What is Equality?
David Miller
Professor of Political Theory, Nuffield College, Oxford
Presentation to the Equalities Review Panel, Bedford, 19 July 2005
This short paper does not attempt to make policy proposals, and does not
represent any particular group with an interest or a stake in the
Equalities Review agenda, but instead asks what we mean by equality and why
it matters to us. I have been thinking and writing about this topic for
some time: for fuller discussions see, for example, my essays ‘What kind of
equality should the left pursue?’ in Jane Franklin (ed), Equality (London,
IPPR, 1997) and ‘What is Social Justice?’ in Nick Pearce and Will Paxton
(eds), Social Justice: Building a Fairer Britain (London, Politico's,
2005).
To start at the most general level: many of us have been guided in our
thinking by the idea of a society of equal respect. That means a society in
which people are different in many ways – in religion, ethnicity, personal
values, and so forth - but in which they interact with each other on terms
of equality: they treat other people as equals, despite their differences,
neither showing contempt for ‘inferiors’ nor deference towards ‘superiors’.
In a society like this, we would expend to find many small hierarchies but
no single big hierarchy in which everyone has their proper place – so for
example I may be your manager at work, but when we meet at the football
club you are the team captain while I am only on the subs bench. This is
the vision that lies behind more practical forms of equality, and we should
remember that in terms of human history it's quite unusual; most
societies – feudal societies, caste societies, and the rest – have been
ranked societies. Equality isn't ‘natural’; we have to work at it.
But equality also functions at a more applied level, as a way of
distributing rights and resources and advantages of all kinds, and this is
more directly relevant to the Equalities Review. What kind of practical
equality should we be aiming for? To my knowledge virtually nobody believes
that we should aim for complete equality in all dimensions – that
everything in society should be divided up equally. I want to propose that
there are three domains in each of which a different principle applies.
First, there is a domain in which equality of outcome should be our goal.
Civil and political rights are the main example here: everyone should enjoy
these to the same extent, not just formally, but in substance. And at
present we're a long way away from that. Take the right to personal
security – freedom from being assaulted or threatened or harassed as
you're going about your daily business. We know that there are
significant differences between men and women, income groups, and ethnic
groups in the extent to which they currently have an effective right to
security. And this inequality isn't acceptable. There are many things
that money should be able to buy, but this isn't one. So here we can
track equality by looking at outcomes – if one group is being threatened or
attacked more often than another, then we know that equality isn't
being achieved.
Second, there is also however another domain in which the goal isn't
equality, but ensuring everyone a minimum standard. An obvious example here
is housing. Everyone should be entitled to housing that meets standards of
decency, in terms of running water, heating and so forth. But above that
line there is no objection to people using their money to buy bigger,
better, or more attractive housing. The same is true of what we could call
environmental amenity – the quality of your local neighbourhood. Everyone
is entitled to live in an environment with adequate access to transport,
shops, recreational areas etc, and one that is free of environmental
hazards, but beyond that people who can afford to do may choose to live in
areas that are more beautiful, have special amenities etc, and that
inequality is not objectionable.
Third, there is a further domain in which the relevant principle is
equality of opportunity, and this is what I would like to focus on here.
This applies where resources are scarce – higher education places, better
jobs, etc. – and the principle is that people should be able to compete for
these scarce goods on fair terms. There should be a level playing field, as
it is often put.
This is the most difficult idea of the three. What exactly does it mean to
say that there should be equal opportunity to get into better positions? At
one end of the spectrum, we have the principle that those allocating the
positions shouldn't discriminate and should use relevant selection
criteria – university places awarded according to academic merit, jobs
going to the best qualified applicants. Other features like sex or skin
colour should be ignored. This is important, but it isn't enough, for
reasons that are pretty familiar. Essentially different candidates will
have had unequal opportunities to prepare themselves for the competition.
Poor school conditions handicap some applicants who would otherwise have
the talent to get to university. So non–discrimination – focusing just on
the mechanism by which people are selected – isn't enough.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's sometimes assumed that equality
of opportunity entails that each sector of society should be a kind of
microcosm of the whole, so if you take any profession or any occupation,
say, then the numbers of people in it, and their relative seniority, should
exactly mirror the population as a whole, in terms of gender, ethnicity,
class background. If there aren't as many women fire–fighters as men
fire–fighters, say, then equality of opportunity hasn't been achieved.
This is a very demanding condition, because what it requires is that we
should correct for everything that might distribute different groups of
people unevenly across destinations. We need to look inside the black box
to see why people are on average ending up in different places, and then
ask whether we find this inconsistent with equality of opportunity.
So let's look inside the box for a moment. Suppose we have two groups
in society – call them group A and group B to avoid any preconceptions –
and we find that group A are much more heavily represented in certain
occupations or in higher education than group B, even though there is no
discrimination at the point of entry. What could explain this? Broadly
there are four possibilities.
-
Natural differences in ability: the As are naturally more likely than the
Bs to have the qualities that are relevant for that branch of employment.
Now we tend to be suspicious of claims like this, and rightly so –
they're often fallacious and based on prejudice. But is this always
the case? Mightn't one reason for there being more men fire–fighters
be natural differences, for instance in bodily strength?
-
Differences of preference. More As than Bs want to go into the
occupation. This might, for example, be for cultural reasons. If group B
are pacifists and group A everyone else then it's no surprise that
there are more As than Bs in the armed forces. Again this reason is open
to abuse. We need to look harder at why the difference of preference
exists. I'll come back to this.
-
Earlier inequalities of opportunity. At some earlier stage, the As had a
better chance than the Bs to get the qualifications that are necessary to
enter the occupation we're considering; for instance they had better
opportunities in secondary education.
-
Financial obstacles. Getting into the occupation we're talking about
involves significant financial costs which the As are better placed than
the Bs to meet – for instance a long period of training (medicine, for
example) or the need for start–up capital to run a small business.
Now I think most people would say that possibilities 1 and 2 are consistent
with equality of opportunity while 3 and 4 are not. If the reason that more
As than Bs are getting into a certain position is that they are naturally
more talented, or have a stronger wish to get into that position,
that's consistent with the principle, but if the reason is that the Bs
were handicapped at earlier stage or face higher financial costs, that
breaches it
So we can now see why non–discrimination doesn't go far enough – it
ignores 3 and 4 as barriers to equality of opportunity – while what I
called the microcosm view goes too far, because it overlooks 1 and 2, which
give legitimate reasons why some groups may be more heavily represented
than others in particular occupations.
But let me go back to no. 2, because many people are justifiably suspicious
of the idea that where we can trace unequal outcomes back to group
preferences, that's OK. If people are being held back by their culture,
isn't that an obstacle we should be concerned about? I think it depends
on whether they're being systematically disadvantaged. Let me give a
couple of examples, drawn from casual observation, where it does seem
acceptable for groups to end up concentrated in particular areas. Students
from ethnic minority families tend to choose vocational courses at
university – law or medicine rather than English or philosophy, for
instance. This is culturally determined, but a perfectly rational response
to a situation where you need professional skills to have a secure future.
Children from academic families, I've noticed, rarely follow mainstream
business careers ' they don't end up as managers for Marks and
Spencer or British Gas. Instead they often end up working for charities,
human rights organisations and the like, in genteel poverty. This is
culturally determined too, but again not worrying. Why not? Money isn't
everything and these lives are rich in other ways. What should worry us are
cultures that tend to create disadvantage across the board – lead to lives
that are just poorer by almost any reasonable measure. So–called ‘cultures
of poverty” are the obvious example.
So an equal opportunity policy ought to tackle cases 4, 3 and sometimes 2.
4 is both the easiest and most difficult issue to tackle. It's easiest
because there's no problem in saying what it would mean to level the
playing field – every child should begin life with same access to financial
resources – and most difficult because there's huge political
resistance to bringing this about; even relatively modest measures like
inheritance taxation are not very popular. There seems to be a view that
what goes on inside the family is sacrosanct and can't be interfered
with politically. So long as that's the case, there are going to be
fairly severe limits on how much equality of opportunity we can achieve.
If we look now at case 3 – earlier inequalities of opportunity – then again
we run into family background as a major obstacle to equality. You may find
it helpful to distinguish the direct from the indirect effects of family
membership. By the direct effects, I mean what goes on inside the family
itself, as parents transmit linguistic and cognitive skills, cultural
values etc to their children; by the indirect effects, the way that the
family places children in particular neighbourhoods, peer groups, schools
and so forth. The direct effects are often seen as very important, and
indeed there is evidence about variations in the attainment levels of
children as young as three which seems to point to the class background of
the parents as the explanatory factor. But I am somewhat sceptical because
it is hard to disentangle the effects of parenting from inherited
differences in genetic make–up, which may explain children's
differential ability to acquire vocabulary etc. I believe we should place
most weight on the indirect effects, some of which can be counteracted, for
instance by investing more heavily in schools which take in kids from
disadvantaged families. To the extent that we can equalize the external
environment within which families function, we will be able to worry less
about the family itself as an obstacle to equality of opportunity.
I think also that we have to recognise that we face trade–offs in our
pursuit of equality of opportunity. For instance, we want families to
invest in their children, by encouraging them to develop their natural
talents and so forth, but unless all families do this to an equal extent,
there will be a trade-off between giving families an incentive and
compensating those children who are relatively less advantaged. Or consider
children with behavioural problems – equalising their opportunities
suggests integrating them into mainstream schools, but this may diminish
the opportunities of their classmates. So we are only going to be able to
go so far, and that's why we need a more multidimensional approach to
equality, as I suggested at the beginning by introducing the three domains
idea. Politicians' rhetoric sometime suggests that if we could open
opportunities to all, somehow everyone would end up with a good, white
collar or professional, job. Since that won't happen, we need to think
about how to create a decent life for everybody, not just about how to
fulfil the potential of the talented, important though that is.
