Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s interesting criticisms of the ideal of equality of opportunity for welfare provide a welcome occasion for rethinking the requirements of egalitarian distributive justice.1 In the essay he criticizes I had proposed that insofar as we think distributive justice requires equality of any sort, we should conceive of distributive equality as equal opportunity provision. Roughly put, my suggestion was that equality of opportunity for welfare obtains among a group of people when all would have the same expected welfare over (...) the course of their lives if each behaved as prudently as it would be reasonable to expect her to behave. My specific proposal was more demanding, holding that when an age cohort reaches the onset of responsible adulthood, they enjoy equal opportunity for welfare when for each of them, the best sequence of choices that it would be reasonable to expect the person to follow would yield the same expected welfare for all, the second-best sequence of choices would also yield the same expected welfare for all, and so on through the array of lifetime choice sequences each faces. (In the jargon of my 1989 essay, equal opportunity for welfare obtains when everyone faces effectively equivalent sets of life options.). (shrink)

According to John Rawls, "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions."1 Like Gaul, justice is tripartite. Rawls affirms an Equal Liberty Principle that guarantees equal basic or constitutional liberties for all citizens and a Difference Principle that requires inequalities in the distribution of certain social and economic benefits, the primary social goods, to be set so that the long-term holdings of primary social goods are maximized for the citizens whose holdings are least. Sandwiched between these two principles is a (...) Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, which has stimulated much less commentary.2 Yet this Principle is plausible, controversial, and has radical implications for the design of social policy and legislation in modern democracies. This essay assesses Fair Equality of Opportunity and offers reasons for rejecting it. (shrink)

This paper is an engagement with Equality by John Baker, Kathleen Lynch, Judy Walsh and Sara Cantillon. It identifies a dilemma for educational egalitarians, which arises within their theory of equality, arguing that sometimes there may be a conflict between advancing equality of opportunity and providing equality of respect and recognition, and equality of love care and solidarity. It argues that the latter values may have more weight in deciding what to do than traditional educational egalitarians have usually thought.

What kinds of principles of justice should a cosmopolitan support? In recent years some have argued that a cosmopolitan should endorse a Global Difference Principle. It has also been suggested that a cosmopolitan should support a Principle of Global Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I examine how compelling these two suggestions are. I argue against a Global Difference Principle, but for an alternative Needs-Based Minimum Floor Principle (where these are not co-extensive, as I explain). Though I support a negative (...) version of the Global Equality of Opportunity Principle, I argue that a more positive version of the ideal remains elusive. (shrink)

All conceptions of equal opportunity draw on some distinction between morally justified and unjustified inequalities. We discuss how this distinction varies across a range of philosophical positions. We find that these positions often advance equality of opportunity in tandem with distributive principles based on merit, desert, consequentialist criteria or individuals' responsibility for outcomes. The result of this amalgam of principles is a festering controversy that unnecessarily diminishes the widespread acceptability of opportunity concerns. We therefore propose to restore the conceptual separation (...) of opportunity principles concerning unjustified inequalities from distributive principles concerning justifiable inequalities. On this view, equal opportunity implies that that morally irrelevant factors should engender no differences in individuals' attainment, while remaining silent on inequalities due to morally relevant factors. We examine this idea by introducing the principle of ‘opportunity dominance' and explore in a simple application to what extent this principle may help us arbitrate between opposing distributive principles. We also compare this principle to the selection rules developed by John Roemer and Dirk Van de Gaer. Footnotes1 We thank Brian Barry, Ken Binmore, Alex Brown, Jerry Cohen, Marc Fleurbaey, Dirk Van de Gaer, Jeroen Knijff, Peter Postl, John Roemer, Robert van der Veen, Peter Vallentyne, Jo Wolff and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Analytical Philosophy National Postgraduate Conference in Reading, the Workshop on Equal Opportunity at the University of Bayreuth, the Political Theory Seminar at Yale University, the Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare at Caltech, and the Economics Seminar at London Metropolitan University. We thank the participants of these conferences for their comments. Alex Voorhoeve's research was supported by the Dr Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds, the Bisschoffsheim Stichting, the Radboudstichting Wetenschappelijk Onderwijsfonds, the UCL Graduate School and the AHRB. Matthias Hild acknowledges research support by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (California). (shrink)

One of the central theses of egalitarian liberals in the domain of distributive justice is that talented individuals should not be allowed to keep their entire market-income even if it flows solely from their greater abilities. This claim is usually supported by one of several arguments or some mixture of them, but in the present paper, I want to concentrate on the version that invokes equality of opportunity as its starting point. Namely, it is claimed that every human being should (...) enjoy an equal starting point in the life-race but that this is not secured insofar as some have greater natural talents than others. Therefore, egalitarians hold that results that arise from such an unfair situation are unjust and should be corrected by a redistributive taxation. I want to criticize this argument by hoping to show that it presupposes an untenable view about identity of persons. (shrink)

This study is concerned with john R0emer’s Equality of Opportunity} I argue that his theory is committed to compatibilism but that one of its central claims is plausible only within a libertarian view on the free-will problem. Thus Roemer’s theory is troubled by a deep structural inco— herence and should be rejected as an account of equality of opportunity? Let me briefly introduce some background to Roemer’s theory. Contemporary egalitarians face two major challenges: first, they need..

The lexical priority of fair equality of opportunity in John Rawls’s justice as fairness, which has been sharply criticized by Larry Alexander and Richard Arneson among others, is left almost entirely undefended in Rawls’s works. I argue here that this priority rule can be successfully defended against its critics despite Rawls’s own doubts about it. Using the few textual clues he provides, I speculatively reconstruct his defense of this rule, showing that it can be grounded on our interest in self-realization (...) through work. This reconstructed defense makes liberal use of concepts already present in A Theory of Justice , including the Aristotelian Principle (which motivates the achievement of increasing virtuosity) and the Humboldtian concept of social union (which provides the context for the development of such virtuosity). I also show that this commitment to self-realization, far from violating the priority of right in Rawls’s theory, stems directly from his underlying commitment to autonomy, which is the very foundation of the moral law in his doctrine of right. The reconstituted defense of this priority rule not only strengthens the case for justice as fairness but also has important and controversial implications for public policy. (shrink)