Topics Justice

Question Egalitarian principles suggest that it is important to provide equal opportunities for all. Does this mean that all countries should be let into the EU on the basis of equal opportunities rather than on merit, or that every continent should get an equal number of football teams into the World Cup despite some continents clearly displaying a higher standard of football?

Accepted:
October 18, 2005

Comments

I don't understand this question. To say that there is equal opportunity doesn't imply that one can't make distinctions based upon "merit".

When we’re attracted to a principle of equality of opportunity, we’re often moved by the thought that everyone should have the same chance to gain access to the good things of life. Of course, if people blow their chances, then they have no one to blame but themselves; but they might reasonably complain if their access to the good things of life is due to factors over which they have no control.

But what, then, about my access to the NBA? I’m 5' 2", and while not entirely graceless, I’m not exactly the picture of athleticism. Is it unfair that the NBA excludes me from its ranks? It’s surely not my fault that I have the height that I have. So has the NBA violated some right that I have to equal opportunity?

The reasoning here, of course, goes much too quickly.

It seems entirely appropriate that access to jobs is determined by one’s ability to do the job well (even if one’s ability to do a particular job is due to factors outside of one’s own control). We wouldn’t want surgeons or even basketball players to be incompetent, since our lives or the quality of our lives depends on the competence of others. Since we all benefit from having competent people in positions on which the quality of our own life depends, it is reasonable for us all to agree to have access to these positions depend on skill. And so we tend to understand our right to an equality of opportunity to certain jobs as compatible with discrimination on the basis of skill, though not on the basis of attributes like skin color that have nothing to do with skill. (The fairness of various principles of access to the EU or to the World Cup might be understood in a similar way.)

But what about access to the good things in life? In our society, access to certain jobs and access to the good things of life are not unrelated. Certain jobs just are more rewarding financially, intellectually, emotionally, and socially than others. There’s nothing to be done about the intrinsic rewards of different jobs, but what about the extrinsic rewards– what, for example, about compensation? Is it fair that different levels of compensation are associated with different jobs? Is it fair that access to essentials like health care is linked to access to different jobs? Here’s where you get real disagreement among philosophers about the implications of our commitment to a principle of equality of opportunity.