It can't be that we should treat everyone the same, because people don't want to be treated the same. For instance, I would rather people didn't talk about football with me, but there are many who would love to talk about it.
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Generally, the better you know someone, the less you should treat them like other people. But the information you get from the location of a meeting and a quick look at them is plenty to pull away from baseline.
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It certainly doesn't mean everyone is equally capable. Obviously, because we can learn to get better at things. It might mean that everyone has the same ability to get better but I don't think that's true - autism serves as a counterexample.
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Looking more historically, equality was a reaction to permanent fixed hierarchies, where certain people were born better and could never become worse than lesser folk. This seems worse: it requires a definition of better which is set at birth and never changes.
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But people change through their lives, and what it means to be better than someone else changes based on the situation. Many of the worst insults in politics consist of claiming someone believes in fixed hierarchies. I don't think a notable portion of people believe in them.
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But what seems better is an idea of temporary, overlapping hierarchies, where person A is better than person B in situation X, and the opposite in situation Y. There are enough situations so that almost nobody will be strictly better than anyone else, at least in the long run.
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I kind of want to expand more on this but this is already pretty long.
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> What do we mean when we say people are equal? It's virtue signalling. There's no sane definition of the term "Equal" that makes that sentence true.
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Well, I mean there are ways you can make it true but it becomes a dumb tautology. Equal = "the same species" ==> "All humans are Equal!"
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I would propose that what is generally meant is that no life is inherently more valuable than another. Situationally and subjectively it may take on different levels of value but that doesn’t override the ideal.
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The corollary being that the rules of society should be ideally designed such that they do not impede on certain individuals based on circumstance (e.g. if you are born in a certain place you are restricted in some way)
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