Natural and Social Inequalities

Political theory sometimes distinguishes between two broad kinds of inequality: natural inequalities and socially-produced inequalities.

Natural inequalities are those that arise from the different capabilities and talents people are born with. They are usually assumed to be inequalities that cannot easily be changed. Social inequalities, by contrast, are created by society itself. Some societies value people who do intellectual work more than people who do manual work, and reward them very differently for it; some societies treat people differently because of their race, colour, gender or caste. Differences of this kind reflect a society's own values and choices, and can therefore look unjust to us in a way that natural differences do not.

This distinction is genuinely useful for telling acceptable inequality apart from unfair inequality — but it is not always as clear or self-evident as it first appears. Very often, when a form of unequal treatment has existed for a long time, people come to see it as "natural" and therefore beyond question, when it is really nothing of the sort. For centuries, women were described as "the weaker sex," supposedly of lesser intelligence than men and in need of special protection — a claim used to justify denying them equal rights. Colonial rulers in Africa similarly described Black people as being of lesser intelligence, "child-like," and better suited to manual work, sport and music — a belief used to justify institutions like slavery. Both of these claims are now recognised for what they really were: not descriptions of any genuine natural difference, but distinctions created by an imbalance of power between groups and nations, later dressed up as though they were facts of nature.

A second problem with treating something as a fixed "natural" inequality is that what looks unalterable can change with new knowledge and technology. Advances in medicine and technology have helped many disabled people function fully in society — computers can help blind people work and communicate, wheelchairs and artificial limbs restore mobility, and even a person's physical appearance can now be changed through surgery. The physicist Stephen Hawking, who could barely move or speak without assistance, still made some of the most important contributions to science of his generation. It would seem deeply unjust today to deny disabled people the help they need, or a fair reward for their work, on the grounds that their limitation is simply "natural" and therefore not society's problem. …