From Justice as Fairness:
“[T]hose who have the same level of talent and ability and
the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of
success regardless of their social class of origin.” (p. 44.)
In looking to the concrete policy prescriptions that follow
from this statement of Rawls of his principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity,
I am going to make a simplifying assumption. I will take this passage pretty much on face value. That is, if other
passages in the Rawls corpus, or implications of the Rawls’s larger theory can
be argued to be incompatible with the natural reading of this passage, I am
going to turn away from them. I do not gainsay the value of careful Rawls
exegesis. Here, however, my interest is in the implications of the principle
that appears to be set out in this passage of the 1985 book. It has its own inherent appeal, an appeal
that I think is not diminished if its concrete policy implications turn out to
be radical.
What would be required for a child born on a Pine Ridge
Reservation of South Dakota to have the same prospects of becoming president of
the US, or a Calech mathematician, or a prima donna soprano as a child born
with the same genetic endowment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? I concentrate on elite levels of talent, even
though the genetics may well be rare, because it is the case that most
dramatically shows how radical is this formulation of fair equality of opportunity.
Policy implications begin before our genetically matched
individuals are even born. The Park Avenue baby has a much lower probability than
the baby of Pine Ridge of prenatal and natal exposure to injury, toxins, and
malnutrition. Universal and improved health care, safer roads, and more
stringent vehicle inspection in South Dakota would shrink this gap, but only
much broader anti-poverty measures could make it disappear.
The cost of giving the Pine Ridge baby the same prospects through
birth as the Park Avenue baby are, however, dwarfed by what will be required to
keep those prospects equal through the pre-school and school years: early
childhood programs, more and better trained teachers, an Upper East Side range
of extracurriculars would be the start, but only the start.
The gap cannot be entirely eliminated in any foreseeable
future, but life prospects could be dramatically improved in Pine Ridge and the
many other communities where factors completely extraneous to talent, ability,
and willingness to work are now the dominant life shapers.
It would be very
expensive. Fair equality of opportunity as so formulated is indeed radical, but
shouldn’t those prospects nominally based on merit be a matter of fair
competitions, and not class biased from the outset?
Interesting--seems to me that the radicalism of the statement depends on how strongly he meant "should." I had always taken this as the highly uncontroversial claim that, ceteris paribus, it would be better if everyone had equality of opportunity. And I can't think of anyone who would argue with that, progressive, conservative, or otherwise, since it's a statement of values but doesn't yet engage in tradeoffs against other values.
ReplyDeleteWhen combined with Rawls's other views, I do think the concrete policy prescriptions would be along the lines you suggest, with much more public spending to create equality of opportunity. I personally suspect it would be worthwhile as an investment as well. But I could see an interlocutor reasonably disagreeing with the policy implications, even if they agree with that equality of opportunity is abstractly desirable.
I suppose the strongest take on Rawls's statement would be that equality of opportunity is so desirable that rich kids should be actively prevented from being the beneficiaries of certain kinds of parental investment. This might be socially optimal in some cases--does all that SAT tutoring really do any good?--although it strikes me as a bad idea.
But ultimately, most of what I know about Rawls is what you taught me, so I defer to you on whether these speculative claims are right!