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Equality as a Consolation Prize - by Ruxandra Teslo

writingruxandrabio.com · 2,639 words · saved by 1 readers

In a secular world, equality is a last attempt to offer some dignity to the weak

I am not the first to notice that the moral imagination of the modern world feels, in certain respects, flattened. Not long ago, after immersing himself in nineteenth-century novels, Matthew Yglesias remarked on how foreign the language of honor now sounds to us and how distant from the moral world of someone like Dorothea in Middlemarch. Think about it: when was the last time you praised someone for being noble or honorable? Even “good” has been replaced by the epithets “kind” or “nice”. The ends we pursue now tend to cluster around three dominant aims: safety, utility, and equality. Of…

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