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Social equality
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Social equality is a social state of affairs in which all people within a specific society or isolated group have the same status in a certain respect. At the very least, social equality includes equal rights under the law, such as security, voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and the extent of property rights. However, it also includes access to education, health care and other social securities. It also includes equal opportunities and obligations, and so involves the whole society.
Social equality requires the lack of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the lack of unjustified discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of a person's identity.
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Encyclopedia
Social equality is a social state of affairs in which all people within a specific society or isolated group have the same status in a certain respect. At the very least, social equality includes equal rights under the law, such as security, voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and the extent of property rights. However, it also includes access to education, health care and other social securities. It also includes equal opportunities and obligations, and so involves the whole society.
Social equality requires the lack of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the lack of unjustified discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of a person's identity. For example, gender, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health or disability must not result in unequal treatment under the law and should not reduce opportunities unjustifiably.
Social equality, however, does not require communism or income equality. "Equal opportunities" is interpreted as being judged by ability, which is compatible with a free-market economy. A problem is horizontal inequality, the inequality of two persons of same origin and ability.
Perfect social equality is an ideal situation that does, for various reasons, not exist in any society in the world today. The reasons for this are widely debated. Reasons cited for social inequality include commonly economics, immigration/emigration, foreign politics and national politics. Also, in complexity economics, it has been found that horizontal inequality arises in complex systems.
A counterexample to social equality was the social inequality of the medieval Europe, where a person's estate, which was usually inherited, determined the legal and social rights the person had. For example, clergy could claim the benefit of clergy to receive a more lenient punishment for a crime. Likewise, women have historically been and still are in some countries formally denied access to higher education—even if they could pay the tuition. In 19th century Europe, women had to apply for an "exemption from gender" to enroll in a university, insofar they could do so.
In apartheid-era South Africa, both blacks and whites had formally access to healthcare and similar public services. However, the segregated healthcare arranged for blacks did not meet the same standards as those for whites. That is, there was enforced social inequality.
History of social equality in America
The colonists in New England and the other 13 colonies enjoyed more social equality than the people in England did. Although they believed that, they also believed that it was only natural to rank people higher than others, by using a social class.
The idea of social equality in the minds of the founding generation of America was a belief that the government had the responsibility to protect equal rights, not to provide equal things. However, with the spread of socialism in the 1930s, Americans began to accept new definitions of social equality including right to certain goods and services.
Criticism of socialist view of social equality
One concern about modern socialism is the taxpayer-subsidized access to equal things such as health care or education. The problem arises when individual chooses not to use the public service or good, but have to subsidize it nonetheless, thus creating a social imbalance in distribution of goods and services. An example of this is education. The western education systems often provides free public education to all citizens, but it does not provide compensation to those who choose alternative education methods (such as homeschooling or private schooling).
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