Equality of Opportunity 1

Some people are against equality of opportunity. Most people, however, seem to take it for granted that equality of opportunity is a Good Thing we should be aiming for, and that our only problem lies in achieving it. True equality of opportunity must therefore involve special remedial treatments, or perhaps even, eventually, genetic engineering. Before any possibility arises of implementing equality of opportunity, we need a description of what would count as having achieved it. That is the first problem. The ideas that propel the main descent, in contrast, represent irre- ducibly different kinds of standard, compatible with each other, which introduce equality in different ways and imply different interpretations of opportunity, and whose confusion turns all practical discussions of equal opportunity into convoluted fallacies of equivocation. The whole appearance of an ideal of equal opportunity is produced by a series of intellectual slips into which the serpent has, appropriately, beguiled us.