Opportunity

The idea of opportunity in relationship to the power structure concerns its distribution. If some people have greater opportunities than others to [Page 459]secure the positions they desire, to gain wealth or political office, then they will obviously be in a stronger position to gain greater power. However, it is also clear that if everyone had the same opportunities in life this would not necessarily lead either to equality in final outcomes or to equality of power. Some people might make the best use of their opportunities while others waste theirs.

Equality of opportunity is often taken to mean equality of opportunity before the law. In other words, no positions in society can be closed to some people for irrelevant reasons. Of course, for many positions certain qualifications are needed. Those without medical degrees will not be considered for employment as hospital doctors; often advertisements will specify certain skills or educational attainment required if the applicant is to be considered for the job. Irrelevant considerations in modern times would be the applicant's gender (for most positions; sometimes this might be considered pertinent), race, caste, or social background. For many egalitarians, however, equal opportunity simply specified in legal terms is not enough. We need to equalize opportunities more broadly. But measuring the chance that people have to make use of their opportunities and whether they really have them is problematic.

It might be argued, for example, that one's opportunities are directly related to one's ableness, as Peter Morriss defines the term. Giving someone the opportunity to apply for a given job—sending them the application form, for example—is not much of an opportunity if they do not have the relevant qualifications. Or, to take Morriss's examples, giving someone a library card does not give them the opportunity to read if they have never been taught to read, any more than does handing a blind person one's reading glasses. On this account opportunity is equivalent not only to the conditions of the possibility but also the ability to make use of those conditions. Ability plus the conditions is (roughly) what Morriss means by ableness. This approach implies that the equalization of opportunities requires the development of people's capacities and abilities.

But note how strong Morriss's argument is. We might think that ensuring that every child goes to school and participates in a reading program will entail that all learn to read. Nevertheless, some will be advantaged because their home has many books and their parents encourage them to read. They will have greater opportunities. This implies that children need to be treated unequally at school for them to have equal opportunities to learn to read. Further, if some are genetically less able to read (or play sports) they will not have had equal opportunities unless, somehow, they attain the same outcomes as those with more ability, because the measure of true opportunity on this account is being able to get the same outcome. This seems too strong an account of opportunity. It might be that in order to comprehend equality of opportunity we should not examine the attainments of two people, but rather sets of people. After all, the main idea behind equality of opportunity is that each person should be given the same chance of succeeding, not that all should equally succeed. Two people of equal initial abilities might be given equal opportunities to learn some skill, but one works hard whereas the other does not. Their attainments are not equal, but they did have the same opportunity for attainment. Furthermore, we might think that two people with different abilities had the same opportunities as long as one was given the chance to excel at what that one did well, whereas the other was given the opportunity to shine in his or her own domain of ability. We can probably only examine equality of opportunity in this sense across classes or types of people. This is what John Roemer attempts to measure with his equality of opportunity metric.

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