Blind Workings and Human Endeavors

Via Mahablog, this piece by Robert McCain. Maha picks out this quote for a blast:

This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

Since I like to see the context of things like this, I checked it out. Here's the whole paragraph:

Most annoying is how Cohn offers Rawls' views as if they were self-evident. Why is random chance "unjust"? Whence the "moral" obligation to equalize outcomes? This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic. "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one." (A famous guy said that. Maybe you should look him up, Jonathan Cohn.)

As you can see, she preserved the sense (nonsense?) of it.

Not having read Cohn or Rawls, I can't really comment, except to say that anyone who was really looking at things would realize the McCain is talking about two different phenomena here; Cohn may be as well, which is something that should have been noted.

By way of elucidation, "random chance" and "justice" occupy separate universes. Justice is a human concept, as is equality, so to equate the productions of chance with inequality is a stupefying example of misdefinition. Moving the argument back into the realm of human activities, however, I think O'Brien is right:

And speaking of racism and other forms of discrimination, I give you the Rightie Genius of the Week, Robert McCain, who writes,

This idiotic liberal tendency to equate inequality with injustice is indefensible as logic.

If you need to stop and reflect on that for a bit, take your time.

In context, I believe Mr. McCain was using the word equality to mean identical, which I think only works in mathematics — not even then, if I’m doing the mathematics. However, here in Real World Land, equality — as in equal treatment under the law — is the cornerstone of justice. When elements are equal they are not necessarily identical, but they have the same intrinsic value even if they have different attributes.

She does go on to to deconstruct that paragraph, and does it very well. Another reason I admire Maha -- she understands about asking the next question.

Daniel Larison also takes on McCain, about a different issue. I don't follow McCain's writing, and on the basis of these two posts, I'm probably not going to. But he seems to be getting it from both sides lately. Yeah, I can identify with that.

Not that I have any sympathy in this case.