The titanic social struggle of our era pits those favoring equality (in its traditional sense) against those demanding “equity” (in a sense far from its traditional meaning). One who advocates equality is an egalitarian, and his philosophy is egalitarianism. One who advocates “equity” has no name—or has scores of names; the same is true of his philosophy. This asymmetry of nomenclature and the divergent meanings of “equity” put egalitarians at a powerful rhetorical disadvantage. For effective argumentation, egalitarians need to level the rhetorical playing field, and I believe the most efficient way of doing so is to refer to anti-egalitarians as “equitists” and to their philosophy as “equitism”—as we’ll do here.  ...

Egalitarians aspire to equalize individual rights and opportunities, and perhaps to equalize ex post outcomes across individuals via social safety nets. Equitists, well-intentioned though they may be, pigeonhole people by immutable characteristics (race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, disability, etc.) and then seek to equalize average outcomes across groups. Someone in charge (an equitist, naturally) must devise a taxonomy of mankind, assign every individual to some cell in that taxonomy, rank each cell along something like an oppressor/oppressed spectrum, and then allocate rights, privileges, opportunities, and wealth among these cells.