I am currently disappointingly short on time, I apologise.  So I will take this chance to quote from smart people, in this case Amartya Sen on inequality again.  This time at the end of chapter one from ‘Inequality Reexamined’.

The tendency to assume away interpersonal diversities can originate not only from the pragmatic temptation to make the analytics simple and easy (as in the literature of inequality measurement), but also, as was discussed earlier, from the rhetoric of equality itself (e.g. ‘all men are created equal’).  The warm glow of such rhetoric can push us in the direction of ignoring these difference, by taking ‘no note of them’, or ‘assuming them to be absent’.  This suggests an apparently easy transition between one space and another …

But this comfort is purchased at a heavy price.  As a result of that assumption, we are made to overlook the substantive inequalities in, say, well-being and freedom that may directly result from an equal distribution of incomes (given our variable needs and disparate personal and social circumstances).  Both pragmatic shortcuts and grand rhetoric can be helpful for some purposes and altogether unhelpful and misleading for others.

The purpose of thinking about this is not to say there is nothing that should be done.  But instead that, as was made clear here, these moral issues are too important to just relate to some vague partially related factor and pretend we have a silver bullet.  If we genuinely care, we need to try to understand why and about what – instead of using ‘grand rhetoric’ to simply make others think about how thoughtful we really are 😉

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