Alienating Equality

In a 1987 essay on equality as a moral ideal, Harry Frankfurt notes that setting up equality of wealth or income as a social ideal diverts one’s attention from oneself to concern over the assets of others: 

“To the extent that people are preoccupied with equality for its own sake, their readiness to be satisfied with any particular level of income or wealth is guided not by their own interests and needs but just by the magnitude of the economic benefits that are at the disposal of others. In this way egalitarianism distracts people from measuring the requirements to which their individual natures and their personal circumstances give rise. It encourages them instead to insist upon a level of economic support that is determined by a calculation in which the particular features of their own lives are irrelevant. How sizable the economic assets of others are has nothing much to do, after all, with what kind of person someone is. A concern for economic equality, construed as desirable in itself, tends to divert a person’s attention away from endeavoring to discover-within his experience of himself and of his life-what he himself really cares about and what will actually satisfy him, although this is the most basic and the most decisive task upon which an intelligent selection of economic goals depends. Exaggerating the moral importance of economic equality is harmful, in other words, because it is alienating. . . . It influences them to take too seriously, as though it were a matter of great moral concern, a question that is inherently rather insignificant and not directly to the point, namely, how their economic status compares with the economic status of others. In this way the doctrine of equality contributes to the moral disorientation.”

And if that is not itself envy, it certainly sets up a situation ripe for envy, and for mimetic rivalry, and for all the mayhem that flows from such rivalries.