Equality from the start is a great liberal good. However, if children are transferred from family to collective care too early due to a fixation on equality, this damages a pillar of liberal society.
“Being born at the right time and in the right place . . .”: This is the beginning of a song by Austrian cabaret artist Hans Peter Heinzl (1942-1996), which takes aim at historical and global inequality. It came to mind when a former colleague raised a topic in the margins of a conversation that has been on my mind for a long time.
In the usually emotional discussions about a just society, liberals always emphasize that justice and equality are two different things, but that equality before the law is the highest principle of justice. On the other hand, liberals do not think much of redistribution that does not serve to help the weakest and poorest members of society, but generally aims to equalize incomes.
Success thanks to differences
Differences of all kinds, including income, are an essential feature of liberal systems, indeed they are what make them so good and successful. This is why liberals counter the demands for distributive justice with performance justice, which only makes sense if there is also equality of opportunity.
But it’s so easy to talk about equality of opportunity or equality of start. People are born into different family backgrounds with different genetic dispositions, which differ not only in terms of wealth and income, status and power, education and profession, but also in terms of love and security, achievement-oriented thinking and encouragement, self-confidence and willingness to take risks, fear and confidence.
Standardize after birth?
If one wanted to largely eliminate these differences with the aim of equal opportunities, one would have to take children out of their families at a very early age, preferably right after birth, in the knowledge of the importance of early childhood development, provide them with extensive state care and “standardize” them.
There are many reasons against such an approach. Fortunately, most differences in talent and character can never really be evened out. Furthermore, state care is also never homogeneous. With young children, curricula are less important than teachers. And they are as different as families.
Alignment at a low level
In addition, as in many other areas of society, this striving for more equality leads to equalization not at a high or at least medium level, but at a low level. Finally, and above all, a liberal society protects not only individuals, but also their union in partnerships and families.
The state is only called upon in cases of abuse of power or severe neglect. Liberal equality of opportunity can therefore only mean keeping access to the education system wide open, promoting talent when it is recognized, regardless of the family environment, and trying not to remove obstacles, such as language barriers, but to overcome them. If, on the other hand, we take the pursuit of equal opportunities to the extreme, we end up in an inhumane, totalitarian hell instead of a just world.
Translated with DeepL
