It's fair to point out there is a huge difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome. Equal opportunity is giving everyone free early education, and giving free continued education to all to meet the passing standards of early education. Equal opportunity is giving a job to the most qualified candidate regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity.
Equal outcome is whenever every child gets a participation medal but no one actually gets any other prize. Equal outcome is when everyone is allotted the same budget regardless of what they do or how well they do it. Equal outcome is giving everyone the same healthcare.
Freedom is also complicated. It is often been suggested that your rights end at the point they start infringing on another's rights. And while this sounds good, two things are true: 1. People argue about which rights should take precedent. 2. It's nearly impossible to enforce the purest version of this.
The basic concept of equality (speaking of humans only-) is that all human life has equal value regardless of outcome or ability. That Beethoven and Shakespeare and you and the homeless man on the corner are all equal value by inherent property of life. Equal value in society is the next step- that the garbage man and the doctor and the police officer, the man, the woman, the blind, deaf, etc. all serve a value to society. It starts to break up there as we commoditize humans. It’s easier and less costly to train a courier than an accountant. More humans have the skills or mindset to be a retail shelf stocker than a Nuclear physicist.
But so much of society is comprised of artificial or imaginary concepts and rules- things which exist to serve a purpose but act via a mechanism not inherent to nature but of our decision or design. So the direct link between ones actual contribution to society and ones compensation or recognition is a falsehood- but quantifying “contribution” in terms other than a hard metric like the money generated by ones labors is too abstract. The person with no education or experience who works selling the thing can make as much or more than the person who invented or designed it using their education.
Experience itself is even more varied in quality control than education- but how does one place a value on experience vs education for example? It is indeed all very complex and as we tend to do as humans, we try to make it simple enough that we can manage it.
Two human beings are equal in the universe because what does it matter in all the creation of the vastness of space that a hairless anxiety monkey broke profit records or ran around a circle faster than any monkey before? Transmit any humans accomplishments into space and wait for a message back saying “good job” and the results will be the same. Equal. Humans are not always equal in the eyes of other humans. Ask a number of people who the worlds greatest artist or entertainer or singer is and you will get different answers. Ask who the worlds best looking person is and at least one person will say “my spouse/partner.” The overarching idea of social equality is to simply not let the subjective opinions of even a majority form a default standard that others must live by.
lol. Yes and no. A single 10lb difference of one human to another won’t have any measurable effect on the travel of planets and galaxies and the expansion of the universe. In a cosmic sense there’s nothing to suggest that one mass of atoms in the shape of a human can’t be substituted for any other mass of stains as far as we can see. That’s not to say that every human isn’t important- every money builds to An unknown future of which we play some part- one which may be spectacular one way or another. However- a way to think of it is that if you look at a photo of the entire earth- if you were to replace any of those folks standing there- you wouldn’t know it from looking at that picture.
that depends on your level of precision. If we are in gigatonnes scale earth is still a number requiring 10^x to show, however we have to go out to like 10 digits of precision to show 180 or 170 pounds. If we only show 8 digits of precision in gigatonnes, a 180 pound person and 170 pound person are both 0 gigatonnes.
so you expect us to use enough precision to say how much earth weighs down to the 10s of pounds when talking about a cosmic scale, something we cant even do with any real accuracy? thats just unreasonable.
I never said any of that. I said: "If one human weighs 170 lbs, and another weighs 180 lbs, they are not equal in the universe." That's a fact and I feel like a jackass for quoting myself.
Equal outcome is whenever every child gets a participation medal but no one actually gets any other prize. Equal outcome is when everyone is allotted the same budget regardless of what they do or how well they do it. Equal outcome is giving everyone the same healthcare.
Freedom is also complicated. It is often been suggested that your rights end at the point they start infringing on another's rights. And while this sounds good, two things are true: 1. People argue about which rights should take precedent. 2. It's nearly impossible to enforce the purest version of this.
Mic drop.