This is a hot topic for some people right now.
What is your definition of these two terms?
Mariam-Webster says:
equity: justice according to natural law or right
(and several definitions relating to financial terms)
equality: he quality or state of being equal
equal: 1. of the same measure, quantity, amount, or number as another
2. regarding or affecting all objects in the same way
Note that I specifically included racial in the term. That is important.
I will begin by offering discussions that have been made recently.
Discussion A:
Equity is supporting outputs.
Equality is supporting inputs.
Discussion B:
Consider eyeglasses.
Equality is giving everyone the same kind of eyeglasses with the same prescription.
Equity is giving everyone the same kind of eyeglasses with the appropriate prescription.
Discussion C:
Equity is avoiding negative consequences to a given characteristic. For some definition of negative.
Equality is ignoring a given characteristic regardless of whether the characteristic has a negative consequence or not.
Discussion D:
Equality is asking everyone to get something off the top shelf regardless of the person’s height.
Equity is providing a step stool to shorter people such that everyone can reach to the same height.
Can you provide definitions to these two terms? More discussions may be helpful, but I am really trying to come up with generally accepted definitions.
I am posting in IMHO so opinions about which is “better” are quite acceptable, however I am really trying to find an agreed definition of the two terms before discussing which is better. Right now discussions I am part of haven’t been able to come up with a common definition. Definitions inevitably are given to support the conclusion, not clarify what is being discussed.
I see it as a form of handicapping, adding necessary modifiers to rebalance each input such that each output option would have a roughly equal chance of winning. Like if you had ten dice all weighted differently, identifying their statistical distribution and compensating for them by either shaving off or adding weights until each die was fair again. The end result would be that the numbers 1 through 6 would all have a roughly similar chance, but no one specific die or number would have a huge advantage.
Not a very succinct definition, I admit, more an explanation.
I don’t think of equality that way, and I only rarely hear of or think of the term equity. To me, equality is actual equality of opportunity taking into account all of the resources you may not have close to you or the money for as well as the prejudices you face. It is manifestly not some libertarian notion of non-interference masquerading as equality of opportunity.
I mainly hear the term “equity” in the context of “fairness” and “justice”, and what “equality” means to me mostly encompasses this. The only difference I can think of is that “equality” is mostly going-forward: to truly equalize things but not punish the guilty is not really “justice”.
Thus, in my opinion, the distinction between the two should only be drawn when there is a specific body to seek justice against, for instance, victims of active discrimination and redlining.
Let’s discuss desired outcomes and current situation for a moment. The ideal situation is that one’s physical traits as inherited from one’s recent-to-median ancestors don’t play any role in one’s life options, how one is viewed and treated informally let alone how the law treats one. That culture, e.g. the music one listens to and the food one eats and more important things like the values and priorities one holds, these are understood as cultural and historical and not innately attached to physiology. In short, that “race” is abandoned to lie discarded in the sidewalk as an anachronistic notion from the distant past, and that ethnicity is scrutinized with an awareness of ethnocentric notions of superiority, but that it’s okay to be proud of one’s heritage.
Now the current situation is not that; neither is it identical to how it was in the past, but it is an outgrowth of the past. And the past was first and foremost a time where people had vastly different treatment in the law, as well as radically different informal treatment. This is racism. The overwhelming majority of the legally-ensconced variety has been uprooted but the informal variety persists. At the heart of the “equity versus equality” issue is the fact that any individual’s situation is partly determined by the situation of their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. And that means inequality of opportunity. Here is where the equity arguments often focus: saying (for example) that everyone gets an opportunity to apply to be a Rhodes scholar or run for President ignores the fact that someone who grew up in a family where Daddy and Mommy attended prep schools aimed at getting kids into competitive universities is a zillion times more likely to be in prep school themselves than the child of parents who never went to college because their own parents couldn’t afford to send them there and because the education they’d received had been substandard because wealthy communities get better schools.
Ameliorative actions are appropriate when the intention is to help level out those inequalities of opportunity, to keep the inequality from continuing to be passed down and inherited by future generations. But by their very nature they should always be conceptualized as temporary. That they will be in place until outcomes level off enough to make the immediate differences in opportunity trivial, then they get dismantled, after which point there is no focus on equal outcomes. Most people agree with this in principle but this argument is often used as a preface for arguing that we’re there already. We most certainly are not. My great grandparents grew up with slavery. I don’t think any of them were living in plantation mansions but they had enslaved people doing involuntary servitude from which they directly benefitted. Other people my age may have had some of those enslaved people as their great grandparents. They may be entitled to reparations and I think it’s a reasonable matter to bring up. Affirmative action definitely seems necessary.
Trying to boil complicated social truths down to a slogan reeks of “four legs good two legs bad” and I advise against “equity is good politics, equality is bad politics” kind of conclusions.
I don’t agree with the use of these two words to express this concept. Equity means just means fairness, which can be interpreted in many different ways, depending on your ideology.
The usual terminology for the concepts that you’re talking about here is “equality of opportunity” vs “equality of outcome”.
The use of the word “equity” as synonymous with “equality of outcome” seems wrong to me, since it assumes an ideological stance that equality of outcome is what’s fair, and dodges having to argue for that viewpoint.
Thanks for the replies so far.
Just to be clear, none of the “discussions” in the OP represent my views. They are simply things I have heard discussing this issue with a variety of people.
What’s designing the shelving so that everybody can reach?
(I note that in most places it’s carefully designed so that taller people can reach without climbing on things.)
– where is that cartoon about the people of various heights trying to watch the ball game on the other side of the fence? anybody got a link to that they can find quickly? – oh, that was easier to find than I expected; though I had to hunt through the wrong version first to find the one I wanted.
The problem isn’t that people aren’t all the same height. The problem is that the fence is designed wrong.
People don’t mean the same thing by “equality of opportunity”, though.
To some people it means “anybody can apply to Harvard. They don’t ban black people, or Jews, or women any longer.”
To other people, it means “children born into households in which adults don’t read, whether for lack of education or for lack of time/money or for lack of interest; and children whose lives make it difficult for them to pay attention in school for any of a wide variety of reasons; and children whose educational opportunities before college level are poor; all need extra attention paid to them starting early in their lives or they don’t have anything like an equal opportunity of getting into Harvard.”
