Apr 18, 2025 06:22 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 18, 2025 06:39 PM by C C.)
Why philosophers hate that equity meme
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/why-p...hat-equity
EXCERPTS:: If you want to annoy your favorite philosopher, one of the best ways to do it these days is to mention the “kids standing on boxes equity meme.” To call it the bane of our existence would be something of an overstatement, but it’s certainly not making anyone’s job easier.
[...] Unfortunately for us, this little picture with the boxes represents the undoing of practically everything we have been trying to achieve in our debates over equality and social justice for the past half-century. (More evidence that when reason goes up against social media, reason loses every time.) Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the inadequacy of the conception of “equity” presented in this picture served as the point of departure of the major debates over egalitarianism that have been central to the discipline since the 1970s.
As a result, anytime a student brings this meme up – and they pretty much inevitably do – the competent philosopher has little choice but to explain what is wrong with it. This immediately leads them to suspect us of wrong-think, because as everyone knows, the type of “equity” illustrated in the meme provides the E in DEI, and so if you’re not down with this conception of equity, then that makes you an opponent of DEI, which means you might as well be a Trump supporter.
[...] The most immediate problem with the meme is that it does not present an accepted definition of the term “equity,” but rather a stipulative redefinition, which does not correspond very well to how the term has historically been used. As I mentioned, the graphic was originally drawn to illustrate the contrast between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
Later on, after it was reproduced umpteen times, someone changed the labels, and somehow the idea that “equality of outcome” should be called “equity” stuck. This means that philosophers are going to be annoyed by the fact that so many of our students consider the picture to be a critique of “equality,” when in fact it was intended as an endorsement of a particular conception of equality.
[...] My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it. Because people are different (i.e. diverse), one should not expect perfect equality, but rather just equity. And for all I know, this may have been what the person who modified the kids on boxes meme was thinking, suggesting that the allocation of boxes to kids should be responsive to the different characteristics of the kids.
The unfortunate result, however, is that instead of introducing a looser standard of equality, the meme wound up saddling DEI with a commitment to an extremely strict, controversial conception of equality (i.e. equality of outcome), which no reasonable person actually endorses as a general principle. Furthermore, this was not achieved through argument, but merely through persuasive definition... (MORE - details)
Equity: the thief of human potential (Thomas Sowell) ... https://youtu.be/8WYi-64MejU
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8WYi-64MejU
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/why-p...hat-equity
EXCERPTS:: If you want to annoy your favorite philosopher, one of the best ways to do it these days is to mention the “kids standing on boxes equity meme.” To call it the bane of our existence would be something of an overstatement, but it’s certainly not making anyone’s job easier.
[...] Unfortunately for us, this little picture with the boxes represents the undoing of practically everything we have been trying to achieve in our debates over equality and social justice for the past half-century. (More evidence that when reason goes up against social media, reason loses every time.) Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the inadequacy of the conception of “equity” presented in this picture served as the point of departure of the major debates over egalitarianism that have been central to the discipline since the 1970s.
As a result, anytime a student brings this meme up – and they pretty much inevitably do – the competent philosopher has little choice but to explain what is wrong with it. This immediately leads them to suspect us of wrong-think, because as everyone knows, the type of “equity” illustrated in the meme provides the E in DEI, and so if you’re not down with this conception of equity, then that makes you an opponent of DEI, which means you might as well be a Trump supporter.
[...] The most immediate problem with the meme is that it does not present an accepted definition of the term “equity,” but rather a stipulative redefinition, which does not correspond very well to how the term has historically been used. As I mentioned, the graphic was originally drawn to illustrate the contrast between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
Later on, after it was reproduced umpteen times, someone changed the labels, and somehow the idea that “equality of outcome” should be called “equity” stuck. This means that philosophers are going to be annoyed by the fact that so many of our students consider the picture to be a critique of “equality,” when in fact it was intended as an endorsement of a particular conception of equality.
[...] My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it. Because people are different (i.e. diverse), one should not expect perfect equality, but rather just equity. And for all I know, this may have been what the person who modified the kids on boxes meme was thinking, suggesting that the allocation of boxes to kids should be responsive to the different characteristics of the kids.
The unfortunate result, however, is that instead of introducing a looser standard of equality, the meme wound up saddling DEI with a commitment to an extremely strict, controversial conception of equality (i.e. equality of outcome), which no reasonable person actually endorses as a general principle. Furthermore, this was not achieved through argument, but merely through persuasive definition... (MORE - details)
Equity: the thief of human potential (Thomas Sowell) ... https://youtu.be/8WYi-64MejU