Equal to or Equal as?

It is very appropriate that the thread on AI is sprouting great questions. We are humans, we think, we create. The discussions you can have with AI are not really discussions. They are exercises in narcissistic mirroring. When people say that they talked to AI for an hour, it’s as off-putting as if they said they stared in a mirror for that amount of time.

As for equality, this is an important point. People often confuse “equal to” and “equal as.” For example, is the person who asked this question equal to serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? Morally, not a bit. Dahmer is absolutely 100% inferior to this reader in terms of morality. But in spite of this very obvious moral inequality, should they have equal rights under the law? Of course. We realize how immoral and inferior to us in every way Dahmer was but we still respect his human dignity. We don’t support him being tortured, starved, or violated in jail. We respect his right to legal representation and trial. Remember those students who hounded a professor because he acted as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer? I’m sure we all agree that they were wrong. Every criminal, no matter how disgusting, deserves legal representation. That’s the beauty of a civilized society which punishes crime while respecting equal rights under the law for everybody.

Is everybody intellectually equal to everybody else? Obviously not. But should the law treat the dumb and the brilliant equally? Obviously yes. I’m clearly enormously intellectually superior to Candace Owens (or the persona she exhibits in her videos). But both she and I should have the exact same right to free expression. I’m horrified by the crap she spouts on YouTube. But I’m adamantly opposed to anybody censoring her or her show in any way. That is what true respect for equality looks like. If I were to pretend that Owens is not 3 standard deviations below me on the IQ scale,* that wouldn’t be respect for equality. That would be myth-making in service of ideology. It would make a mockery of the very idea of equality under the law because the most important thing about that concept is not that everybody is the same but that everybody is guaranteed the same rights in spite of being very much not the same. Equal rights for unequal people is one of the highest achievements of our civilization, steeped in the foundational ideas of Christianity.

I do not support trying to impose or export or promote this way of organizing society to anybody else. Different cultures do things differently. All I said here has to do with our nation-state. Great Britain, for example, has clearly chosen the path that leads away from these principles. I will continue mocking the Brits for this but I don’t support invading them to stop their slide towards authoritarianism.

*Once again, it’s possible that Owens is not actually a moron but plays one on YouTube as a moneymaking strategy. Let’s accept that when I refer to Owens, what I have in mind is her public persona and not anything else.