Equality

The objection is to the factual claim and to what the factual claim is used to license, in that order. People are not equal in any observable sense, since there is diversity between every two humans, so a system built on the premise that they are will treat unlike cases alike. That is where the second half of the definition comes in. Imposing identical treatment on a diverse population means imposing involuntary interactions of unequal force, because the same rule falls differently on people in different positions, and the result is accumulation of power rather than its levelling. Enforced equality appears in fully egalitarian cultures and in strongly endosocial ones alike, and Marsh treats both as applying group standards of justice to the allocation of advantage. She keeps two impulses apart that are commonly combined, the drive to enforce egalitarianism and the drive to enforce the laws of endosocialism, since the first can be healthy and the second is not. The term she offers in place of equality is equivalence, the idea that all members of a society are entitled to equivalent benefit and that nobody should be valued by standards of achievement which others have greater ability to attain. Her reading of the historical record is consistent with the definition rather than dismissive of the struggles, since she treats the abolition and civil rights movements as having made radical progress while noting that racial equality was not achieved.

Egalitarian political philosophy has spent decades on exactly the question of what should be equalized, with Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, Ronald Dworkin on resources and the luck egalitarians all arguing that formal equality of treatment is insufficient. The distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, and the newer vocabulary of equity, both address the problem that identical treatment can entrench difference. Legal theory has substantive against formal equality. Marsh's position is more absolute than any of these, since she rejects the underlying descriptive claim rather than refining what equality should be measured over, and her replacement term shifts the subject from what people are to what they are entitled to receive.