Is Equality of Opportunity Really Necessary to Achieve Social Justice?

Abstract

The principle of equal opportunity, although politically attractive, is theoretically unstable as it is extremely difficult to avoid certain ambiguities in its central concepts. It is disputed whether the principle should ensure a competition of “positions open to all” or more substantive requirements to guarantee “equal chances of success” for those with similar talents. At the theoretical level it has been objected that equality of opportunity is unnecessary to achieve a fair distribution. Moreover, it has been criticized that, in any case, a principle regulating opportunities and access to certain goods is insufficient. In this paper I respond to these objections in three parts. Firstly, I identify what might be considered the dominant egalitarian conception, “luck egalitarianism”, which requires to consider only those choices that people can see as their own and to compensate all other circumstances that can be conceived as arbitrary and unfair. Secondly, I reconstruct the main objection that there is no need to establish a criterion for distinguishing choices from circumstances. In the third, I will argue that the principle can be defended by appealing to what is considered an underlying normative idea of Rawlsian theory of justice: the basis of self-respect. This idea allows us to make explicit the role of the moral capacities of a person who conceives herself as a citizen of a just society.