Each outcome is another opportunity

Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) Vol. 8 No. 4 (2009).

This paper introduces the concept of a Moment of Equal Opportunity (MEO): a point in an individual’s life at which equal opportunity must be applied and after which it need not. The concept of equal opportunity takes many forms, and not all employ an MEO. However, the more egalitarian a theory of equal opportunity is, the more likely it is to use an MEO. The paper discusses various theories of equal opportunity and argues that those that employ an MEO are problematic. Unjust inequalities, those that motivate the use of equal opportunity, occur throughout peoples’ lives and thus go unrectified after an MEO. However, it is not possible to abandon the MEO approach and apply more egalitarian versions of equal opportunity throughout a person’s life since doing so entails problems of epistemology, efficiency, incentives and counter-intuitive results. The paper thus argues that liberal egalitarian theories of equality of opportunity are inconsistent if they support an MEO and unrealisable if they do not.

You can read this paper here.