This book examines a fundamental social paradox: although less equality certainly entrenches injustice, more equality may nevertheless protect the advantages that one group enjoys over fellow citizens. Their studies confront us with vivid cases where equality for some is preferred to equality for all.

The essays in this volume on the subject of equality are the work of scholars at Bard College and West Point. Their research falls within the areas of history, religion, legal theory, social science, ethics and philosophy. The regions covered include the Middle and Far East, Europe, and America; the time periods studied are both contemporary and historical. Each essay is a well-detailed exploration which assumes the reader has no prior acquaintance with the topic.

Together, the studies reveal both conflicting standards of equality as well as patterns of pernicious inequality. In an ideal world, equality and inequality among humans would vary in acceptable proportion, increase of the one ensuring decrease of the other. Unfortunately, as the studies illustrate, any such expectation of progress in the real world is almost routinely thwarted.

Despite the wide variety of topics, a common thread binds these essays. Human nature seems to harbor a moral deficiency lying deeper than any written laws and those traditional customs which promote inequality and breed injustice. The fault is prominent in those who champion unjust laws or who willingly enforce discrimination but it is no less active in the silent many who condone the practice. The essays reveal the same persistent and unappealing trait which social groups from the remote past to the present manifest in various ways: blind determination to perpetuate whatever advantages one group believes it enjoys over another, convinced that its own members are more equal than theirs. Being made unequal, the others too easily become targets who are considered less worthy, sometimes even less human.

Chapter 1: Equality Deferred: A Litany of Discrimination byRobert J. Goldstein

Chapter 2: Equality and Diversity in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey byGeorge

W. Gawrych

Chapter 3: The Social Practice of (In)equality in Nazi Germany byDavid S. Frey

Chapter 4: Social Inequality and the United States Army: The (Un)lucky Seven by Morten G.

Ender and Betsy Lucal

Chapter 5: Civil War Pension Policy: The Politics of Policy Subsystems byBrandon Jason

Archuleta

Chapter 6: Selecting a Military Court-Martial Panel: A Study of Inequality byLTC Christopher

Jacobs

Chapter 7: United Nations Peace Missions and Protection of Civilians: Equality versus

Efficiency? by Darya Pushkina

Part II: Theological Perspectives

Chapter 8: Ultimately Equal and Relatively Complicated: Questions about Equality in TeachingBuddhist Studies byDominique TownsendChapter 9: The Rabbinic Meritocracy and Its Discontents byShai Secunda

Chapter 10: Equality in Paul of Tarsus—More and Less by Bruce Chilton

Chapter 11:The Perilous Promise of Equality: Scriptural Politics in Contemporary Iran by

Tehseen Thaver

Chapter 12:Gandhi, Krishna, and Caste: Inequality More or Less byRichard H. Davis

Part III: Philosophical Perspectives

Chapter 13: Men of Fortitude: Gender and Combatant Non-Immunity in War byGraham

Parsons

Chapter 14:Minding Gibbon’s Manners: Unwritten Rules and the Rhetoric of Equality byHugh

Liebert

Chapter 15:A Kantian Approach to Recognizing Privilege byCourtney Morris

Chapter 16: Inequality in Skepticism by R. E. Tully

Epilogue by Bruce Chilton

Index

About the Contributors