What do we mean when we say people are equal? Obviously it's not that they are the same and you can easily swap one out for the other. Indeed, equality is often used as an argument against that sort of thing.
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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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End of conversation
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