Equal Worth Does Not Mean Equal Access

There is a generous impulse behind saying that everyone can discover a new way to meet life. The invitation should be open to all. Yet an invitation offered to everyone does not mean everyone has the same practical access to it.

Dignity and conditions are different questions

Equal dignity speaks to how people deserve to be regarded and treated. Access depends on conditions: time, money, safety, health, discrimination, language, and the support available around a person. Those conditions vary. Claiming that they do not matter can make an uplifting idea careless.

Someone can have room to reflect and choose while also facing barriers that another person does not. We can ask what is possible for a person without asking them to carry the burden of conditions they did not create.

Keep possibility honest

A useful conversation about possibility can include two questions at once: What can I choose or practice here? What conditions must change so more people can participate? The first question can support agency. The second calls for shared responsibility and material action.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights describes substantive equality as concerned with structural and indirect discrimination as well as formal equal treatment. That distinction helps keep a claim about equal worth from becoming a claim about identical opportunity.

An equal invitation is a beginning. Making access real takes attention to the actual lives in which that invitation lands.

Source

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Equality and non-discrimination”: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Water/Handbook/Book7_Principles.pdf