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by robertlagrant
1271 days ago
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> - If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity" Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity". I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated. That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome. Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much. |
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> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person
Well, a couple of things about that:
- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination
- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.
> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.
Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?
Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:
- a vindictive immigration policy
- a racist carceral system
- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime
- a transphobic... everything
Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.