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Now hold on, all you wild egalitarians. I don't think you've got this right at all.

I think this latest interpretation conceals a separate moral judgment, a new principle of justice if you will. I may or may not agree with the new principle, but I think we should be clear about what we're doing here.

The principle 'treat equal cases equally' can help us if we know what is relevant and have all the necessary information on whatever is relevant. So far, so good.

But I don't think that 'treat equal cases equally and unequal cases unequally' tells us anything about what to do in the case in which we don't have the relevant information. That's a new question.

Remember, we could just as well say that 'treat equal cases equally and unequal cases unequally tells us that we should treat people differently unless we can establish similarities. that would put the burden of proof on the person advocating equal treatment.

Once we add the word 'unless' to the principle we have decided that a certain kind of treatment (for example, equal treatment) should be the default treatment. Therefore, it should be the treatment given in the absence of relevant information. But the word 'unless' wasn't in our original statement of the rule.

I guess what I'm saying is that the following two rules are different in an important way:

What I think Ayesha and Dee have done is to slide from the first formulation of the rule to the second. But they are obviously different. The rule that philosophers have traditionally agreed upon, and the one we started with, is the first formulation, not the second.

If you want to say that we should treat people equally in the absence of relevant information, then say so. But make it a separate principle.