포용, 형평 그리고 평등 = Inclusion, Equity, and Equality

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The value and significance of the concept of equality appear to be increasingly attenuated in contemporary legal and political discourse. While few would deny that equality once functioned as a central normative ideal of modernity, it is no longer widely regarded as a primary guiding principle. Instead, concepts such as diversity, equity, and inclusion have come to occupy a more prominent place in legal and policy frameworks. Several factors help explain this shift. First, theoretical debates over the question of “equality of what” have fragmented the concept of equality into competing accounts of its proper object. Second, the notion of relative equality, with its emphasis on difference and proportionality, has increasingly served to justify inequalities associated with meritocracy. Third, substantive equality has either remained under-theorized in concrete terms or, in the process of elaboration, has absorbed auxiliary concepts that dilute its original meaning. At a practical level, equality-based legal claims have often failed to gain sufficient traction, due in part to political and social dynamics such as backlash. Nevertheless, inclusion and equity remain closely connected to the concept of equality and should be situated within its broader normative architecture. In particular, inclusion reveals its meaning and substance most clearly within the framework of political equality, while equity does so within the framework of substantive equality. From the perspective of political equality, inclusion should be understood not merely as formal access to democratic participation, but as the effective enhancement of individuals’ and groups’ political influence, thereby entailing a critical orientation toward the exercise of state power. Equity, by contrast, stands in opposition to formal equality and is best understood as a concept that realizes the demands of substantive equality in context-sensitive ways. Substantive equality, in turn, presupposes certain core structures of equality, including basic equality and equality of outcomes. In this sense, both inclusion and equity are ultimately grounded in political equality and substantive equality, which together constitute the conceptual core of the idea of equality.