The moment of equal opportunity

The Moment of Equal Opportunity

The idea that equality of opportunity involves looking backwards is found explicitly in Rawls, who states: “fairness depends on underlying social conditions, such as fair opportunity, extending backward in time”. An example of this backwards-looking reasoning can be found in Janet Radcliffe Richards’ article “Equality of Opportunity”. Richards parodies the literature on equality of opportunity by considering the headmaster of a sought-after boys’ private school who is newly committed to the concept. After a moment’s reflection, however, the headmaster finds himself inexorably sliding down a slippery slope into straightforward equality of outcome. Richards describes the slide in four phases. In the first phase, the headmaster realizes that it is inconsistent with equality of opportunity to prevent girls from attending the school. In the second phase, he notes that he must also ensure that he selects only on academic ability, such that a particular cultural background is not a requirement of entry. In the third phase, he realises that applicants face an inequality of opportunity as a result of the unequal backgrounds they have experienced; so “the headmaster, although now rather puzzled, wonders about offering remedial classes, and starts to wrestle with counterfactuals about what the children would have been like if they had had each other’s backgrounds.” Fourth and finally, the hapless head is stymied:
He will not be left with this particular puzzle for long, however, since the critic will already have moved on to matters still more perplexing. Even equality of background could not give genuine equality of opportunity, since the children’s different genetic endowments would still leave them with unequal chances of success. This seems to imply that genuine equality of opportunity requires the admission of everybody – the equality of outcome to which the headmaster always thought equality of opportunity was opposed – or, since this is impossible, either closing down the school or admitting pupils by lot. Neither of these is anything like what he had in mind when he started off in pursuit of equal opportunities, but he can now see no escape. A similar reductio ad absurdum argument is set forward in Bernard Williams’ earlier article “The Idea of Equality”. “One might speculate,” Williams notes, about how far this movement of thought might go. The most conservative user of the notion of equality of opportunity is, if sincere, prepared to abstract the individual from some effects of his environment. We have seen that there is good reason to press this further, and to allow that the individuals whose opportunities are to be equal should be abstracted from more features of social and family background. Where should this stop? Should it even stop at the boundaries of heredity?

Perhaps the first thing to note about these two reductios is that the supposedly absurd resting-place at the end of each is in fact precisely what is argued for in much of the relevant literature. The headmaster is asked to “wrestle with counterfactuals about what the children would have been like if they had had each other’s backgrounds”, to notice that “the children’s different genetic endowments would still leave them with unequal chances of success”, and to conclude as a result that either places must be allocated by lot or the school must be closed. These requirements do not seem so absurd in the light of contemporary egalitarian philosophy. For example, Ronald Dworkin states: “Unfair differences are those traceable to genetic luck, to talents that make some people prosperous but are denied to others”, and advocates distribution not by lot but by clamshell. “We must not allow the distribution of resources at any moment to be endowment-sensitive, that is, to be affected by differences in ability”, he cautions. To take another example, Swift moves from the premise of equality of opportunity to the conclusion that “ ‘Family values’ set limits on how far opportunities should be equalised, but respecting those values does not require us to permit private or selective schools.” It seems that, if the headmaster is not to distribute places by lot, he must indeed close down his school. The impression one gets when considering these accounts of equality of opportunity is of lives severed into two halves, with what I call a Moment of Equal Opportunity, or MEO, separating one from the other. In the first half of an individual’s life, many things happen to her that unjustly make her different from her peers. As a foetus, she is unfairly formed with a particular set of genes, giving her particular propensities for particular talents. As a child, she is unfairly subjected to the influence of her parents, who add unjustly-varying degrees of advantage to her genetic endowments according to their inclination for, and skill at, such activities as reading bedtime stories, playing Mozart in the home, taking her to Shakespeare plays and asking her to count and name various everyday objects. As a schoolchild, she is unfairly benefited or harmed by the skills of her teachers, the resources of her school (which may be unfairly determined by the resources of her parents) and the influence of her peers. These benefits or harms repeat themselves as she develops an unfair advantage or disadvantage as regards attaining places in other schools, or perhaps at university.

At some point in this process, equality of opportunity occurs. It is common to argue that this point should occur at age 18, when applications for universities or jobs are submitted. Brighouse, for example, argues that education must give individuals equal opportunities at “the age of majority”.
Consider, for example, two people with similar merit (in the Rawlsian sense, where merit means talent plus effort plus inclination), similar family backgrounds and similar educations at eighteen years old: Jeremy and Jason. Both apply to an elite university, such as Oxford, whose admissions tutors are (we assume) making decisions based on equality of opportunity. As places are scarce, only Jeremy is accepted. Jason studies a similar course at another university, one which is less prestigious and which devotes less time to undergraduate tuition. Both work equally hard (in other words, both display the same amount of effort and inclination to work). Both achieve 2:1 degrees, and both apply for graduate jobs at leading companies in a particular field. Jeremy is more successful. Employers are impressed by his Oxford degree – not because they are wrongly prejudiced in favour of Oxford through something such as an old boy network, but because they believe that Oxford selects the best students in the first place, that it provides its students with a better education than other universities, and that its culture means that its students develop important skills such as confidence and initiative. In other words, employers prefer Oxford graduates because they believe that Oxford graduates are more likely to have qualities which legitimately and genuinely make better employees.

So, Jeremy gets a top graduate job at a leading company, while Jason gets a less prestigious position at a less prestigious company. Both work equally hard. Jeremy’s job develops his skills quickly. He is given important clients to work with, encouraged to try new things, sent on expensive training courses. Jason is also given opportunities to develop and sent on training courses, but his position and his company mean that he does not develop such impressive skills as Jeremy. In five years, each applies for a more senior position at another company. By this stage, Jeremy is the far better candidate. Not only does he have the advantages that his Oxford degree conferred upon him, he also now has a further advantage in terms of career experience, skills and the good name of a prestigious first employer. As a result, Jeremy gets the job. Jason has to wait until he is offered a less significant promotion at a less prestigious company. And here the process repeats itself. By the time they apply for their third jobs, Jason has no hope of competing with Jeremy: Jeremy’s CV is far more impressive, and the experience he has enjoyed and skills he has developed make him clearly the more competent candidate. By retirement, Jeremy has achieved a much higher position in their industry than has Jason, and has earned much more money. Jason is neither poor nor unsuccessful, but his career has not reached the stellar heights of Jeremy’s. This story is by no means unusual. It is the general pattern of career development that we see in many industries - including academia, as Morris Zapp notes with glee. But the point is not merely that this severance of a life into two halves, one before and one after the Moment of Equal Opportunity, does in fact occur. The point is that most advocates of equality of opportunity accept that it should occur. Despite the detailed burrowing into every aspect of an individual’s history that might undermine equality of opportunity (the bedtime stories, the trips to the theatre, the piano lessons), the assumption prevails that at some point the attempt to compensate for previous advantage should stop. We must ask, then, whether the final outcome and progress of Jeremy and Jason’s lives are consistent with justice and with equality of opportunity. unproblematic from the point of view of justice. I criticise these responses by arguing that Jeremy and Jason’s lives contain many features usually accepted as constitutive of, or contributing to, injustice. The responses in the second category agree that Jeremy and Jason’s lives violate equality of opportunity and are, in that respect, unjust. However, the problem with these responses is that equality of opportunity becomes extremely difficult to implement, since it fundamentally conflicts with other important values. Whether a theory fits into response type 1 or response type 2 depends on two things: the version of equality of opportunity it employs, and whether or not it endorses a Moment of Equal Opportunity.

On some theories of equality of opportunity, namely non-discrimination and careers open to talents, the increasing inequalities between Jeremy and Jason are unproblematic. However, most liberal egalitarian theorists advocate some more extensive version of equality of opportunity. According to more extensive theories the progress of Jeremy and Jason’s lives is incompatible with equality of opportunity. In other words, equality of opportunity cannot consistently be restricted to an MEO, but must be applied throughout a person’s life. However, it is not at all clear how equality of opportunity can be applied throughout a person’s life, since doing so poses serious problems of epistemology, efficiency and incentives, and leads to counter-intuitive results. Overall, my argument is that liberal egalitarian theories of equality of opportunity are inconsistent if they support an MEO and unrealisable if they do not.

Equality of opportunity is meant to remedy, not legitimate, inequalities arising from “chance contingencies” that develop the talents of some while leaving those of others unrealised. Rawls does not limit the scope of equality of opportunity to the time before an MEO, but heralds it as a tool to mitigate the ongoing injustices of chance and “social circumstances”, such as winning or losing in early competitions. Rawls extends his idea that the principles of justice, including equality of opportunity, exist to adjust the unfair outcomes of social processes in Political Liberalism. Social processes, he notes, favour “an oligopolistic configuration of accumulations that succeeds in maintaining unjustified inequalities and restrictions on fair opportunity.

Source: Dr Clare Chambers, Each outcome is another opportunity, Dept of Intl Relation, Social Justice working papers, Oxford Univ Sept 2006


One email dated Friday, 16 June, is from Michele Ballarin, chief executive of Select Armor - a US military firm based in Virginia. Ballarin's email was sent to a number of individuals including Chris Farina of the Florida-based military company ATS Worldwide.