Social equality is about equal respect, not about relieving hardship
Helping the unfortunate and pursuing social equality sound alike but are different goals. Social equality is the ideal that any two people deserve equal respect and an equal right to take part in society regardless of rank, which means no legally enforced class or caste and no discrimination based on who someone inherently is.
Advocates call for equality before the law regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, caste, income, language, religion, disability, political views, marital status and more. Thinkers measure it differently, as equality of power, rights, goods, opportunities or capabilities. Some stress formal equality, meaning equal opportunity based on merit, while others seek substantive equality, equal outcomes for groups, also called social equity. The advocacy itself is known as egalitarianism.
Many ideologies draw on the idea, including democracy, republicanism, socialism, social democracy, communism, anarchism and multiculturalism. In societies that embrace it, relationships tend to rest on mutual respect and equal worth rather than hierarchy or honour. It can also apply between nations, since power gaps in a globalised world can create hierarchies between states and their citizens, who share no common community.
The struggle has advanced on many fronts. Abolitionists in Britain, the United States and elsewhere fought slavery through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thomas Jefferson's 1776 declaration that all men are created equal became a founding principle for later movements, though narrowly applied at the time, and the French Revolution of 1789 targeted inherited privilege. Women's suffrage campaigns stretched from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 into the twentieth century.
Beyond the West, Japan's Meiji reforms between 1868 and 1912 dismantled feudal hierarchies and introduced legal equality among citizens. In France from 1936, trade unions and charities such as those of Abbé Pierre and the International Movement ATD Fourth World campaigned for workers and the poor, and since 1945 the United Nations has promoted cooperation through its agencies. As progress is made, the scope keeps widening, because new inequalities come into view and new remedies become possible.
Source: Social equality
