Equity and Equality

Equity and equality are related but significantly different concepts. Equity means fairness, and in the American legal tradition inherited from England, it is a principle giving judges in certain civil cases a degree of discretion in order to achieve an equitable result that the letter of the law might not explicitly provide. One of the “maxims of [Page 806]equity,” a set of legal principles expanding on the concept of equity in law, is “equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy.” Commonly, the goal of equity cases is to provide a better remedy to a wrong that has been done than the common law remedies available, which are usually limited to monetary damages.

In economics, equity is specifically contrasted with the idea of equal treatment. A flat tax treats each taxpayer equally, but not equitably. Economic equity requires policies to achieve fairness to account for unequal access to resources and unequal opportunity. Most people today embrace the simplest tenets of egalitarianism— that all people are created equal, should be treated as equal, and have the same rights. This is encoded not only in the U.S. Declaration of Independence but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, which states that “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.”

Disagreements arise from the creation of new rights or routes to resources in order to correct economic, social, or civil inequalities, such as in voting rights laws or affirmative action programs. Classical liberalism favors individual rights and equal treatment by the law without regard to equity as such. Economist John Maynard Keynes, on the other hand, emphasized egalitarianism as the pursuit of an equality of outcomes: if two children are sitting at a restaurant booth and the smaller one is given a booster seat to bring him to the level of the table, that is not equal treatment in the sense of each party being treated identically, but it is equitable treatment in that the outcome for each party is equal.

The concept of “equality of opportunity” is interpreted differently by various parties. The opportunity in question refers to access to resources, especially employment, but includes education, housing, health care, and financial resources such as fair credit terms, small business loans, and mortgages. The difference in interpretation mirrors that between classical liberals and Keynes mentioned above: conservatives generally feel that it is sufficient to outlaw discrimination, while liberals have often supported programs that act as the figurative booster seat to increase the opportunity of disadvantaged groups, with an eye toward the Keynesian equality of outcomes. Affirmative action is perhaps the best-known example.

Affirmative action programs are those that are adopted by universities or employers in order to actively prevent and counter discrimination against race, ethnicity, religion, or sex. Rather than simply outlaw discrimination, affirmative action programs actively support the hiring, or admission into college, of minorities through programs that include targeted recruitment, special grants and loans available to minority students, employee development programs for minority groups, and other such actions. Though the concept of affirmative action is popularly associated with quotas—whereby a minimum number of students of a particular gender or ethnicity would be admitted in a given year, for instance— the Supreme Court has limited universities’ ability to set such quotas, primarily in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) decisions. What has been upheld, however, is a school's ability to consider race or gender as a positive factor in evaluating candidates for admission.

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