Concept
Social equality
Overview
Social equality is a state of affairs in which all individuals within society have equal rights, liberties, and status; possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services.
Social equality requires the absence of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries, along with an absence of discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of an individual's identity. Advocates of social equality believe in equality before the law for all individuals regardless of many aspects. These aspects include but are not limited to, sex, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health, disability, trade union membership, political views, parental status, mores, family or marital status, and any other grounds.
These are some different types of social equality:
Formal equality: equal opportunity for individuals based on merit.
Substantive equality: equality of outcomes for groups, also called social equity.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The members of this body are called magistrates or _kings_, that is to say _governors_, and the whole body bears the name _prince_.[1] Thus those who hold that the act, by which a people puts itself under a prince, is not a contract, are certainly right. It is simply and solely a commission, an employment, in which the rulers, mere officials of the Sovereign, exercise in their own name the power of which it makes…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract & discourses
States what Social equality is; the author is tied to Social equality in the knowledge graph.
The old saying, that 'equality makes friendship,' is happy and also true; but there is obscurity and confusion as to what sort of equality is meant. For there are two equalities which are called by the same name, but are in reality in many ways almost the opposite of one another; one of them may be introduced without difficulty, by any state or any legislator in the distribution of honours: this is the rule of…
Plato, Laws
States what Social equality is; the author is tied to Social equality in the knowledge graph.
And of this latter there are two parts: because of transactions some are voluntary and some involuntary; voluntary, such as follow; selling, buying, use, bail, borrowing, deposit, hiring: and this class is called voluntary because the origination of these transactions is voluntary. The involuntary again are either such as effect secrecy; as theft, adultery, poisoning, pimping, kidnapping of slaves, assassination…
Aristotle, The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
States what Social equality is; the author is tied to Social equality in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Social equality
- Pierre Bourdieu
- John Rawls
- Ronald Dworkin
- Marquis de Condorcet
- Cicero
- Hugo Kołłątaj
- Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
Related ideas
- Egalitarianism
- Vladimir Lenin
- French Revolution
- Productive forces
- Anarchism
- John Rawls
- Hierarchy
- Immanuel Kant
- Power (social and political)
- Individualism
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Republic (Plato)
- Indian independence movement
- John Locke
- Justice
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Autonomy
- Stoicism
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Ontology
- Plato
- Political philosophy
- Political science
- Republicanism
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Agnosticism.