A while back, in the good old days of JAG, I started a thread asking why equality should be considered such an overriding goal for social policy. I'm not sure we ever reached any conclusions but we kicked about the various ideas of different types of equality, opportunity, outcome, equality before the law and so on. Needless to say most people regarded at least some forms of equality as very desirable. I did myself

A recent thought made me wonder how much we really do believe in equality though. Here is a thought experiement:

A maniac has kidnapped two children. One is your own child, the other the child of a stranger. He tells you that he will kill one child and release the other, but that you can choose which is killed and which goes free. If you refuse to choose within an hour, he will kill both.

I don't think any parent would find it all that difficult to choose to save their own child in that case. (I'm not saying that you would be remotely happy to be in the scenario, or pleased the other child would die, simply that deciding to favour your own child would, I think, be obvious). Obviously, though, on any objective measure your child has no greater claim to survival than the other child, and the equal option is to toss a coin.

I concluded from this that I don't REALLY believe in equality, even if I think I do.

And the scenario is not hypothetical, and it doesn't have to relate to anything nearly so extreme as death (although as it happens it does). I spend my own resources, and taxes are spent on my behalf, to favour my children, and children who live in the UK, when those same resources could be spent (to greater overall benefit) on children in the developing world. I know this and yet I intend to do very little about it, maybe the ocassional donation, maybe the occasional comment that trade and aid in Africa is a good thing, but certainly nothing that materially impacts on my children.

I conclude that I, and the vast majority of us, are in fact screaming hypocrites who do not beleive in equality at all.

Or am I being too harsh?