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2. All human beings are capable of value judgements, including moral, judgments and hence all have the right to adopt their own values or ideals.

3. All human beings are capable of participating in political decisions.·

4. All human beings, so far as can be told at birth, have the same inborn mental and moral capacities and thus are capable of the same achievements given the same opportunities.

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3. Whatever the differences of worth between normal human adults, it is impractical to try to take account of all of them either socially or politically.On how many different dimensions—of skill, intelligence, virtue, potentially potentiality for transcending habits, and so on—can people be compared? And who is competent to judge the relative importance of these different dimensions or the status of different ever-changing individuals with respect to any of them? Certainly, parentage is not a reliable guide to individual gifts and merits, and intelligence tests are notoriously often misleading.

Even if such considerations fail to establish absolute equality, the they surely suffice to exclude the chief forms of inegalitarianism practive practiced hitherto, such as racism, the subjection of women, the denial of opportunity to children of the poor, and so on. But can we say anything more?

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As for Jefferson's point that human equality amounts to a common inferiority to God and a common superiority to other nonhuman creatures, it's well taken, even though it can be made more clearly and powerfully today by comparing human beings, not with the nonhuman animals of their ordinary experience, but with the cells of their own bodies that biologists take to be genuinely individual organisms. When it is said that no person ca can be made innately subservient to another, two things are being denied: no human being can be to another either as a cell is to a human being or as a human being is to God. Thus theories of natural subservience or natural overlordship between reasonably normal adults are all false. All human beings normal enough to have anything like average symbolic capacity are appropriately dealt with as coparticipants in a cooperative process of conscious valuation and purposive activity. They out ought to have, if not literally "equal respect" for each other, sufficient respect so that it is scarcely appropriate even to ask about a distinction. Each primarily confronts a fellow human being or rational animal, only secondarily, a superior or inferior.

(Closely following Charles HartshoneHartshorne, "Equality, Freedom, and the Insufficiency of Empiricism")

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