The Hazards of "Colorblind Equality" | Mises Institute
The Hazards of "Colorblind Equality" | Mises Institute
While “colorblind equality” has a better ring to it than the DEI regime, nonetheless, the concept is unworkable and actually contributes to worsening racial
If we were to treat the notion of “colorblindness” as the animating principle of the Constitution, the law, and the very concepts of justice and quality, we would thereby concede the moral, ethical, and ideological debates to those who assert that our interpretation of the world must be based, one way or another, on race. Instead, we should regard liberty, not “colorblindness,” as our highest ideal.
Rothbard is right to say that the equalization of human beings is horrifying precisely because it ignores the reality that while we are equal in our humanity (that is, we are all equally human), we are not equal in our attributes: “The horror we all instinctively feel at these stories is the intuitive recognition that men are not uniform, that the species, mankind, is uniquely characterized by a high degree of variety, diversity, differentiation; in short, inequality.” From a natural-rights libertarian perspective, egalitarianism amounts to a “revolt against nature” regardless of the label attached to it.
Conservatives, square this circle for me: how do you recognize and praise the innate inequalities of humanity's attributes, while somehow believing in the equality of "humaneness"? Wtf does that even mean?
Given those premises, a more honest position, as I interpret it, would actually align more with the intellectual far right, asserting that: if it is natural for us to be unequal in our attributes as humans, then to the degree that those attributes make us more human relative to the beasts of the natural world, they should also indicate a relative hierarchy of humanity.
I'm not a real conservative but I'll take a stab. I don't think the author is praising natural inequality, merely recognizing its existence and that at least some of the unequal outcomes we observe are a result of it (not that this precludes other causes). As far as equality of humanity I think the idea is that humanity is just an innate, yes/no property of humans and doesn't depend on every member of the species being identical or that an individual achieve something like a certain score on any of the other attributes that separate us from animals. Perhaps it is arbitrary to draw the borders of humanity where we have, but as you pointed out anything else is a slippery slope.