If you want to annoy your favorite philosopher, one of the best ways to do it these days is to mention the “kids standing on boxes equity meme.” To call it the bane of our existence would be something of an overstatement, but it’s certainly not making anyone’s job easier.

Most of us have seen this picture, but more importantly, every single one of our students has seen it. And not only have they seen it, they think that it’s a complete conversation-stopper. According to them, it provides a correct and uncontroversial definition of equity, and also constitutes a decisive refutation of equality as a moral ideal. The fact that philosophers still think there are issues worth debating in this area is therefore something that they find incredibly puzzling.

Unfortunately for us, this little picture with the boxes represents the undoing of practically everything we have been trying to achieve in our debates over equality and social justice for the past half-century. (More evidence that when reason goes up against social media, reason loses every time.) Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the inadequacy of the conception of “equity” presented in this picture served as the point of departure of the major debates over egalitarianism that have been central to the discipline since the 1970s.

As a result, anytime a student brings this meme up – and they pretty much inevitably do – the competent philosopher has little choice but to explain what is wrong with it. This immediately leads them to suspect us of wrong-think, because as everyone knows, the type of “equity” illustrated in the meme provides the E in DEI, and so if you’re not down with this conception of equity, then that makes you an opponent of DEI, which means you might as well be a Trump supporter...

The contrast that is drawn in the meme, which was originally intended to illustrate the distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome,” captures the way that people used to think about issues of equality up until the late 1960s, before the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. After that, pretty much everyone came to agree that the opportunity/outcome distinction was neither useful nor coherent. The really important question was not when one chose to equalize, but rather what one intended to equalize (in academic lingo, this “what” is referred to as the equalisandum, or “that which is equalized.”) The vast and detailed “equality of what?” debate, which preoccupied major thinkers for decades, was basically a debate over the appropriate equalisandum for a theory of justice.

This “equality of what” question was generally thought to have subsumed the opportunity/outcome distinction, in the sense that anything that could be expressed in terms of opportunity and outcome could be more clearly articulated in terms of differences in the equalisandum. For example, the kids on boxes meme could be taken to express the distinction between equalizing boxes and equalizing viewer satisfaction, in which case it is not about equality of outcome at all. So right away there are two things wrong with the meme: first, the labels involve a misuse of the term equity, and second, the conception of equality of outcome it is intended to represent is retrograde. I will take these two points in order:

1. Misleading conception of equity

The most immediate problem with the meme is that it does not present an accepted definition of the term “equity,” but rather a stipulative redefinition, which does not correspond very well to how the term has historically been used. As I mentioned, the graphic was originally drawn to illustrate the contrast between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Later on, after it was reproduced umpteen times, someone changed the labels, and somehow the idea that “equality of outcome” should be called “equity” stuck. This means that philosophers are going to be annoyed by the fact that so many of our students consider the picture to be a critique of “equality,” when in fact it was intended as an endorsement of a particular conception of equality.

Traditionally, the term “equity” has had a less precise sense than the term “equality.” Although there is no universally accepted definition, equity has often been used to denote a standard that is somewhat looser than strict equality. In particular, when dealing with a complex allocation problem, involving a heterogeneous collection of goods, one might refer to the allocation in which everyone gets exactly the same amount of everything as “equal,” but the allocation in which people get bundles that are internally different, and yet all of the same value (in some sense), as equitable (e.g. here).

A good example of this, and perhaps the most common use of the term “equity” outside of DEI contexts, is that of “pay equity.” The goal of such policies is often articulated as that of ensuring “equal pay for work of equal value.” The wrinkle, of course, is that not all work is of equal value, and so in cases where the work is not of equal value, one should not expect pay to be equal. The term “equity” is then brought in to designate this looser standard, which involves a justifiable departure from equality. This allows one to say that two pay packages, despite being unequal, may nevertheless be equitable.

My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it. Because people are different (i.e. diverse), one should not expect perfect equality, but rather just equity. And for all I know, this may have been what the person who modified the kids on boxes meme was thinking, suggesting that the allocation of boxes to kids should be responsive to the different characteristics of the kids. The unfortunate result, however, is that instead of introducing a looser standard of equality, the meme wound up saddling DEI with a commitment to an extremely strict, controversial conception of equality (i.e. equality of outcome), which no reasonable person actually endorses as a general principle. Furthermore, this was not achieved through argument, but merely through persuasive definition.

2. The equality of what debate

Setting aside these terminological issues and focusing on equality of outcome, the next big problem with the meme is that it commits DEI proponents to a conception of equality that is somewhere to the left of the most left-wing view defended by left-wing philosophers. Indeed, one of the major objectives of theorists in the “equality of what?” debate was to reformulate egalitarianism in such a way as to avoid the obvious objections to the simple-minded conception of equality of outcome that used to prevail in public debates (and that is represented nicely in the meme).

The debate itself, like most of contemporary political philosophy, was triggered by something that Rawls said in A Theory of Justice. The view that he was arguing against, in this book, was utilitarianism, which claims that the goal of the state should be to maximize happiness. Rawls had a variety of objections to this view, but one of the most important was that maximization paid no attention to the distribution of the happiness among individuals, and therefore registered no objection to extreme inequality. He wanted to defend instead a theory of justice that would favour more equal over less equal distributions.

One way of doing this would have been to modify the utilitarian calculus to favour a more equal distribution of happiness. But instead of doing this, Rawls took issue with the idea that happiness should even be the focus of a theory of justice. Justice, he thought, was about distributing the benefits and burdens of cooperation, and happiness was not really a direct product of cooperation. The problem is that people formulate their own life plans, according to various conceptions of the good, and the success of these plans is a major determinant of their achieved happiness levels. So happiness seems like the wrong thing for “society” to be concerned about, because it is too much under the control of individuals. Instead of looking at the output of people’s life plans, Rawls argued, a theory of justice should focus instead on the inputs, which is to say, the various liberties and goods that they require in order to carry out their plans.

Because of this, Rawls claimed that the “basis of expectations” in a theory of justice should be a list of what he called “primary goods,” including most importantly income and wealth. Rawls said all this in just a paragraph or two, but the idea got picked up by Ronald Dworkin, who then argued in much greater detail that an egalitarian theory of justice should not be focused on happiness, because people make too many choices that affect their happiness level. He gave the particularly persuasive example of someone who cultivates a taste for fine wine, and so becomes unable to derive as much satisfaction from ordinary vintages. It seems absurd to suggest that society owes this person a larger wine budget in order to ensure that he achieves a happiness level equal to that of the less discerning drinker.

Based on this argument, Dworkin drew a distinction between equality of resources and equality of welfare (i.e. happiness), and argued that egalitarians should be focused on equalizing resources. The major reason for this, he claimed, is that an egalitarian system of this sort gives individuals their fair share of the social product, but then forces them to take responsibility for what they are able to accomplish with it. So if two people wind up with different outcomes, due entirely to differences in the choices that they have made, then this is not really an affront to equality. Inequality is only problematic when it is the result of circumstances that are beyond their control.

This suggestion gave rise to the most popular theory to emerge in this space, a view known as “luck egalitarianism” (or, more formally, as “responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism”). The basic idea was that society should be in the business of compensating individuals for bad luck, so that if they wind up with less than others because of circumstances outside their control, this is an objectionable form of inequality that should be corrected. G.A. Cohen became one of the strongest proponents of this view, in part because he thought it was immune to the standard right-wing objections (he famously wrote that “Dworkin has, in effect, performed for egalitarianism the considerable service of incorporating within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.”)

This idea got picked up enthusiastically by many philosophers, who took the choice/circumstance distinction and turned it into the fundamental justification for egalitarianism, arguing that our most basic reason for caring about equality is our desire to neutralize the effects of bad luck. According to this view, when we look at the kids on boxes meme and agree to take the box away from the tall guy and give it to the short kid, the reason we make this judgment is because height is an unchosen characteristic – it’s not the short kid’s fault that he’s short. The idea is not that everyone should get exactly the same outcome, but that we should not be allowing unchosen differences between persons to determine outcomes.

You don’t have to agree with this idea to see that it represents a very different way of thinking about equality. And from this perspective, the problem with the meme is that it dredges up an old, discredited view of equality, that can easily be undermined just by pointing to cases where individuals wind up with less because of choices they have made. A lot of the excitement generated by luck egalitarianism was based on the perception that we had overcome a significant error in thinking about equality, and could now move on to discussion of more defensible conceptions. And yet all it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years!

3. Further complications

The distributive justice problem presented in the picture is obviously a very simple one, but it is clearly intended to have implications for how we think about broader social issues. Simplicity is not a problem in itself. The purpose of any good model is to present a simplified representation of reality, in order to accentuate crucial features and make them more analytically tractable. The question, therefore, is whether the kids on boxes provide a useful model for thinking about the sorts of distribution problems that arise in DEI contexts. Most egalitarian philosophers, I think, would say that it is a bad model.

To start with the most obvious, the picture provides a very bad way of thinking about affirmative action – so bad, in fact, that it has led to the predictable accusation that it is “racist.” If one interprets the boxes as a metaphor for the extra bump that members of so-called “equity-deserving communities” get when competing for various coveted positions, then what does “being short” represent? Undoubtedly the paragons of virtue who disseminate the image think that it stands for some type of structural disadvantage. But what is to stop the less fastidious from thinking that it stands for “being dumb”? Crude egalitarianism sometimes has a way of insulting its beneficiaries.

There are some more subtle issues as well, which philosophers are now a great deal more aware of thanks to the big 20^th century debates. First, the distribution problem presented in the image is zero-sum. There are only three boxes, and so in order to give an extra one to the short kid it is necessary to take one away from the tall guy. Situations like this sometimes arise in real life, but a lot of problems do not have this structure. They involve rather the distribution of (what Rawls called) the benefits and burdens of cooperation – which makes the interaction, by definition, positive-sum. This is important to emphasize, because a lot of people misclassify positive-sum interactions as zero-sum, and so adopt unnecessarily polarizing moral stances.

Second, there is the question of where the boxes come from. The picture suggests what is known as the “manna from heaven” view – that the boxes were just sitting there waiting to be distributed by some impartial box-allocator. But what if this is a tailgate party, where everyone was supposed to bring their own box? In this case, it might be nice for the tall guy to give his box to the short kid, but coercively transferring it would raise a host of objections. This is extremely important when it comes to economic questions, because the institutional structure that generates the wealth of society accomplishes this in part by creating claims upon that wealth, which in turn impose constraints on the types of redistribution that can be undertaken.

Third, the distribution problem is one-dimensional. There is only one good that matters – boxes – and the problem involves the allocation of boxes to individuals. If one were a welfarist, then one might think that society as well should only be concerned with equalizing in a single dimension, happiness. But the force of the Rawls-Dworkin critique was to push egalitarians into thinking that we should be concerned about the distribution of a somewhat heterogeneous bundle of goods. This creates its own set of problems, especially in a pluralistic society, in which different people value those different goods differently. This makes it very difficult – not impossible, but difficult – to say what it means to achieve equality. (The example most often used to represent this is the problem of dividing up an inheritance equally among heirs without liquidating it.)

This last point has actually led to a certain amount of pessimism among philosophers about the entire “distributive” paradigm of equality. The number of good things produced by society is very large – not just income and wealth, for example, but also health and leisure. If one attempts to aggregate all of this into a single equalisandum, in order to simplify the distribution problem, then one is going to wind up equalizing something that is extremely abstract and difficult to measure (for Cohen, “access to advantage,” for Amartya Sen, “capabilities” defined over the “space of possible functionings,” etc.) The alternative is to equalize the good things directly, without aggregating, which then generates an enormous problem dealing with heterogeneity and pluralism.

It is not difficult to sharpen this up into a dilemma for egalitarians. The most popular philosophical response to this, at the moment, has been to abandon the entire enterprise of achieving distributive justice, and to focus instead on trying to achieve “relational equality” between individuals. This suggests an even more radical critique of the kids on boxes meme – that we should not be worrying about the distribution of boxes per se, or even about whether they can see the ball game, but should be focusing on the quality of the relationships that exist between them. This is not so much a conception of equality as it is an attempt to change the subject. (So far it has not generated any progress on any of the problems that have traditionally bedeviled egalitarians. But who knows? Someday someone might get serious about trying to say something useful about how relational equality is supposed to be specified, measured or achieved.)

4. The resounding silence

One of the most striking features of the DEI-mania that swept through North American universities in the past decade – and that appears to be continuing unabated in Canada – has been the resounding silence of philosophers on these questions. It’s actually quite amazing how little engagement there has been with any of the major issues. Given that questions pertaining to equality, multiculturalism, feminism, and racial justice have been among the most significant issues debated in political philosophy over the course of my career, it’s surprising how few of my colleagues have been willing to go to bat for DEI (except, I suppose, for the epistemologists, who have been acting strange lately).

Not only have philosophers chosen not to engage with DEI, proponents of DEI have also chosen to ignore pretty much all of the work that has been done by philosophers on these questions over the past century. For example, if one looks at the SSHRC guidelines for DEI statements in research grant applications, it is rather striking that the suggested reading list contains no reference to any philosophical literature. Apparently they could not find even one piece of high-quality, refereed philosophical work on the subject of diversity, equity, or inclusion that they were willing to recommend.

Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that most members of the profession don’t really accept any of the major ideas that have been associated with this trend. The kids on boxes meme is a good example – if this is how “equity” is interpreted, it basically precludes any competent political philosopher from endorsing DEI. And yet, as everyone knows, DEI statements are not generally considered an invitation to share one’s genuine views on the best way to promote justice and equality. This has, unfortunately, led many to conclude that silence is the better part of valour.

Until, that is, our students bring up the kids on boxes, at which point even the shy are forced to say something.

Addendum: For readers with an interest in education and looking for further reading, I recommend the excellent article by Meira Levinson, Tatiana Geron and Harry Brighouse, “Conceptions of Educational Equity,” (https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221121344). HT to Jim Boettcher for drawing my attention to it.