How everyone can be inherently equal, and still be treated differently

This is a much shorter piece, as I missed my bi-weekly Saturday deadline due to the vaccine, and just wanted to get something out.

Generally, it’s frowned upon to favor one person’s happiness over another’s. To clarify, while two people may be different, the want for either to experience pleasure or be happy should be equal. There is no intrinsic metric by which someone is better than another.

Knowing this, how can other people still be treated differently, if each person’s happiness is equally valuable in a society? This is where an extrinsic metric comes into play. In a rather curveball way, the extrinsic measure is the amount of happiness a person can provide to others.

For example, compare a doctor and someone with a relatively standard profession. Without knowing who these people are, we cannot say that one of them is nicer, or more deserving of happiness. We can however, generally say that the doctor will be increasing the pleasure (or decreasing the pain) of more people, and therefore in order to help that increase of pleasure, the doctor receives greater pleasure himself.

In utilitarianism, the general goal is the happiness of the most people. To do this, it therefore makes sense to spend limited resources on people who will in turn create more happiness for everyone else.