Your alternative would be to think an aristocratic or meritocratic principle is true. (It's either equal or unequal, right?)
I wouldn't use those terms, since they bring in all kinds of unnecessary connotations. I would say the opposite of the egalitarian principle is the non-egalitarian principle. I was thinking less along the lines of nobles/commoners and more along the lines of my children/other people's children. I find the idea (that I think the egalitarian principle entails) that I have as much obligation to perfect strangers as to my wife to be extremely counter-intuitive.
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
I don't consider the Divine Right of Crowds ('human rights', or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days) to be any less silly than those 'theological relics'.
Meritocracy in some form I believe has been advocated by some utilitarians. People with Oxford degrees get 10 votes. Cambridge 9. Down to the LSE with 2 votes and the common ignorant unlettered herd 1 vote...
This is kind of an epistemocratic voting regime which some think might lead to better outcomes. Alas, no one has been game to try get such laws up. There is little evidence that an electorate of PhDs is any less daft/ignorant/clueless/idle/indifferent on matters outside their specialty than the general public.
This part isn't really relevant to what I'm talking about, since I'm not discussing equal weight in decision-making, but equal weight in a social welfare function. My infant son's interests are one of my greatest concerns, but he currently has about zero say in family decision-making.
From a legal rights perspective, egalitarianism is surely correct. Equal treatment before the law seems a lot easier to defend than unequal treatment.
Equal treatment before the law does not necessarily mean that individuals interests are weighted equally. When was the last time you heard of jurors on a rape trial trying to figure out exactly how much utility the rapist got so they could properly combine that with the disutility of the victim?
Divine Right of Crowds
Of course what "the cool kids" are actually talking about is more like a Divine Right of People; it's got nothing to do with treating people differently when there's a mass of them. And of course adding the word "divine" is nothing more than a handy way of making it sound sillier than it otherwise would (whereas in "Divine Right of Kings" it is a word with an actual meaning; the power of kings was literally thought to be of divine origin).
So, removing some of the spin, what you're apparently saying is ...
Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis
-- Paul Graham
-- Doug Henwood
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:
Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.
So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:
What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?
With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)
(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)