Human Equality: Theory and Practice

An avalanche, a flood—these were the terms used to describe the response to public appeals for the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of September 11, 2001. Three months after the disaster the total stood at $1.3 billion. Of this, according to a New York Times survey, $353 million was exclusively for the families of about 400 police officers, firefighters, and other uniformed personnel who died trying to save others. That came to $880,000 for each family. The families of the firefighters killed would have been adequately provided for even if there had been no donations at all. Their spouses received New York state pensions equal to the lost salaries, and their children are entitled to full scholarships to state universities. The federal government gave an additional $250,000 to families of police officers and firefighters killed on duty. That families received close to a million dollars in cash on top ofthese considerable benefits may well leave us thinking that something has gone awry. But there was more to come. The American Red Cross received more than $564 million in donations and had trouble finding needy recipients for so much money. It therefore set aside nearly half the funds for future needs, including possible future victims of terrorist attacks. When that fact became public, a wave of criticism forced the organization to spend all the money on victims of the 9/11 attacks. To do so it abandoned any attempt to examine whether potential recipients needed help. Instead it drew a line across lower Manhattan and offered anyone living below that line the equivalent of three months’ rent (or, if they owned their own apartment, three months’ mortgage and maintenance payments) plus money for utilities and groceries, if they claimed they had been affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Most of the residents of the area below the line were not displaced or evacuated, but they were offered mortgage and rent assistance nevertheless. One woman was told she could have the cost of her psychiatric treatment reimbursed, even though she said she had been seeing her psychiatrist before September 11. Red Cross volunteers set up card tables in the lobbies of expensive apartment buildings in Tribeca, where financial analysts, lawyers, and rock stars live, to inform residents of the offer. The higher your rent, the more money you got. The Red Cross acknowledged that money was going to people who did not need it. According to a spokesperson, “In a program of this sort, we’re not going to make judgments on people’s needs.”

As the terrorists were planning the attack, the United Nations Children’s Fund was getting ready to issue its 2002 report. The State of the World’s Children. According to the report, released to the media on September 13, 2001, more than ten million children under the age of five died each year from such preventable causes as malnutrition, unsafe water, and the lack of even the most basic health care. September 11, 2001, was just another day for most of the world’s desperately poor people, so presumably close to 30,000 children under five died from these causes on that day — about ten times the number of victims of the terrorist attacks. The publication of these figures did not lead to an avalanche of money for UNICEF or other aid agencies helping to reduce infant mortality. In the year 2000 Americans made private donations for foreign aid of all kinds totaling about $4 per person in extreme poverty, or roughly $20 per family. New Yorkers who were living in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, whether wealthy or not, were able to receive an average of $5,300 per family- The distance between these amounts encapsulates the way in which, for many people, the circle of concern for others stops at the boundaries of their own country — if it extends even that far. “Charity begins at home,” people say, and, more explicitly, “We should take care of poverty in our own country before we tackle poverty abroad.” They take it for granted that national boundaries carry moral weight and that it is worse to leave one of our fellow citizens in need than to leave someone from another country in that state. This is another aspect of the attitudes I described in the introduction. We put the interests of our fellow citizens far above those of citizens of other countries, whether the reason for doing so is to avoid damaging the economic interests of Americans at the cost of bringing floods to the people of Bangladesh or to help those in need at home rather than those in need abroad.

While we do all these things, most of us unquestioningly support declarations proclaiming that all humans have certain rights and that all human life is of equal worth. We condemn those who say that the life of a person of a different race or nationality is of less account than the life of a person of our own race or nation. Can we reconcile these attitudes? If those “at home” to whom we might give are already able to provide for their basic needs and seem poor only relative to our high standard of living, is the fact that they are our compatriots sufficient to give them priority over others with greater needs? Asking these questions leads us to consider to what extent we really can or should make one world a moral standard that transcends the nation-state.

A Preference for Our Own

The popular view that we may or even should favor those of “our own kind” conceals a deep disagreement about who our own kind are. In the late nineteenth century Henry Sidgwick, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University, described the common moral outlook of his own times as follows:

We should all agree that each of us is bound to show kindness to his parents and spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree: and to those who have rendered services to him, and any others whom he may have admitted to his intimacy and called friends: and to neighbors and to fellow-countrymen more than others: and perhaps we may say to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men, and generally to human heings in proportion to their affinity to ourselves.

When I discuss this passage with my students, they have no problem with the various circles of moral concern Sidgwick mentions, until they get to the suggestion that we should give preference to our own race more than to “black or yellow men.” At that point they disagree, often vehemently.

Coming a little closer to our own time, we can find defenders of a much more extreme form of partiality:

We must be honest, decent, loyal and friendly to members of our blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.

That quotation is from a speech by Heinrich Himmler to SS leaders in Poland in 1943. Why do I quote such dreadful sentiments? Because there are many who think it self-evident that we have special obligations to those nearer to us, including our children, our spouses, lovers and friends, and our compatriots. Reflecting on Sidgwick’s description of the attitudes of Victorian England and on Himmler’s much more stark preference for his own kind should subvert the belief that this kind of self-evidence is a sufficient ground for accepting a view as right. What is self-evident to some is not at all self-evident to others. Instead, we need another test of whether we have special obligations to those closer to us, such as our compatriots.

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