To the People of the Global Village:
In the preceding paper I argued that the common good must give reasons that include those who bear its burdens. I now ask what standing each person possesses in that argument. My thesis is that equality requires institutions to justify distinctions without converting differences of wealth, experience, or circumstance into a permanent ranking of human worth.
I do not mean that every person knows the same things or can perform every office equally well. A community needs trained judgment and differentiated responsibilities. The difficulty begins when a useful distinction becomes an unlimited title to command, or when a lack of resources is treated as evidence that a person has nothing worth hearing.
The historical disagreement must remain visible
Federal Farmer No. 7, dated December 31, 1787, argued that representation should collect the interests and circumstances of the people and guard against domination by particular classes. It warned that formal electoral choice could coexist with a legislature remote from ordinary lives. Its descriptions of social groups contain generalizations I do not adopt. I take seriously its institutional question: whose experience actually reaches the place where binding decisions are made? [1]
Abigail Adams’s letter of March 31, 1776, challenged the contradiction between professed liberty and the deprivation of others’ liberty. She urged protection against husbands’ unlimited power and demanded attention to women’s lack of voice. The letter is a particular historical intervention, not a modern statute or a complete contemporary program of equality. [2]
John Adams’s letter to James Sullivan of May 26, 1776, provides a resistant position. He recognized consent as government’s moral foundation while defending caution about expanding voter qualifications, invoking dependence, property, and the need for general rules. His account illustrates an argument for exclusion rather than establishing that excluded people lacked judgment. [3]
These sources do not speak with one intention. Their disagreements are part of the evidence. I would diminish the inquiry by placing all three beneath a timeless slogan and pretending that the contradiction had disappeared. My Neoteric position must answer the argument for exclusion rather than borrow the language of consent while preserving every inherited boundary.
Equal standing and differentiated responsibility
I distinguish standing from assignment. Standing means that a person’s interests and reasons deserve consideration without requiring permission from a social superior. Assignment concerns who should perform a particular task under defined qualifications. A surgeon’s training can justify assigning surgery to that surgeon; it cannot justify treating the patient as a lesser person.
Likewise, experience in public finance may justify responsibility for preparing an estimate. It does not make the estimator the owner of the community’s purposes. Those who lack that technical skill may still identify a burden the estimate ignores. Expertise and affected experience supply different forms of knowledge, and an accountable institution needs a way for them to meet.
I would therefore require qualifications to connect to the responsibility at issue. A condition that predicts competent performance deserves examination. A condition that merely reproduces the status of present officeholders deserves suspicion. Neither wealth nor poverty should automatically settle the question of capacity, honesty, or fitness to participate.
The strongest argument for exclusion
A defender of restricted participation may say that dependency creates opportunities for manipulation. A person whose livelihood depends upon another may face pressure to repeat that person’s political judgment. Institutions need independent minds, not merely a larger number of formally separate voices controlled by the same patrons.
I accept the danger of coercive dependence. I reject the inference that the appropriate remedy is to remove the dependent person’s standing. That remedy can strengthen the patron by making the person’s circumstances even less visible. It treats exposure to pressure as a reason to withdraw protection from the person exposed.
I would instead examine the means by which pressure operates. Within applicable lawful procedures, a community could consider confidential participation, protection against retaliation, disclosure of relevant conflicts, and accessible avenues for reporting coercion. These are original proposals, not claims about the requirements of any present jurisdiction. Their adequacy would need evidence and practical review.
Nor should independence be presumed merely because a participant possesses property. An affluent person may be beholden to an office, contract, or association. The institutional problem is influence that cannot be examined, wherever it arises. A rule that investigates only the dependence of the poor may overlook powerful forms of obligation among the wealthy.
A concrete test of equal treatment
Imagine a hypothetical community allocating places in a publicly organized apprenticeship. Applicants differ in prior schooling, available time, disability, experience, and ability to pay for equipment. One proposal admits those who perform best on an advanced test. Another reserves every place for those facing the greatest hardship.
I would first ask what the apprenticeship is meant to accomplish. If it teaches beginners, an advanced test may chiefly reward access to previous instruction. If it requires prerequisite knowledge for safety, abandoning that requirement could injure the very people the program seeks to serve. The purpose and actual demands must be stated before fairness can be assessed.
I would then distinguish a necessary standard from an avoidable obstacle. A tool required for safe participation may be necessary; requiring every applicant to purchase it privately may be only one possible arrangement. Shared equipment, preliminary instruction, or different hours might broaden access without abandoning competence. Their cost and feasibility would need examination rather than assumption.
The applicant who is refused should receive an intelligible reason and an appropriate route to challenge an error. This does not promise a place to everyone. It makes the exercise of selection answerable. An institution that cannot explain a refusal should not expect the excluded person to regard the word merit as a sufficient answer.
The objection from uniform rules
A second critic may object that attending to different circumstances destroys equal treatment. If rules vary whenever someone encounters difficulty, officials gain discretion to favor friends and punish opponents. Predictability protects people against arbitrary judgment, and a general standard may be fairer than individualized sympathy.
I agree that unexplained exceptions can become favoritism. My answer is to distinguish a publicly defined accommodation from a private dispensation. Where different treatment is proposed, its reason, boundaries, and availability to comparable cases should be stated. Review should ask whether the distinction serves the task or the preference of the official.
Uniformity itself also requires justification. A meeting held at one hour applies the same schedule to everyone, yet may systematically exclude those with particular work or care obligations. That does not prove the hour is wrong. It shows why identical wording cannot complete the inquiry into practical access.
The objection from unlimited demands
A third critic may say that every difference can become a claim upon common resources. If equality requires removing every disadvantage, no institution can satisfy it. Scarcity forces choices, and the effort to equalize all circumstances might create an authority more intrusive than the inequality it seeks to remedy.
I do not propose an institution responsible for making every life identical. I propose a duty to identify relevant disadvantages, compare feasible responses, and explain priorities. A community may conclude that a requested measure exceeds its resources. It should distinguish that conclusion from a claim that the person requesting it has inferior standing.
Proportion matters here. A minor adjustment that permits participation deserves a different examination from a demand that would consume the entire undertaking. Reasons should address the actual proposal. Officials should neither promise unlimited provision nor dismiss every adjustment as the beginning of limitless obligation.
Equality must survive disagreement
Equal standing also belongs to those whose opinions I consider mistaken. If respect is available only after agreement, it is a reward distributed by the dominant view. I would preserve the difference between challenging an argument and degrading the person who advances it. Evidence may defeat a claim without removing its author’s membership in the public.
This principle does not prevent institutions from enforcing valid rules or selecting qualified people. It requires the grounds of enforcement and selection to remain examinable. Accountability is weakened when every refusal is called oppression, but it is equally weakened when every demand for explanation is called insubordination.
I seek a community in which differences can inform responsibility without becoming inherited commands. The test of equality is not whether every outcome matches. It is whether power can justify its distinctions to people whose standing it has no authority to erase. My next inquiry concerns education: how people acquire the understanding needed to exercise that standing without making schooling itself a new gate of exclusion.
— Shemsizedek
Source notes
[1] Federal Farmer, No. 7, December 31, 1787, The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 13, document 22; cross-reference vol. 1, ch. 15, document 36. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s22.html
[2] Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776, The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 15, document 9. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s9.html
[3] John Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776, The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 13, document 10; cross-reference vol. 1, ch. 15, document 13. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s10.html
Previous installment: https://holytemples.org/2026/10/29/neoteric-papers-no-5-the-common-good-must-give-its-reasons/
Sources consulted October 29, 2026. The apprenticeship example is hypothetical. First-person interpretations and safeguards are original proposals, not statements of enacted law. This essay changes no legal obligations. The planned 85 installments are an original editorial structure, not historical Anti-Federalist numbering.
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