some parsing.[1] First, there is the word “men”: surely, we don’t mean to exclude women and children, neither of whom are men. This is easily done: swap the word “men” for “human beings” or “members of the human race”—this is clearly what is intended. Less clearly, what is the force of “created”? The dictum doesn’t say all men are equal; it says they were created that way. Does this presuppose theism and creationism? Do humans need to have a Creator in order to be considered equal? We can fix this problem by extending the notion of creation to non-supernatural creation—as in creation by Darwinian selection (or by alien beings). So, we get: all humans are created by natural selection equal (or God or aliens or chance). We could paraphrase this as “all humans are born equal”. All human babies are equal, or fetuses, or fertilized eggs. They may not end up equal, but they were born that way—this is how they came into the world. I think we should take this use of “created” seriously—all humans are created equal, not actually equal in the fullness of time. But the more troublesome question is the use of “equal”: it means the same, as in “being the same in quantity, size, degree, value, or status” (OED). Are all babies born the same size? Obviously not. Are they the same in color? No. Are they the same in IQ or musical potential? Probably not. They differ in many ways—they are not “equal”. So, is the dictum simply false? Many people have supposed so, and not without reason. The question is how to restrict the equality to something genuinely identical in all human infants. The traits generally supposed relevant here are intelligence and physical abilities, but then the claim is contentious at best and dependent on scientific knowledge we may not possess. We need to find traits that are universal in the human species, so that we can say “All human beings are born the same in respects X, Y, and Z”. What traits are invariant across human beings and built in from the beginning? Some have felt that this is a quixotic question—for there are no such traits. Then what are equal natural rights based on?
What human traits are independent of race, birth, education, and luck? What are we all born sharing? That is the question. Fortunately, it has an answer: consciousness and language. All (normal) humans have the same degree and type of consciousness; and all speak a language, essentially the same language. They are equalin these respects. By “consciousness” I simply mean the range of subjective states available to the person (or animal)—all the ways he or she can sense and feel. We can divide these into the perceptual and the emotional: the ways the individual can sense the world and the ways he or she can feel about it. In particular, consciousness will include the ability to be happy or unhappy: the pursuit of happiness essentially involves the ability consciously to feel happiness, or its lack. Well-being is bound up with consciousness of well-being. Then the idea is that different types of human being don’t significantly differ in their available states of consciousness; it isn’t that some humans have much less consciousness than others. All humans are created with basically the same consciousness profile—as is true of other species (all elephants sense and feel much the same way as other elephants, give or take some). In the case of language, all (normal) humans possess a language, used in speech and thought. There are no speechless subspecies of humans, or primitive languages, or intellectually superior languages. We are all born to speak a language of comparable complexity to other human languages. Thus, we are all born with the capacity for infinite linguistic creativity (impressively so). We are linguistic equals—all born the same way linguistically. Language is a human universal, like the bipedal gait. We can thus gloss our original dictum as follows: All human beings are born equal (the same) with respect to consciousness and language. That is a true statement, unlike others that have been made (people are blank slates, no one genetically has a higher IQ than anyone else, etc.). And I think this is what proponents of the dictum tacitly have in mind, though they may not know it.[2]
The question now is whether this is sufficient to ground the existence of natural moral and political rights. I think it is. Consciousness gives us basic rights to freedom from torment and confinement (same for other animals); language gives us a range of rights commensurate with our distinctive human nature—rights not shared by other sentient animals. Animals have some natural rights, specifically in relation to suffering; but language is necessary for many legal rights to apply to us, such as the right to due process of law (including the right to a hearing and a defense). There is no need to appeal to God-given rights or across-the-board equality or legal stipulations regarding “persons”. We really are equal with respect to consciousness and language, and they ground our moral and legal rights as human beings. It is correct to say that these traits are biological: we are biologically identical in the respects in question. So, humans are biologically equal in these respects, where this equality justifies attributions of rights. That was the great political discovery of the Enlightenment, which led to democracy and a better world for all (though not yet animals). We began to see past social hierarchies, wealth differentials, surface glitter, good fortune, physical appearance, and history; we recognized the deeper qualities of inner consciousness and linguistic mastery. On the inside people are much the same in their basic make-up; there is a shared core species identity. Perhaps the philosophy and science of the age smoothed the way for these perceptions—the human mind came into clearer focus. Politics had to be more inwardly directed, more geared to actual psychology.[3]
[1] I am not attempting to interpret the use of this phrase in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, in which equality of rights occupies center stage. I am concerned with the more general principle of human equality—that all men are fundamentally alike (and thus have equal rights). It seems to me that the historical documents rather conflate these two meanings. The assumption is evidently that all men desire life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—a factual not normative proposition.
[2] I suppose there would be no objection to rephrasing the dictum to fit modern sensibilities, as in: All humans are born with basically the same brain. For the brain is the basis of both consciousness and language, and it is common to all types of human (unlike skin color, inherited wealth, good table manners, etc.). Let me also note that differences of human IQ, though they seem significant to us, are negligible when viewed from the perspective of other species—we are all geniuses when compared to our nearest biological kin.
[3] The universality of language in the human species has been a longstanding theme of Noam Chomsky; I am adding a comparable claim about consciousness, viz. humans have a mode of consciousness that is universally shared among us. Universal grammar and universal phenomenology: these are the two poles of human nature and hence human rights. People differ in all sorts of ways, but they are the same in these ways (of course not down to the last detail). Size, shape, and color don’t matter.
Let’s suppose Shakespeare returns to the living- his consciousness is so vaster than ours- does that confer more rights than we mortals possess?
I don’t think it is significantly vaster, just like his language.
To reply to your note: we are to Shakespeare as we are to the Gods or flies to wonton boys
I suspect that what the Framers had in mind was that no one was born into royalty or aristocracy, with greater rights than others. That is why the Supreme Court’s declaring the president above the law is so shockingly contrary to what the country stood for. I am not challenging anything you wrote, because I realize that you were not attempting to interpret the use of this phrase in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, in which equality of rights occupies center stage.
I would think they had many things in mind.
One can hardly improve on this analysis. Howard’s argument about Shakespeare is irrelevant. Some people are smarter than others (many have been smarter than Shakespeare), but Colin has successfully dealt with this problem.
Quite so.
Maybe you just don’t get it. Shakespeare saw more, more things than in your philosophy or Professor McGinn’s or any.. He was if not a God then Godlike, higher up in the evolutionary chain.
Your only argument it seems to me is that you are right, and one ought to prove that one is right and not just assume it.
On the contrary, I know more philosophy than Shakespeare ever did–and the same is true of nearly all philosophers. He wasn’t a professional philosopher, but an excellent dramatist. I don’t think he was godlike or higher up some evolutionary chain: he was a member of the human species. There have been similar geniuses in many fields.
Howard, he probably (luckily) avoided being imprisoned and/or executed for treason for his satires of monarchs and the state. I doubt even the vastly superior consciousness you attribute to him would have saved him from the gallows had he at any time appeared personally to be above the god-like status royalty of his day enjoyed. If he were magically re-incarnated today he would be no more than a celebrity impresario producing streaming content, etc, with the same rights as all of us.
This is a wonderful analysis that highlights the changing nature of language and meaning. It gives me hope that great minds will continue to analyze and provide some conceptual clarity to these matters. Thank you, Colin.
I would like to try my hand at a more enduring and sustainable statement (setting aside eternal beings):
-All humans begin existing with the same rights and consideration under the law as this is guaranteed and assumed by their membership as humans-
Conceptual clarity is underrated these days in the rush to sound like a scientist.
I’m curious why you don’t count the faculties of reason and decision among the traits that are universal and distinctive of humankind? Are these just products of the language faculty?
It’s because I don’t think those traits are distinctive of humankind–other animals have them. And our peculiar version of them is probably language-dependent. But we could add them if we disagreed with these two views.