In What Way Are We Equal

I recently read this piece by Scott on his blog Astral Codex Ten, and I have opinions about it. Everyone has opinions about everything, and not all of them are particularly interesting, but I actually want to share my thoughts about this. If you haven't read the article, it is nominally about genetics, but really about what it would mean for one human being to be "inferior" to another. Scott discusses a lot of common objections to calling anyone "inferior" or "superior" (Like that it's unlikely that you are worse than someone else at literally everything or that regardless of what traits we have, we should treat everyone equally). Then he goes through these objections and shows that they aren't all that legitimate (Nobody uses "superior" to mean "literally better at everything", and we prioritize the life of a man who can cure cancer over one who can't). Finally, he concludes with a bit of a wishy-washy "maybe some people are superior to others in common usages of the word, but don't say that or people will get upset." That seemed a bit uncharacteristic of him considering he seems to hold strong opinions around optics, although it's not entirely clear what those opinions are.

As a slight tangent, I don't buy the argument that no one uses inferior to mean "worse in every way". I play a good amount of card games and ttrpgs, and in those communities "inferior" and "superior" sometimes do carry the meaning of "worse in every way". When games exist for upwards of a decade, there are often examples of cards or features that are strictly worse than another. I think the main point still stands. If someone claims a person is inferior, they don't often mean strictly worse. Still, it was a small point that bothered me.

My actual objection to the piece is that I think there is a fairly straightforward way in which we are all equal. Scott brings up an example of a group of a people on a crashing airplane, deciding who to give the parachute to. If a doctor with the cure to cancer is on that plane, it would be very admirable for the other passengers to sacrifice themselves and give the parachute to the doctor. I don't disagree with this, but I think it confuses terminal with instrumental goals.

To grossly oversimply the concept, terminal goals are the things someone wants, and instrumental goals are the things someone wants because it helps them acheive their terminal goals. Money is often cited as an example of an instrumental goal. Most people only want money because it lets them buy the things they actually want. Maybe one of my terminal goals is to not starve. In order to not starve I need food. In order to get food I need money. In order to get money, I need a job, and so on. I don't want a job because I love working, I want a job so that I can buy food. A job is an instrumental goal, and eating food is my terminal goal in this example.

If you're the kind of person who thinks of themself as broadly good, human life is probably a terminal goal for you. We don't want others to survive just so that they can do something for us later, we want them to survive because we value human life. I hope most of the readers can relate. If we apply this idea to the plane crash example, all of the passengers' lives are terminal goods, but the doctor's ability to cure cancer (saving many lives) is an additional instrumental good. The doctor's life as a terminal goal isn't more or less valuable (inferior nor superior) to any of the other passengers. We would give the doctor the parachute because doing so would save several millions of people, not because this one life is more valuable than any other.

I think that is the sense in which we are all equal. All of our lives (and happiness if you subscribe to Utilitarianism) are equally valuable. If we are forced to make difficult choices about which lives to save, a person's talents are only an instrumental good. They do not make the terminal goal of their own life more or less valuable. Is this a satisfying answer? Is it just saying "Sure some people are better than others, but we're all the same in some cosmic sense that doesn't affect reality"? I personally don't think so. I think it's easy to get carried away and value "good" people more than "bad" people, so a reminder that our lives and our subjective experiences are equally important in and of themselves can be useful.