Fair Equality of Opportunity

Taking equality seriously means that we ought to consider the ways in which persons are not only unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged from the start – e.g., through genetic inheritance, wealth, or a parent’s educational background – but also how opportunities and rewards that result from these basic inequalities are later exacerbated in the distribution of goods and opportunities. The basic point of equality as a normative principle is not that everyone have similar things or achieve similar outcomes, that would be undesirable both for reasons having to do with individual liberty as well as social need.

This paper discusses the adequacy Rawls' theory of justice as a tool for racial justice. It is argued that critics like Charles W Mills fail to appreciate the both the insights and limits of the Rawlsian framework. The paper has two main parts spread out over several different sections. The first is concerned with whether the Rawlsian framework suffices to prevent racial injustice. It is argued that there are reasons to doubt whether it does. The second part is concerned with whether a Rawlsian framework has the resources to rectify past racial injustice. It is argued that it has more resources to do this than Mills allows. This second part of the paper centers on two Rawlsian ideas: ideal theory and the fair equality of opportunity (FEO) principle. It is argued that ideal theory is essential for the kind of rectificatory work that Mills wants nonideal theory to do, and that where there is a socioeconomic legacy of past injustice, it is hard to see how FEO could be implemented if it did no rectificatory work, a result which means that there is less need to turn to nonideal theory at all.

In the past 40 years, disability scholars have emphasized the extent to which disadvantages suffered by people with disabilities are the result of social conditions inhospitable to their atypical bodies – developing what has come to be called a ‘social model’ of disability.  In this paper, we will argue that the contribution of social factors to disability can play a significant role in theorizing about justice: not in making all disability-related disadvantages ipso-facto unjust, but rather in giving the elimination or mitigation of many of those disadvantages higher priority in a just society. We will develop this claim in terms of a distinction thought by some political philosophers to determine the priority of eliminating or reducing a given inequality. Many theorists, following Rawls, hold that the reason why, e.g., class inequality is particularly objectionable is that inequalities due to class background are in some important sense social rather than natural. This, they think, explains the particular priority class inequalities have as a matter of equal opportunity. We argue that there is as yet no adequate account of this distinction; proceed to provide one, and argue that many disability-related inequalities are, relevantly, ‘social’, rather than ‘natural’, and therefore that addressing them should be prioritized under equal opportunity.

In this paper I argue that all citizens of a just society, regardless of their age, gender or occupation, should have a genuine access to (free) higher education. This is not because education is a public good that benefits the entire society, but because denying any person the genuine right to education is to deny him the moral status as an equal citizen.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed

In this article I examine two basic questions: first, what constitutes a gifted person, and secondly, is there justification in making special educational provision for gifted children, where special provision involves spending more on their education than on the education of ‘normal’ children? I consider a hypothetical case for allocating extra resources for the gifted, and argue that gifted children are generally denied
educational justice if they fail to receive an education that adequately challenges
them. I further argue that an adequately challenging education is essential to human
flourishing, but that most children can be adequately challenged in schools in ways
that promote flourishing without doing so at the expense of other children.

This paper compares three accounts of distributive justice in health and, more specifically, healthcare. I discuss two accounts—Norman Daniels' fair equality of opportunity for health and Shlomi Segall's luck-prioritarian equity in health—and contrast them with a sufficientarian account based on sufficiency of capabilities. The discussion highlights some important theoretical differences and similarities among the three accounts. The focus, however, is on the practical implications of each account in three hypothetical cases: synthesized growth hormone for short children, forms of compensation for paraplegics, and reconstructive breast surgery versus cosmetic breast enhancement. My aim is to show that by replacing egalitarian concerns with sufficiency and by focusing on capabilities (rather than opportunities), it is possible to provide a more reasonable and justifiable account of justice in healthcare.

This paper uses and adapts John Rawls’ writings on justice in order to argue that past injustice can change what publicly counts as justice today. This differs from forward-looking approaches based on alleviating prospective disadvantage and backwards-looking historical entitlement approaches. In different contexts, Rawls’ own concern for what he calls the ‘social bases of self-respect’ may require the public endorsement of different principles of justice or a different specification of justice. Rawls’ difference principle focuses on the worst-off group defined in terms of class. A historicized difference principle is concerned with the relative standing of racial, gender, and other historically stigmatized groups. This assures group members that they receive fair treatment. It disincentivizes attempts to manipulate justice to a group’s advantage. Similarly, Rawls thinks providing one package of basic liberties to all citizens signals respect. However, indigenous peoples have often been forcibly coerced into being individual citizens. Given this history of disrespect, signaling respect could require recognizing indigenous self-government rights. Assurance requires respecting indigenous peoples as peoples, as in Rawls’ law of peoples, and disincentivizing attempts to make them into mere citizens. What counts as justice can change through past injustice, guided by forward-looking considerations of self-respect and public assurance.

This is the penultimate version of a piece that was published as: Timothy Waligore, "Rawls, Self-Respect, and Assurance: How Past Injustice Changes What Publicly Counts as Justice," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2016): 42-66. An earlier, slightly longer version of this piece is elsewhere on this webpage.

Distributive justice is a central focus of modern political philosophy. Rawls (1971) pioneers a famous approach in which principles chosen to regulate the basic structure are just if they can be endorsed by impartial individuals from behind a “veil of ignorance.” This paper attempts to experimentally determine the income distributions individuals will select from “behind the veil.” While prior experiments have been concerned primarily with only the difference principle and utilitarianism, our experiment investigates a more complete reading of Rawls, taking into account Rawls’ other principle, fair equality of opportunity. We find little support for the Difference Principle, but uncover that the consensus from behind the veil is nonetheless structured and exhibits a lexicographic ordering.

Genetic enhancement represents an improvement of human abilities and talents, giving those who are thus enhanced a competitive advantage over others. If genetic enhancement technologies are privately funded and only a small group of wealthy people has access to them, their competitive advantage might be further increased, and the existing social, economic and political inequalities might be increased as well. I discuss Baccarini's regulation proposal according to which genetic enhancement can remain privately funded and (at least for some time) accessible only to a small group of people, provided that the benefits of their enhancement (e.g. increased productivity, better health care) are distributed is accordance with the lax difference principle (i.e. to the greatest reasonable advantage of the worst-off citizens). I have some doubts regarding this proposal. Namely, I argue that there are other more important principles (i.e. the principle of equal liberty and the principle of fair equality of opportunity) that have lexical priority over the difference principle, and offer several arguments supporting this claim. In the rest of the paper I argue that privately funded genetic enhancement, available only to a small number of wealthy citizens, can lead to the violation of both the principle of equal liberty and the principle of fair equality of opportunity. It should therefore be replaced with publicly funded genetic enhancement available to all citizens.

Is the family subject to principles of justice? In "A Theory of Justice", John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the, "basic institutions of society", to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity, (the first part of the Difference Principle, Rawls' second principle of justice), he abandons the priority of justice. I also argue that he is right to do so.

The central argument is simple. As Rawls admits, what family one is raised by profoundly affects one's life chances: a child raised by a family has far greater life chances on every dimension than one raised in a poorer family that may lack books, education, and time to give the child attention. But the prevailing family arrangements in the industrialized West, assigning children to be raised by their biological parents, is guaranteed to perpetuate this injustice. While Rawls says an unjust institution in the basic structure of society, in which he includes the family, must be, "reformed or abolished," he refrains from calling for the reform or abolition of the family. We must simply work around it to compensate for the injustices he admits it involves. And this despite the fact that alternative arrangements involving communal child-rearing (Plato) or assigning children to those best qualified to raise them (Rousseau) are common in the philosophical literature. Moreover, the practice of having children raised by their biological parents is a relatively recent one, at least in the West, where, before the late 18th century, fostering-out or apprenticeship arrangements were normal and expected for both rich and poor for centuries.

Much of the paper is devoted to fine-grained textual analysis of Rawls' attempts to avoid the devastating implications of this argument for his theory of justice -- much of which are stated only in the original edition of "A Theory of Justice" and simply deleted, without substitution by anything better, in the second edition. In the end, Rawls has no way out. He cannot keep the priority of justice, fair equality of opportunity, and the monogamous family in which children are raised by their biological parents. As he admits, these are mutually inconsistent.

In the final part of the paper, I argue that Rawls should give up on the priority of justice. While child-rearing by the biological parents is a historical anomaly, in the real modern world it would be politically unfeasible to institute Platonic, Rousseauean, or similar legislation that purportedly assigned children to those best able to raise them, regardless of biological relationship. Since Rawls is committed to principles of political stability and feasibility, as he should be, and since ought implies can, such proposals are off the table. I concur with Rawls that we must work around this injustice, even those there are more just arrangements available in principle. But the cost of this -- less high than Rawls suggests -- is abandoning the principle of the priority of justice. Justice is one of a number of considerations that we must or may balance in deciding on the best attainable social relations. It is not a trump. However, this comes a great cost for Rawls: he must also abandon the lexical ordering of principles of justice or, in general, right or good principles of social order, in favor of the messy intuitionist balancing that his theory is designed to avoid.

One feature of the paper that is worth independent attention is a discussion of Marx's rejection of justice in the Critique of the Gotha Program, which I explicate, and urge, without adopting it, that it has a great deal more force than is widely understood.

[Abstract in English] This paper develops a normative model for the obligation of continued access to an investigational medicine towards research subjects from the perspective of social or distributive justice inspired in the theory of justice of John Rawls. I call this the democratic reciprocity model. The original idea of the democratic reciprocity model is to claim that the obligation of continued access correlates with the right to health. Thus, within the Rawlsian framework, I argues that the moral reasons giving weight to the obligation of continued access are, indirectly, the principle of fair equality of opportunity and, directly, the duty of justice and/or the principle of fairness that apply to the members of a society understood as a system of social cooperation. #########################[Resumen en español] En este trabajo desarrollo un modelo normativo sobre la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso hacia los sujetos de investigación desde la perspectiva de la justicia social o distributiva, inspirado en la teoría de la justicia de John Rawls. Llamo a esto, el modelo de reciprocidad democrática. La idea original del modelo de reciprocidad democrática es defender que la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso tiene como derecho correlativo el derecho a la salud. Así, dentro del marco rawlsiano, argumento que las razones morales que dan peso a la obligación de continuidad de tratamiento beneficioso son, indirectamente, el principio de igualdad equitativa de oportunidades y, directamente, el derecho de justicia y/o el principio de equidad que se aplican a los miembros de una sociedad entendida como un sistema de cooperación social.

Leslie Stephen's "Social Equality" is a fascinating prefiguration of some of the central themes of 20th and 21st century egalitarian thought, with interesting connections to the work of Rawls, Scanlon, Dworkin, Barry and Cohen. Stephen's essay is particularly striking for its vivid and insightful treatment of (a) social equality and (b) social mobility and equality of opportunity.