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Liberty & Equality

Let’s Be Reasonable!

Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality.

One shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif, The ‘Robbers Cave Experiment’, 1961), whilst others suggest that evolutionary pressures will always undermine such efforts. In The Righteous Mind (2012), Jonathan Haidt gives us the striking metaphor that the ‘irrational elephant’ (the visceral part of ourselves that has its origins early in our evolution) is always going to escape the control of the ‘rational elephant rider’.

In their 2010 book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket argued that the evidence from social science shows inequality to be the key to understanding such social dysfunction. The evidence they cite is correlational rather than causal – it suggests that less equal societies tend to do worse on a range of indicators of well-being, including health and levels of violence, than more equal ones (though other factors such as environmental lead levels are also involved, complicating an otherwise clear picture).

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