On human equality

I’ve been thinking a little more about what it would really mean if we were all serious about saying (as the Founding Fathers of the US said) that all “men”– for which, read “all humans”– are created equal, and are endowed equally with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was just reading the 2005 edition of the UN development Program’s Human Development Report. Table 14 at the back there tells us that the annual Gross Domestic Product of the whole world is US$36.06 trillion– or,if you count something called “Purchasing Power Parity dollars”it comes to PPP$51.15 trillion. (These are figures for 2003.)
Given a world population of just over 6.3 billion souls, the global GDP per capita comes to US$5,801, or PPP$8,229. That is the value of all the goods and services produced in the world in a year (now, not changed much from 2003.)
So if your household’s income is less than PPP$8,229 per capita, then you’re getting the short end of the economic stick, globally speaking. If it is more, then you’re a person of privilege.
Okay, I’m a person of privilege.
In 2003, the GDP per capita in the US came to PPP$37,562. Of course, we know it is very unevenly distributed within the US. (Indeed, Table 15 tells us that the richest 10% of Americans enjoy 29.9% of the nation’s income or consumption; and the proportion between the income enjoyed by the richest 10% to that enjoyed by the poorest 10% is 15.9 to 1, by far the highest for any of the OECD countries.)
By contrast, the average GDP per capita in the 32 countries listed in the Report as being of “Low human development”– and I hope to heck there’s no-one out there reading this who takes this to be a moral judgment??– is just PPP$1,046. That is, just 2.78% of the per-capita PPP GDP within the US.
So, let’s go back 13 years, to 1990. That year, according to the 1993 Human Development Report, the real GDP per capita in the US was PPP$21,449 (Table 1). In the countries described as “least developed” it was PPP$740, or 3.45% of what it was in the US.
Clearly, gaps are getting wider.
Clearly, too, these gaps in income, which accumulate year after year after year into ever larger gaps in wealth, leave the US and other rich countries– some of which, I should note, have a slightly higher per-capita GDP than the US, though these are much smaller countries– but the ever accumulating gaps in wealth between the uber-rich and the uber-poor leave the rich countries much, much more capable of intervening economically in the affairs of the poorest countries… And they (we) do this in many ways, including by keep the international trade rules firmly stacked against poor-country producers of most primary goods.
In terms of the “ability to intervene economically”, too, I think the “raw” US$ figures of per-capita GDP in any country are a stronger indicator of their relative susceptibility to US intervention than the PPPS figures. For example, if a gringo goes into any of the many low-income countries where the cost of living is relatively low (in dollar terms), then he or she can exert a lot more influence by waving $100 around there than s/he could get by doing the same in a (much more expensive) West European country.
… Well, deeply embedded and continuing economic inequalities are only dimension of the present inequalities among the world’s peoples. But I’ve been thinking about human equality/inequlity quite a lot over recent months (okay, most of my life, to be truthful.) Some years ago, when I was toying with the idea of doing a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics, I took a course that involved a lot of close reading in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls, who died a couple of years ago, was a leading icon of US political philosophy. He was a longtime Harvard prof, and Theory of Justice was his best-known work by far.
Back when I was reading it 8 years or so ago, I found it intriguing, but I disagreed fairly strongly with some of his general dispositions; mostly, I should say, with his ontology. His view of “the human condition” was very much in the tradition of the English empiricists, those dear old (always unmarried) Anglican clergymen like Locke, Hobbes etc who viewed “men”– for such was the subject of their enquiry– as quintessentially individualistic, self-generating, and self-sufficient beings. (I guess they never stopped to speculate about the ontological standing of the women who must have washed their socks for them, and fed them– let alone the mothers whose tireless labor had raised them from infancy and endowed them with all the basic tools of the language by which they later made their living… Oh well.)
Myself, I always was much more of a feminist communitarian. I love Seyla Ben-Habib’s takedowns of Hobbes and Locke; Margaret Walker, Sara Ruddick, and all those other feminist philosophers whose works are notably NOT taught in philsophy departments dominated by a rigidly “analytical” approach.
So anyway, I had a bunch of criticisms of Rawls that I argued out in various forms at the time. But now, looking back, I think maybe it’s time to reconnect with a couple of his key insights, and try to bring them more to life within the US discourse.
He centers his argument about the nature of “justice” around a clever educational device that he calls the “veil of ignorance.” Basically, he says that if you try to imagine what a just social order might look like, you should imagine that all the people in the world encounter each other in an initial deliberation in which they don’t know the details of their own social situation. So since you don’t know, in this thought experiment, whether you might be male or female, rich or poor, black-skinned or white-skinned, able-bodied or disabled, you would want to minimize your chances of getting “the short end of the stick” by legislating some kind of social order in which, regardless of your condition, your interests would not be totally ignored… and on this basis, a generally “fair” and perhaps even somewhat “caring” social order would emerge.
Nearly all of this argument was set within a national community. I don’t recall whether he stated this, or whether it was strongly implied, instead. Toward the very end of his life, Rawls wrote a book called, I think, “The Law of Nations” in which he attempted to use a similar device to construct some form of a “world order”. But I don’t think anyone took that latter work, which was really poorly argued and disorganized, very seriously.
Maybe we could do a Rawlsian thought experiment at the global level, though? Not– as Rawls had done in the Law of Nations, by considering the basic “negotiating unit” to be each nation, but taking it as being each person in the world…. If you had a real chance that, after the removal of the “veil of ignarance” you might indeed find yourself to be a Guatemalan subsistence farmer or a disabled Congolese child… then how would you order the world and its priorities?
I wonder how people in rich, secure western countries would respond when invited seriously to take part in such a thought experiment. I know Oxfam and similar organizations do things like dinners where people are randomly assigned a heaping plate, or a half-empty plate, or a plate with just a few grains of old rice on it, and then they use that to start talking about global economic inequalities…
But I think it’s probably still true that most westerners (a) don’t really like to think much about things like that, (b) don’t even know that much about the lives of people in low-income countries that they could start to really even imagine what it would be like to be one of them, and (c) might have at the back of their minds some version of the Calvinist view that people who have a lot of worldly goods somehow “deserve” to have them, while people who do not, somehow “deserve” not to.
.. Well, I realize I’m not coming to any answers here. But still, I think it’s really important as we approach the next phase of global affairs, to start thinking about what a world order truly based on the principle of human equality would or should look like. There are so many dimensions of this issue! Stay tuned…

25 thoughts on “On human equality”

  1. Helena,
    Thanks for your thoughts about applying Rawls’s model of distributive justice on an international level. Like you, I have some doubts about whether whether Rawls’s thought experiment really captures the reality of life for a gendered species like our own.
    But there is another part of Rawls’s theory of justice that I suspect is helpful in thinking about distributive justice on an international level – his idea of “minimax.” If I remember this rightly, the idea is that policies that affect the distribution of goods and opportunities will be just, only insofar as they provide the greatest advantage to those who are presently the least advantaged. In other words, it’s not enough that a rising tide should lift all boats, it should lift the most deeply mired boats the highest.
    I’ll bet that applying this principle to international trade policy, for example, would yield a different result than applying John Locke’s (or Rawls’s old friend Robert Nozick’s) principle of unfettered “free” trade.
    Best,
    Rebecca

  2. I don’t think the problem is how to devise a more fair and equitable system. That’s easy. The problem is how to enforce it against all of the people who do not want a more fair and equitable system. Even if you could redistribute all the wealth and start everyone in the world over again on an equal footing, how would you defend this newly egalitarian social order against all of the people who would try to turn it into something else more to their personal benefit?
    I don’t believe it is just a question of education and dialogue. There are many highly educated people with a clear understanding of the gulf between rich and poor and the reasons why it exists, who are quite determined to not only remain on the rich side, but to expand the gulf as much as possible. You can’t talk them out of it. I’ve tried. I have a libertarian friend with whom I’ve argued nearly every day for the past decade about the fallacies of “free market” economics and the harmful effects of an ever-increasing disparity of wealth. I know I’m wasting my breath, but it’s OK – so is he.
    There has to be some form of coercion, and there’s the rub. Coercion is an inherently unequal relationship. How do you use this unequal relationship to reduce inequality?

  3. There is no such thing as distriubutive justice that will ensure complete and total rquality. I think Rawls’ theories have been effectively debated by Judith Shklar and Bernard Williams who advocate something called the liberalism of cruelty. In this model, the sole function of government is to ensure that citizens suffer as little fear and cruelty in their daily lives as possible. Once this is done, then they will be free to pursue thei individual and natural-born talents–which often entail forms of inequality.

  4. Sorry for the re-post. Took care of the typos:
    There is no such thing as distributive justice that will ensure complete and total equality. I think Rawls’ theories have been effectively debated by Judith Shklar and Bernard Williams who advocate something called the liberalism of cruelty. In this model, the sole function of government is to ensure that citizens suffer as little fear and cruelty in their daily lives as possible. Once this is done, then they will be free to pursue their individual and natural-born talents–which often entail forms of inequality.

  6. The problem of enforcement is extremely serious. The last time this was tried we ended up with Stalinism. Okay, that’s a little unfair to Cobban and Rawls (who I haven’ read). But it is true that the Communists did try to enforce a kind of equality and ended up with a gulag and a police state.
    The current capitalist mess does foster growth and innovation. And the innovation and invention does eventually filter down. I don’t argue that filtering is adequate, but that it is important not to kill the goose that’s laying the Golden Egg.
    The Golden Egg I have in mind is the Industrial Revolution and now the Information Revolution. For some reason Northern England and the US have or had whatever it is that was necessary to generate these great transformations. Before about 1700, there was a great statis wherein the serfs and farmers did the same things on the same land for thousands and thousands of years. Maybe the Greeks and Roman governments came and went but serfdom and slavery lasted, what, ten thousand years? A hundred thousand?
    Think of it. You worked the same plot your grandparents did and that was the same plot your grandchildren would work. If we could achieve equality at the current level of some 5 to 8 thousand dollars per year at the cost of millenia of statis, would we want it? Probably not. Share the eggs, sure, but keep the goose healthy.
    Nowadays we do, on the one hand, have the capacity to blow up the whole world and broadcast endless reruns of Dukes of Hazzard; But we also have the internet and the possibility of people like Rawls analyzing the prospects for world equality. And the prospect for the future is that lifespans will get longer and prosperity will spread.

  7. The view of the human condition that you describe here, Charles… the sole function of government is to ensure that citizens suffer as little fear and cruelty in their daily lives as possible. Once this is done, then they will be free to pursue their individual and natural-born talents–which often entail forms of inequality… is a wonderful representative of all that is unsatisfactory– at both the logical and the human levels– about any view that considers the human individual to be somehow antecedent to society.
    How on earth do these citizens get raised, grow up, get educated, and find an economic and social milieu in which to pursue their “natural-born talnts” if not for the existence of a broader organized society? In fact, even to speak of “natural-born talents” in this way is to ignore the entire role that society as such plays in identifying and fostering such talents.
    How many potentially extremely talented mathematicians, musicians, poets, and philosophers die every day quite unrecognized in, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo purely because of the hunger, lawlessness and AIDS incidence there… not to mention the entire breakdown of their society?
    It is not that “men”, thought of as self-supporting, individualistic monads, later come together to form “socety”. The existing society is also all along, in a dialectical way, forming all the humans who survive into adulthood.
    But how, then, is “society” to be organized? Government plays one role here– and a more important one than libertarians are generally prepared to recognize. I chuckle every day when I think of libertarians from the Cato Institute or eslewhere traveling to conferences on airlines regulated by the FAA, along roads regulated by various federal and state bodies, riding up and down elevators inspected by local government inspectors, and pursuing their repetitive diatribes against the “intrusions” of government. Oh, and along they way there they communicate in a language that has been identified as the “national standard” by centuries of government-sponsored practice in whichever state it is they live in, and organize their weekweeks according to calendars organized by governments.
    If one’s only view of the role of government is to minimize fear and cruelty, that fails to capture 90% or more of what governments do that enables “normal, daily life” to happen. (It is also a rather bleak view of human existence.)
    But how, then, are governments at any level– local, state, federal, global– to be organized?
    I suppose I could consider the “liberalism of cruelty” idea if it were allied to the granting of a truly equal voice in world affairs to the disabled woman from Guatemala, the child soldier from Congo, or the dispossessed peasant in Burma. They, surely are the people who need the most protection against the fear and cruelty that dominates nearly every moment of their existence. If we truly believe in human equality, we who live in basically secure and rich western societies should surely care much more about the survival and wellbeing of those of our fellow-humans who live in very low-income and threatened societies than about our own.

  8. I would like to contribute properly to this discussion but there is not enought time. It must suffice for me to say that I don’t think that equality can be taken as the starting point of philosophical enquiry. Equality is the handmaiden of scarcity, isn’t it? And why would we want to accept scarcity as eternal?
    I have become convinced over the years that it is the concept of freedom that is crucial because freedom is at the heart of what it is to be human. The most concise statements of this idea are Karl Marx’s in the Manifesto (“a vast association of the whole nation… in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”) and the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (“Philosphers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it”).
    In terms of more contemprary philosophy, including various feminists and John Rawls, the philosophy of freedom is best expounded in my opinion in James Heartfield’s book, “The Death of the Subject Explained”. An excerpt of it is at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/heartfield-james.htm and Heartfield’s own site (where you can order the book) is at http://www.heartfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/. He has also done an Internet run-down of contemporary philosophers – find it for yourselves if you are interested.
    As I say, he takes on Rawls in the book and fairly well demolishes him, though in a sympathetic way.
    Heartfield’s razor is the philosophical “Subject” and I have come to follow him to that extent.

  9. Somehow it seems as if the debate thus far has spun off into an either / or sort of thing.
    Here are some thoughts:
    1. Regardless of what political system you have in place, there will always be self-serving people who elbow up to the top and step on others in the meantime. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
    2. Nonetheless, there are countries and time periods in which the discrepancies between rich and poor are less — and these times and places seem to come about when a more communitarian set of laws and policies are in place. To wit, just read this a.m. about how a Clinton policy has increased the number of U.S. children with health coverage, even as the total number of people without health coverage has decreased thanks to Mr. Bush.
    3. So it seems like it’s also possible to have a more humane / humanitarian view of international economic policies.
    Condemn me for moderation, if you will, but then enforcement isn’t such a problem.

  11. Helena: Those who propose the liberalism of cruelty, aka liberalism of fear, understand the situation much as you do. They do not, however, propose atheory of human nature as requisite for a politics that encourages a sense of equality that most would accept. BTW what do we mean by equality, anyway?
    This form of liberalism is pretty minimalistic in its approach. It assumes as little about human nature, religious or metaphysical systems or models as practicable. In this way, it is rather “pluralistic” in its understanding of the potential for many societies and cultures to form viable political institutions and forms of life.
    The virtue of such an approach is that it is existential in the snese that social and political problems are not solved from a grand template and imposed from the top down. Instead, problems are solved in situ, conforming this basic principle of decding on all issues from the persepctive of how they will contribute to or not to the fear that individuals within that society experience.
    As to the questions you have about the talented–I guess I was assuming that all have their talents; in this way we are all different and therefore unequal, at least from that persepctive. You have ascribed to me a view of “talent” from the Romantic notion of the “genius,” something I think has wreaked too much havoc in our own consumerist cults of personality. Call me an Emersonian, but I do have that rather quaint notion taht all have some form of “genius,” no matter how that might express itself in one’s life.

  12. Everyone has made good points. We can probably all agree that absolute equality is not the goal. This is really a straw man used by the capitalists to paint a picture of drab uniformity and lack of innovation, to which they can then contrast the wonders of individual achievement springing from “free enterprise.” It is certainly not equality of result we are after, and not complete equality of opportunity either. On the other hand, I do not accept the notion that individual freedom is the highest value. This is the libertarian line, although apparently certain Marxists have adopted it as well. In fact, complete individual freedom is a terrifying condition, and definitely not what most people want. We need a social structure, with multiple public institutions that encourage participation and provide incentives for individuals to pursue common goals. These institutions need to act as checks and balances on both public and private excess (and on each other), not with the goal of maintaining complete “equality,” but so that no one becomes too rich, powerful and unaccountable, and no one becomes too poor, weak and oppressed. Easy to say, hard to accomplish.

  13. JC wrote:
    “I do not accept the notion that individual freedom is the highest value. This is the libertarian line, although apparently certain Marxists have adopted it as well.”
    Like Marx, for example? (Since the examples given were form Marx himself).
    No, you are projecting the question back into the answer. If “the free development of each is the condition for the free deveolpment of all” then both “each” and “all”, within the “vast association” are properly treated.
    Marxism is dialectical. It deals in the unity of opposites. The main opposites are the human Subject and the Objective universe in which we live, but what makes us human is that we act on the universe and change it. The human Subject is both individual and collective, and the individual human consciousness is socially formed and not in any other way.
    Marxists are compelled to have a definition of freedom, unlike the libertarians you quote for whom it is an absolute and eternal value. Our definition is the same as Spinoza’s, which is: “The recognition of necessity”.
    In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx put it this way: “Human beings make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing”.
    We are not libertarians and we are also not liberals. We are revolutionaries. We intend to make the question of equality superfluous by doing away with scarcity. We are social: people are people because of each other. We will continue to be concerned with freedom, because free will, both individual and collective, is the essence of what it is to be human. In other words, we are humanists.

  14. It seems that most people who have taken part in the discussion so far think there is some contradiction between equality and liberty. But this is not the case, provided that you speak of equality of power, not only of distributed goods.
    Communists didn’t really try to obtain equality. They always distinguished themselves (who should have all power) and the others (who should have none). That’s not equality.
    If you think equality is something that should be given to you (and to other people), you will never have it. Nobody can give away power. It must always be taken. Which means changing different kinds of social and economical relations.
    Poor people can attain equality if organized in trade unions, citizens’ movements etc. And poor nations can attain equality if they get together and force the rich nations to give them better terms. This is usually quite tricky and work-demanding. But it has been done, sometimes.

  15. I believe that is the right tack to take–the distinction, if there is one between liberty and equality. On a simplistic level, it seems right to say that if we are equal then we are equally free. In practice, that gets set awry from the facts of socio-economic consitions. Ideally, of course, we all equal–but, agins, what does this mean? Equal in what way? By law? But that’s simply normative and often is not played and cannot be played out given various natural abilities, capacities, and so on. Juts some random, scattered thoughts to get the discussion started.

  16. I would also love to see this discussion take a few more turns, Charles, but I’m afraid my interventions so far have not had any stimulating effect. But since there are few, let me add another small stick to the pile.
    It may help to consider three rather than only two things. That is to say, to start with the Great French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. These have their echo in the formulation reduced to its bare bones by Lenin in the “3 sources and 3 component parts”, which again are reconstructed in the Oxford degree course of “PPE”. That is, Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
    There is no dichotomy here, but economics is relegated to a lesser position if it is solved, as it were, by an abundance (because if there can always be supply, the demand side becomes a matter of will, not compulsion). Philosophy, as Marx said in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, only explained the world, but the point is to change it, which is once again a matter of will. And liberty is concerned with the will, the free will.
    Therefore all these three terms resolve themselves without any destruction into the single question of free will, otherwise known as agency, sovereignty, liberty, freedom, The Subject, autonomy, and other terms of this kind. These are terms which are peculiar to human kind. They are unimaginable without the prior exitence of consciousness and discernment. They are inseparable from the moral nature of human beings. It is free will which creates the necxessity for morality. Free will is unavoidable and therefore morality is unavoidable.
    Where were we? Well, the connection between Helena’s term “Human Equality” and morality is not direct. It does exist but it is indirect, and can only be established by reference to free will.

  17. Several years ago, I was given a tour of the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas (purely voluntary, mind you). This is about as medieval a place as you are likely to find in the US – a great, gray fortress hulking like a dark cloud on the Kansas prairie. Perhaps its most famous inmate of recent years was Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement.
    I came away with several impressions, including (i) the penal system in the US has far more to do with retribution than rehabilitation, and (ii) there are some people whose personal liberty and freedom I definitely do not support.

  18. John C, the trouble with philosophy based on homespun, anecdotal ramblings is that it cannot be transacted in dialogue. It is solecism.
    Even a slight acquaintance with the philosophers of the past begins to afford us a vocabulary which can be used to construct a new dialogue.
    I wonder if you have heard of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian and inventor of the “panoptikon” jail and the corresponding vision of society?
    This is almost all I know about Bentham. My point is only that you seem to be a utilitarian. Are you?

  19. D, there is no requirement for you to read or respond to my anecdotal, homespun ramblings, if they do not meet your standards for acceptable dialogue. I must say that for a champion of the working class, you have a rather elitist approach to political discourse. Are you leading a revolution of the proletariat, or of the Oxford educated intellectuals?

  20. Hi JC, it wasn’t meant personally, but since you take it that way, let us proceed. What I’m saying is that it seems to be normal in the USA to affect historical ignorance and hold it as a virtue.
    Your response seems consistent with this trait. It blocks out dialogue. Your unique personal experiences can’t be challenged, even when they violate the vocabulary of history. How can a prison in Kansas be “medieval”? What can that possibly mean?
    It is the height of arrogance to expropriate the vocabulary of what little scholarship people may have, and devalue it to the point of meaninglessness. I deplore it as a form of cultural vandalism that is consistent with US imperialism. You make a virtue of vulgarity so that you can have the world on the unrestricted terms of your power, not even recognising scholarship, just like your president.
    Who do you think you are? Bertie Wooster?
    Jeremy Bentham was a London man as far as I know and not an Oxford man. I think his mummy is still in a glass case in London somewhere.

  21. OK, I can play that way if you want. You doctrinaire Marxists are like a religious cult. You follow a prophet whose teachings cannot be questioned. You interpret all new events in light of his past pronouncements. You have your sacred texts that all acolytes are expected to study, absorb, and to the extent possible, commit to memory. You have developed your own form of structured, stylized discourse, which includes the redefinition of commonly used words like “freedom” (“the recognition of necessity!”). You allocate status within the cult based on degree of indoctrination and ideological purity. You use these techniques to draw sharp distinctions between the few who are enlightened and the many who are deluded, which reinforces the bond of identity between cult members and imbues them with a sense of missionary purpose. Your goal is revolutionary change which will elevate human society to some higher plane of your imagination, presumably after all non-believers have been either converted or eliminated I don’t want any part of it.

  22. JC your blind anti-communist prejudice is leading you astray. It always will.
    Jeremy Bentham was not a communist, he was a utilitarian. He might have intended to create a cult, by having his body mummified and put in a glass case, but did not succeed, if that was indeed his intention.
    Bentham’s ideas are diametrically opposed to those of Karl Marx, for your information. Hence I asked you: Are you a utilitarian? But you never replied.

  23. D, I have no idea why you want to turn this into a discussion of Jeremy Bentham. At the moment, I am not interested in Jeremy Bentham, sorry. My loss, I’m sure. I’m not going to classify myself as “utilitarian” or otherwise. You can call me what you like.
    I really don’t want to go on in this way, and I regret taking the bait.
    Apologies to our hostess.

  24. JC, you wrote: “there are some people whose personal liberty and freedom I definitely do not support”.
    I suppose I am one of them.
    I suppose, if I am ever subjected to “extraordinary redition” to the US ghost-Gulag, you will only say “fiddle-de-dee, I’ll think about that tomorrow” and pass on the other side.
    Learning and morality are connected in the way I have described above. The pursuit of learning is a moral cause. Contempt of learning is a sure sign of a moral vacuum.

  25. Enter Mutlak
    Here is Wiki info on Gen.Mutlak. This Iraqi neo-Baathist seems to fit Cole’s description of Salih Mutlak.
    Anyway, the question is, how to explain the enthusiasm on developments like Mutlak’s arrival on the Iraqi political scene?
    One non-ideological explanation is spoiler-free discussion practice. Those who advocate narrative discussions without spoilers, believe that omitting critical pieces of information on the issues is somehow helpful to make the experience more exciting, even encourages people to think on their own.
    The problem is, presenting a complicated story in spoiler-free form is heavily confusing. In fact, spoiler omission is a typical black PR technique.
    So, any serious narrative discussion actually starts from taking a spoiler-free form, checking it for omitted spoilers and their restoration.
    The next step is to construct a consistent story summary which is actually based on spoilers with non-essential details omitted.
    Finally, we compare different versions of the same story with and without spoilers. This tells quite a lot on the methods used to trim the original story to the spoiler-free form.
    It is hard to imagine how to deal with sources like FP blog comments without proper spoiler analysis.

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