In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson describes its primary moral assertion that “all men are created equal” to be not a self-evident truth but as sacred and undeniable. Locke has described natural rights as being inherent. Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Lincoln, the women suffragettes, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all considered equality to be the primary moral value of our government.
From the perspective of a physician, the primary moral value of medical ethics is a respect for human dignity and our common humanity. This understanding of equality is inherent, sacred and undeniable, or self-evident in that it is essentially a self-affirmation as well as an affirmation of our humanity. G. K. Chesterton, on the other hand, noted that the belief in human equality is not “some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky.” Medical ethics also understands human nature to be multidimensional such that this primary moral assertion and commitment does not resolve all of the ethical issues, but it does provide a good framework of analysis that considers the individual, social, consequential, and metaphysical or deontological perspectives. This understanding of our primary moral value of equality would better enable dialogue and it also has at least the capacity for accommodation in a pluralistic global community. This understanding of equality would be a step toward enabling a more stable world order.
