Lawrence:

I take your point. Of course any Rawlsian would (quite rightly, I think) insist that if the 'clerisy' were to be the beneficiaries of economic inequities, then there would have to be fair and open competition for membership in this class. And that does raise a special problem, for exactly the reason you suggest - how would one go about testing people to see who had possession of the requisite talents before a system of privilege was already in place?

Still, even if one can imagine a future state of affairs in which sufficient strides have been made in child psychology (or perhaps even behavioral genetics or neuroscience) to allow for a solution to this latter problem, I still find it hard to anticipate what the Rawlsian line would be about the relevant type of inequity.