PROPORTIONALITY IN HUMAN RIGHTS: THE AXIOMATIC REASONING OF EQUALITY

Abstract

No human right to subsistence has yet been settled, due to continuing debate over equality and the meanings of proportionality in survival. Across Europe, groceries and energy costs are overtaking consumers’ resources to pay for them. Economists say this crisis will increase the number of households subsisting in poverty. In light of this statement of significance, the overall objective of this research is to discover a critical exegesis on the character of equality. After the developments of the axiomatic reasoning of Eudoxus, the issue arises naturally as to how to characterize ‘equality’. The argument seeks to sustain the proposition that equality is an axiom in the nature of a deus ex machina. Saying that people are alike morally is a circular articulation of a moral rule for the treatment for certain people, demanding reference to how they must be treated alike, effectively a kind of distortion of their proportions. Gillespie’s argument, that people who are alike should be treated alike, only applies where the actor had a specific duty to such persons, introduces at once the convenient circularity of an axiom, and at once the convenient circularity of a deus ex machina. Browne’s explanation of a proportionality genus for rights implies that equality is in the nature of a fictive genus of fictive rights. Equality is an artificial axiomatic construct, cobbled together like a deus ex machina, to resolve the meaning of proportionality in assessing people’s equal receiving of their due.