“All men are created equal” is a fundamental tenet of modern western society, and is especially so in the United States, where its place in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence has enshrined it so fully in American society that it has become part of the American self-identity. Yet, noble as the phrase may be, it is also extraordinarily ambiguous, and how people understand it varies in important ways.

A first way to parse the phrase is to suggest that all people are created equal per se. That is, that there is either no variance in people’s abilities or character, or that what variance is there is necessarily statically accounted for – e.g. if one is smarter than average, one is lesser in other ways, in a sort of zero sum model of personal variance. At first blush, with virtually every person as a counter model of this thought – and obviously so – it would seem impossible that anyone actually believed it; even the more permissive zero-sum model would require a particular level of pugnacious obtuseness for one to sustain its belief.

And indeed, if there are people who believe it, I’ve never encountered one of them. But it is, even so, not a reading to be dismissed, because while there may not be people who believe it, there are plenty who believe in it. That is to say, there exists the pernicious thought that the hallowed phrase does not describe the truth of reality, but rather the ideal – in the perfect society, those who were deficit would be shored up to meet the average, and those taller poppies would be cut down to size.

A second method of parsing, however, is, while admitting personal variance per se, to make both the claim that being human carries a certain value, and that regardless of personal variance, that value is equal. Thus one could say that even the loss of a wretch is a tragedy, as a crucial and essential value was lost; even if the wretch had no other value, he still carried the value of his humanity. This concept is one from which a large amount of modern democratic and legal principals seem to have arisen; certain rights and privileges are tied to that essentially equal and unalienable value, and as such are equally the right of everyone, regardless of circumstance, while others could be tied to other proposed values or concepts, and thus may vary (e.g. regardless of circumstances, perhaps one has equal right to not be tortured, but the right to own a gun may be differentiated based on other factors, such as having committed a felony.)

Yet a third parsing also exists, which differs from the second in only one way: in establishing the claim that there is an equal and essential value to humanity, it also would bluntly see that as the only value a person has. Often heard as “all men are equal before God”, “all men are equally loved by God”, as well as many different political claims that outright deny inequality of value in any manner, the proponents of this view are fairly diverse, as is their reasoning to support it, and the conclusions they draw from it. Yet regardless of by what measure or in whose eyes everyone is deemed perfectly equal in value, the consequence of this argument is to deny that there can be any personal value in one’s actions. If an individual made profound sacrifices to do the ‘right’ thing, worked incredibly hard, and greatly impacted the lives of those around them, this argument claims that they were of no greater value for having done so, and could have embraced every ‘evil’ and weak choice instead, for the same result. It doesn’t quite claim that those actions had no value – they might well be seen to have value in and of themselves, and thus could be worth bringing into the world for their own sakes, but they simply don’t impart their value onto their actor.

It is my view that this represents a seriously impoverished world-view, though to refute it requires asking a complicated question. If there are more values that mark a person, what are they?

Continued in Part 2