Summarize the Key Themes of Freedom and Equality

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or critics, and the lack of demonstrable progress toward equality among humankind is truly remarkable.

Identifying features of equality can be overlapping and contradicting, thus equality can stand for three basic features, firstly the absence of special privileges in society. Secondly the presence of adequate and equal opportunities for development for all and lastly equal satisfaction of basic needs of all.

Looking at variations of meanings of equality, Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech makes a powerful case for natural equality. King uses the power of family to insist we are marked fundamentally by our similarities rather than our differences. He obviously recognised skin colour as the source of inequality and believes once this is rejected and differences such as skin colour, gender and sexual orientation are not considered morally or politically significant then equality will be on the horizon. This kind of equality is now successfully seen as the normal in many societies, however some could argue the recent ‘Black lives matter’ movement and the police gun crime against black Americans in America can question weather this natural equality has really successfully come in to place.

Natural equality has since evolved and developed in to a more formal equality in which it has now come into the governments responsibility to regulate equality in society and to update the meaning of equality as time passes by and social norms change such as gay marriage. Formal equality is more contemporary liberal understanding of equality it is the idea that everyone should be treated equally before the law, in the UK we have the equality act which protects everyone from discrimination of ‘who you are’. However just because this act is in place doesn’t stop the discrimination from occurring, looking at Julie Morgans prospective of politics she’s suggests that politics has been seen as a ‘mans world’ because it is so highly male dominated. She often comes across people that are actually staggered when she tells them she’s in politics because the main view of politics is to be a ‘white, middle-aged men in suits’.

Formal equality leads us on to equality of opportunity, this equality of opportunity is needed to bring about a more meaningful equality Equality of opportunity is a political ideal that is opposed to caste hierarchy but not to hierarchy per se. The background assumption is that a society contains a hierarchy of more and less desirable, superior and inferior positions. Or there may be several such hierarchies. In a caste society, the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is fixed by birth. The child acquires the social status of his or her parents at least if their union is socially sanctioned. Social mobility may be possible in a caste society, but the process whereby one is admitted to a different level of the hierarchy is open only to some individuals depending on their initial ascriptive social status. In contrast, when equality of opportunity prevails, the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is determined by some form of competitive process, and all members of society are eligible to compete on equal terms. Different conceptions of equality of opportunity construe this idea of competing on equal terms variously.