Identity politics have taken center stage of contemporary discourse for the first time since the 1990s. Back then, identity politics in the form of social justice experienced just a few years of prominence. Now, since the last few years and particularly this election, we have seen the movement "come back with a vengeance" (Jordan Peterson, JRE Podcast).
Interpreting hardship in the face of inequality amounts to roughly two choices. Either you accept injustice as a matter of fact that cannot be changed due to nature or you understand it as a sub-optimal state of the world that should be corrected for. Or a combination thereof.
Accepting injustice is a much less controversial approach because it is the state of the world after all. To go around and act as if genetic differences are negligible is to ignore the actual fact of the matter. So we can confidently say that accepting injustice is to accept necessary aspects of reality.
Going down the route of correcting injustice requires one to modify difference. But accounting for differences in opportunity infringes on people's intuition of freedom. So, social justice aims to account for difference in outcome as a way to measure progress towards equity.
Marxism and social justice are effectively the same philosophy but cater to different groups; the marxists claim allegiance with the economically disadvantaged while the ‘social justice warriors’ claim allegiance with the socially disadvantaged. Both apply the same philosophy of social constructionism while ignoring biological and/or psychological differences in individuals, and even going so far as to claim that these do not exist among humans.
Equality of outcome requires a political position which acknowledges differences in people but seeks to correct their outcome artificially to produce uniform results.
Equality of opportunity requires a political position which when taken into its extreme has to create complete equality in human existence. After all, how can one have the equal opportunity in improvement, say, if one isn’t identical, or at least identical in the rate of improvement (which is a multifaceted aspect of human existence).
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