It’s alarming that a way of thinking should now be in common between the Nazis and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Equity is the quality of fairness and impartiality. It can be demanded only in certain defined circumstances, not of human life in general. Only a moment’s reflection is necessary to prove that this is so. It isn’t fair that some people are born handsome and others are born ugly, or intelligent and unintelligent, or gifted and ungifted, in good homes or in bad. Not until everyone is a clone and brought up in precisely the same circumstances will life be fair: and then it will be horrible. But exam papers can be marked, and sports refereed, fairly.
One might have thought that equity in the choice of scholarly work to publish in learned journals consisted solely of assessment of its scholarly worth: no other criterion should count. That’s one of the reasons why submissions to assessors are often anonymized, for it’s true that human beings have biases that may resist their efforts to put them aside. People differ, of course, in their capacity or willingness to be dispassionate.
The more exact the science, no doubt, the more easily truth will out, and the quicker will any bias be exposed. But even in less-exact fields of knowledge, quality is discernible. You might disagree with Edward Gibbon’s outlook and conclusions, for example, but you could hardly claim that his “Decline and Fall” was without merit; likewise, Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history might appear mistaken to you, but you would not therefore assert that his “War and Peace” was no good as a novel.
Continue reading the piece here at The Epoch Times (paywall)
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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