Are all humans created equal?

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The interest to inspect the statement all men are created equal traceable to the US Declaration of Independence transcends its jurisdiction for its pertinence to humanitarian matters concerning all who belong to this global community.

Arguments for and against this dilemma capture the ambiguity of the verb. Indeed, there are two sets of circumstances responsible for "creating" us: those which accompany us during our natal development, and those which shape us throughout life. What the two perspectives do agree upon is that our experiences and identities are largely subject to external factors beyond our initial control. Where the two come into discord is in questioning how much creative control an individual has in steering unfavourable circumstances towards favourable opportunity, and how much identity as a social construct contracts or expands one’s experience, just as experience ably shapes identity at both the individual and social levels.

The fact this debate exists in the first place alerts to some judgement (or belief) that inequality exists amongst one another, is able to be reasoned for, and begs for an interrogation into the treatment of one another. A person’s access (or lack thereof) to opportunity, success, and smooth compatibility with the material world tend to either green- or red-light inequality’s existence in the world.

Are all men, women, and humans non-conforming to either of these labels created equal?

Humans are created equal

Pro

• Pro All words in language are arbitrarily linked to their objects of reference. There is no logical reason why word x in language y should strictly be used to represent object z over all other possible options. Thus, the link between a word and its reference is weak, unstable and subject to the same human imaginations responsible for choosing and conventionalising the option in the first place. Equality is not exempt; there is no factually indisputable definition for the word, and no factually indisputable rule as to how it must be applied in the real world. Like the transparent word; if we strip our identity to its core, removing all labels and judgements arbitrarily attached to it by the perceptions of ourselves and our human kin, we perform a premature (re)enactment of birth (when we had no concern for who we were to be) and death (when this concern self-extinguishes). Thus, we are all equal in origin, destination, and in the intrinsically human experience of both applying value judgements to our world and being judged by others for these same pursuits.
  • Objection Those born into families of public renown are subject to anticipation, judgement and bias from birth and conception. Though it is not unique to have, say, anticipations of the child's gender and name projected onto us from pre-natal infancy, projections onto the child's identity increases correlatively to the mother's renown. If, as you claim, social projections onto the identity are preliminary to experience, then those whose identity is made widely pregnable to projections due to the number of people aware of the child are, by default, predisposed to chances of an unfair experience. In other words: others know of the child before the child knows itself.

Con

• Con The very fact that we are all able to create our own reality about what qualifies as equality, but we are not equal in our power to project our creations influentially onto others to reshape their reality, supposes that we are not all created equal.