Red cross through familiar equality vs equity meme showing kid standing on boxes

I’ve always been a bit uneasy about the above meme (to which I’ve added a red cross). Thankfully, due to link to a blog post by Rob Farrow I’ve discovered why. In fact, it’s possibly the reason why the whole DEI thing has been so contentious.

It shouldn’t need saying, but people don’t read carefully and aren’t used to reading beyond headlines these days. So before continuing of course I believe in equality. The issue is with the woolly concept of ‘equity’. The article I’m citing is by Joseph Heath, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He writes as you’d expect such a person to write: clearly, but assuming a bit of a background in Philosophy. Thankfully, yours truly does have that background and is here to help 😉

The purpose of any good model is to present a simplified representation of reality, in order to accentuate crucial features and make them more analytically tractable. The question, therefore, is whether the kids on boxes provide a useful model for thinking about the sorts of distribution problems that arise in DEI contexts. Most egalitarian philosophers, I think, would say that it is a bad model.

I’ve taken the quotations out of order because the overall argument makes more sense when presented this way. So we start from the position that the kids on boxes meme isn’t particularly useful.

The contrast that is drawn in the meme, which was originally intended to illustrate the distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome,” captures the way that people used to think about issues of equality up until the late 1960s, before the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. After that, pretty much everyone came to agree that the opportunity/outcome distinction was neither useful nor coherent. The really important question was not when one chose to equalize, but rather what one intended to equalize.

So we need to figure out what we’re ‘equalising’ here. Is it the number of boxes? Or the quality of view?

The most immediate problem with the meme is that it does not present an accepted definition of the term “equity,” but rather a stipulative redefinition, which does not correspond very well to how the term has historically been used… [T]he graphic was originally drawn to illustrate the contrast between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Later on, after it was reproduced umpteen times, someone changed the labels, and somehow the idea that “equality of outcome” should be called “equity” stuck.

To recap: we’ve got an outdated notion of ‘equality of opportunity’ vs ‘equality of outcome’ which has been made even more problematic by the meme relabelling the latter as ‘equity’. It’s not a defensible philosophical position, partly because ‘equity’ doesn’t have a universally accepted definition, and is usually seen as a looser standard that strict equality.

My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it. Because people are different (i.e. diverse), one should not expect perfect equality, but rather just equity. And for all I know, this may have been what the person who modified the kids on boxes meme was thinking, suggesting that the allocation of boxes to kids should be responsive to the different characteristics of the kids. The unfortunate result, however, is that instead of introducing a looser standard of equality, the meme wound up saddling DEI with a commitment to an extremely strict, controversial conception of equality (i.e. equality of outcome), which no reasonable person actually endorses as a general principle. Furthermore, this was not achieved through argument, but merely through persuasive definition.

And this, dear reader, is why Philosophy is such an important subject. If you don’t get these kinds of things right, then it has downstream implications. ‘Equity’ might seem like a reasonable thing to aim for, but if you don’t know what it means, then you’re going to run into trouble.

Setting aside these terminological issues and focusing on equality of outcome, the next big problem with the meme is that it commits DEI proponents to a conception of equality that is somewhere to the left of the most left-wing view defended by left-wing philosophers. Indeed, one of the major objectives of theorists in the “equality of what?” debate was to reformulate egalitarianism in such a way as to avoid the obvious objections to the simple-minded conception of equality of outcome that used to prevail in public debates (and that is represented nicely in the meme).

The ‘obvious objections’ mentioned above are things like people who have made poor choices in life. For example, intuitively, we don’t think that people who have made poor choices in life should be treated the same as those who have wound up with less because of circumstances beyond their control.

[Philosophers] took the choice/circumstance distinction and turned it into the fundamental justification for egalitarianism, arguing that our most basic reason for caring about equality is our desire to neutralize the effects of bad luck. According to this view, when we look at the kids on boxes meme and agree to take the box away from the tall guy and give it to the short kid, the reason we make this judgment is because height is an unchosen characteristic – it’s not the short kid’s fault that he’s short. The idea is not that everyone should get exactly the same outcome, but that we should not be allowing unchosen differences between persons to determine outcomes.

Framed like that, DEI would apply across the board, to people who face inequality through no fault of their own. It’s a shame that we took a meme-based approach to policy rather than a philosophical one. But then, we live in 2025 where only a small proportion of people are willing to take a nuanced view.

You don’t have to agree with this idea to see that it represents a very different way of thinking about equality. And from this perspective, the problem with the meme is that it dredges up an old, discredited view of equality, that can easily be undermined just by pointing to cases where individuals wind up with less because of choices they have made. A lot of the excitement generated by luck egalitarianism was based on the perception that we had overcome a significant error in thinking about equality, and could now move on to discussion of more defensible conceptions. And yet all it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years!

Source: In Due Course

Image: Modified from an original used in the above blog post.