Equality
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
equality · each man his due · equal rights · equity · same award to all alike · same privileges
in the texts
Areopagiticus
The principle of fair distribution and equal civic rights, understood as giving each person what is due rather than identical treatment.
But what contributed most to their good government of the state was that of the two recognized kinds of equality—that which makes the same award to all alike and that which gives to each man his due —they did not fail to grasp which was the more serviceable;
for in their selection of magistrates, in their daily life, and in their habits in general, we may see that the principles of equity and equality have greater influence than elsewhere in the world—principles to which oligarchies are hostile, while well-ordered democracies practise them continually.
Furthermore, it is easy to judge of my purpose from the fact that in most of the discourses which I have written, you will find that I condemn oligarchies and special privileges, while I commend equal rights and democratic governments—not all of them, but those which are well-ordered, praising them not indiscriminately, but on just and reasonable grounds.
Nicocles or the Cyprians
Equal political privilege, criticized when it ignores moral difference and desert.
and the doctrine is in high favor in those governments that one man should not have the power to get more than another—a principle which works in the interest of the worthless!
Speaking, then, of forms of government (for this was the subject I set out to lay before you), I imagine that we all believe that it is altogether monstrous that the good and the bad should be thought worthy of the same privileges, and that it is of the very essence of justice that distinctions should be made between them, and that those who are unlike should not be treated alike but should fare a …