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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Personally, I feel a visceral disgust whenever I think about how unequal the numbers 14 and 38 are.

I agree that inequality is not inherently bad in that I don't think most humans have a direct moral instinct to abhor inequality. It's only bad insofar as it reflects or causes lack of fairness. Since inequality and lack of fairness are so strongly correlated, many people have probably been trained to automatically disapprove of inequality. I think in America today inequality does frequently both cause and reflect lack of fairness. So while it may sometimes be imprecise to malign inequality directly, I don't think it's inappropriate.

As for sibling inequality, I'm sure many less successful siblings feel and express great resentment over the perceived advantages of their more successful siblings. They don't expect the government to interfere because the unfair system that caused the inequality is at the family level and dictated by culture. This is in contrast to inequality caused by Wall Street excess.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

At least international inequality is a huge, huge, huge subject of discussion amongst activists, government, NGOs, and political philosophers and theorists (in the latter category, check out the burgeoning literature on global justice).

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