Redefining Equality (part 2)

Join Plato's Cave philosophers and UU Inquiring Minds this Sunday morning, January 27 at 9:00.

Dan and Ellen will co-facilitate our discussion on this question:
"Redefining Equality - Why are the concepts of freedom and equality like a 'see-saw'? When one improves, the other declines?" (part 2)

Coffee? Yes.
Join the discussion – be educated; be wise.

Description
Dan and Ellen are Inquiring Minds regular participants.

From Dan:
Quotes from a recent New Yorker article

• "If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree — and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an 'intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.' It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them."

• "As a rule, it’s easy to complain about inequality, hard to settle on the type of equality we want. Do we want things to be equal where we start in life or where we land? When inequalities arise, what are the knobs that we adjust to get things back on track? Individually, people are unequal in countless ways, and together they join groups that resist blending."

• "...contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around. This was a weird and nebulous endeavor. Is an heir who puts his assets into a house in a flood zone and loses it unlucky—or lucky and dumb? Or consider a woman who marries rich, has children, and stays at home to rear them (crucial work for which she gets no wages). If she leaves the marriage to escape domestic abuse and subsequently struggles to support her kids, is that bad luck or an accretion of bad choices?"

[Source: "The Philosopher Defining Equality" by Nathan Heller (pub. 1-07-2019). The subject of the article is Elizabeth Anderson, her family helped found a Unitarian Universalist church. Full article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/the-philosopher-redefining-equality ]

Proposed discussion points

• Gender equality in the workplace, equal pay, fair treatment, and now signs that say "Men and Women at Work" [from https://nypost.com/2018/12/08/construction-company-rolls-out-first-inclusive-at-work-signs/]

• Ethnicity pay gap, workers in UK who are black and asian are paid less [from https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/dec/27/uk-black-and-ethnic-minorities-lose-32bn-a-year-in-pay-gap]

• Women received the right to vote less than 100 years ago, the 19th Amendment, ratified 1920 [from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage]

• LGBT, most countries don't recognize same-sex unions yet [from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory]

• Famine: millions of kids in Africa have not enough food to eat [from https://www.worldvision.org/hunger-news-stories/east-africa-hunger-famine-facts]

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Special Interest:

StoicDan Meetups: Emerson & Thoreau Discussion Group
Emerson & Thoreau Discussion Group
First Thursday each month, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Next Meeting: Thursday, February 7
Discussion of "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau (Chapter 3)
Panera Bread, 11472 University Blvd, Orlando, FL 32817
More information: https://www.meetup.com/Emerson-Thoreau/