Winter’s Haven

I’m going to explain what “Equality Under the Law” means. This post is motivated by a thread at Friendly Atheist. Here is the question, posed to FA and readers by a theist, which started things:

[most people believe] that everyone is equal, and deserves equal treatment under the law.
But how do you prove this? In fact, science tells us that we are not all equal. Some of us are taller, stronger, faster, and have higher IQ’s. The idea that we are all equal is in contradiction of what science concludes. A person might then argue that we all deserve equal treatment, even if we aren’t equal. But how do you prove this? In fact, science tells us that many species survive by letting the weak or sick die instead of depleting resources for them when they can’t add survival value to the community.

It’s clear that the theist is confused about Legal Equality; if you read the comments, you’ll see that the atheists are just as confused.

Let’s try to untangle this mess. Firstly, all people not equal. Individual humans are quite different from each other in a wide variety of ways. But you already knew that.

Yet if people aren’t equal, what does it mean for them to be “equal under the law”, and why is that a good idea? The answer is actually fairly simple. The core idea behind Equality Under the Law is that the law should only treat people differently if there are relevant differences between them. A few examples will help illustrate the idea.

Consider a law which prevents people committed to mental hospitals for schizophrenia from owning guns. Although the law treats sane people and schizophrenics differently, it does not violate anyone’s right to Equality Under the Law. This is because there is a very important, relevant difference between the two groups: schizophrenics are much more likely to misuse guns than are mentally healthy people.

Now consider a law which allows people born into the Alpha Caste to own guns, but denies this right to those born into the Beta Caste. This is an archetypical example of a law which does violate the Equality Under the Law principle. Who a person’s parents are just isn’t relevant to the question of whether that person should be allowed to own a gun.

What’s that? I hear a muttering of protest. You say that parentage might be relevant to this question after all? And indeed, it might be. Imagine that scientists find a particular genetic trait which strongly predisposes people towards violent behavior. In that case, there is a sensible reason to deny people with that gene the right to own guns. So, facially irrelevant differences between people, such as parentage in this example, can potentially be (indirectly) relevant.

It’s ok for the law to treat people differently when there are relevant differences between them. Of course, sorting out how relevant various differences are can be a complicated business. What the principle of Equality Under the Law objects to are laws which hand out privileges to certain groups arbitrarily and without good reason.

This entry was posted 2007-Jul-10 and is filed under Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.