I have to do an essay on the topic :
“As to the duty of pursuing equality, there is no such consent among us. Indeed, the consent is the other way, the consent is against equality. Equality before the law we all take as a matter of course; that is not the equality which we mean when we talk of equality. When we talk of equality, we understand social equality; and for equality in this Frenchified sense of the term almost everybody in England has a hard word”.
Discuss this opinion in intercultural terms and illustrate your view with concrete examples.
The matter is that I don’t really understand the topic.
What is the meaning of hard word at the end. Is it a pejorative term for French social equality ?
Then, I’m wondering if I must talk about the differences between British and French notion of equality or if I must talk about what is equality for Bristish people (like freedom for example) because of the sentence consent is against equality ?
There is a tension in Western society between people who think that everyone should have legal equality and people who think that you have to make people equal in every way. The former people believe that it is enough to provide people with equal opportunity and equal treatment under the law, and to protect everyone’s rights. The other people think that it’s the government’s job to make sure that everyone’s results are equal – that no one is richer or poorer than anyone else, that no one is more “successful” than everyone else. Many people think that social equality is impossible to achieve, because people have different talents and abilities, and some have more motivation than others, and so attempts to achieve social equality end up punishing society’s most productive people.
We don’t use the expression “a hard word” where I live, but I believe that in this instance it means that the English are very critical of the idea of forcing social equality.
It doesn’t happen absolutely perfectly anywhere, but it happens in some places much better than in others.
You’re confusing income and activity with productivity. Drug dealers are some of the most DESTRUCTIVE people in the US. They’re not creating value, but a burden on society.
I find it interesting how you mix characteristics that people choose with ones that they don’t choose, as if they were the same thing. People cannot choose their race or gender. They choose their clothes and hairstyles, and to a large extent they choose whether or not they’ll be fat, thin or average. These things involve behavior, and an employer is within his or her rights to screen out people whose behavior will be counterproductive or destructive to the enterprise. A guy who gets a satanic symbol tattooed on his face has made a deliberate choice to limit his opportunities. He may have been too stupid to realize it or care, but that’s his problem, not society’s or the government’s.
Discrimination by race or gender is another matter. Anti-discrimination laws help alleviate that, but laws intended to actively promote the advancement of one race or gender or another simply result in more discrimination.
The government has no business forcing lifestyle choices, hairstyles, eating habits and other volitional behaviors on employers who find them detrimental to business. Most employers are small businesses, and they don’t have the option of losing money or customers by indulging people’s chosen quirks.
When I was 18, I had hair down to my butt. My employment was limited to jobs in which having hair down to your butt didn’t matter. So I couldn’t play in a band in a redneck bar (my musical skills were up to snuff, but I had that hair). I also couldn’t get jobs where hair might be caught in machines or where a “clean” public image was necessary. That was my choice. At that time, for some reason, having hair down to my butt was more important to me than a good job. Later, on my own, I felt like cutting the hair off, and after I did that, my employability improved. When my hair was that long, a lot of employers took it as a clue that I must have other characteristics that would make me a bad employee, and they were right.
Exactly. It has become a place where it’s legal and often even obligatory to discriminate against whites and men, but where treating racial minorities equally is considered “discrimination”. If you have a white employee competing for a job with a somewhat less qualified minority employee, you have to hire the minority person, or you could have trouble with the government. If a white employee behaves destructively, you can simply fire him, but if a black or Hispanic employee behaves the same way, you have to assemble all kinds of documentation to prove that he wasn’t working properly, and then you may still have to fight a frivolous race discrimination lawsuit.
However, the US government interferes in those matters less than the governments in some other countries. We have a very low unemployment rate (around 4%), as opposed to places like France, where the unemployment rate was recently around 25% for people in their 20s.
Statistics do not back your assumptions about binge minority hiring at the expense of whites. Nothing compels an employer to hire a “somewhat less qualified” minority candidate over a white one. You also overlook the reality that affirmative action applies also to white women. It is not exceedingly difficult to fire anyone with a history of bad behavior in the private sector, and in the public sector the difficulty transcends race. No, you cannot “simply” fire anyone white, black or purple. Any marginally intelligent employer will document abuses to protect against lawsuits. The U.S. unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent now, after the recession.
