Is Frank Herbert's view on 'equality' similar to Aristotle justice?

Question

Herbert was not a philosopher, but a philosophically astute author that used futuristic fiction to comment on contemporary problems, "impossible to pin you down to neatly packaged ideas" according to some interviewers. In the "Dune Genesis" essay originally published in the July 1980 issue of Omni Magazine* Frank Herbert wrote:

"I now believe that evolution, or deevolution[sic], never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability."

• Since he issue the topic of trans-humanism (although not rare in Science Fiction), could he trying to say that humans have not the ability to administer successfully these ideals?
• Was he trying to say that humans administering could not have the same exact ideals because of its intrinsic inequality?
• Simply saying that some humans have not the ability to administer the ideals while others have it, as Noocracy notes?
• Or, since his apparently anarchist ideas, that "some humans deserve not-equal outcomes because their lack of ability"? I think this would be equality compared to justice in the Aristotle sense, that each one should obtain what deserve.

While he could just stated something like "humans are not equal" at the end of the quote, he wrote instead "humans don't have equal ability". So both things "we should recognize" seems unrelated to me suggesting the anarchist equality option, but I think you could broke down the quote in a better logical way.

PS: Could be possible you need to know Herbert's science fiction work to know his way of thinking, however you can't ask about the writers in Science Fiction SE. I tried it without success in Politics SE too. I think the abstraction ability and skill to understanding different angles of a philosopher could be necessary here, and I come to you because philosophy is probably the best way to get those skills.

(*) Herbert, Frank (July 1980). "Dune Genesis". Omni 2 (2): p. 72. ISSN 0149-8711.

Answer 1

I'm not sure that Frank Herbert is adding anything new to the debate here. Equality is an ideal, and so by it's very nature, can never be fully realised; it's something to aim at, and to inform the political culture.

It's a common-place that different people have different capacities; nevertheless, in liberal democracies we generally assert that every man has the right of a vote in the political system - this is a form of equality; that every man is equal before the law, and this is another form of equality.

Of course, there are numerous nuances and clarifications but this is because political culture is a contested area; hence we need guidelines to think politically - equality is one of them; the others since the French Revolution have been solidarity and liberty; and the modern era, after the horrors of the 20th C has added a fourth - diversity.

Answer 2

I think you can break this down as Enlightenment values are internally self-contradictory, because:

1. people differ in their distribution of attributes
2. equality involves comparisons based upon ideals that value different attributes
3. humans choose those ideals and their relative value (people administer the ideals)
4. doing this administration differently renders different sets of people unequal
5. trying to adapt the standards to make those unequal people equal is unfair to the people who are already equal (creating injustices)
6. those newly unequal people have a logical right to demand return to equality (those injustices rebound upon the equalizers)

So even if you take equality itself as an ideal, even a limited form like equal opportunity and equal justice, you cannot apply it properly because it does not work alone, it relies upon other ideals.

This is just an example of how our own society can never reach its highest point. People will disagree exactly when opportunity and justice are most equal. And that is our primary Enlightenment value set.

His broader argument is that societies never reach a given peak or a best form. And he is using Enlightenment values of modern society as an example. And that itself elaborates the idea that change is the constant, and stable goals are not part of evolution (or deevolution).