Essays on Equality of Opportunity

Equality of opportunity is a principle of justice that is built on two fundamental ideas. On the one hand, outcome dierences across individuals are unacceptable if they are rooted in factors that are beyond individual control. Examples of such circumstance characteristics are the biological sex, race, and the socio-economic status of one’s parents. On the other hand, if individual outcomes were the result of eort, proponents of an equal-opportunity ethic would accept outcome dierences across individuals as fair.