EDITORIALS & ARTICLES
Equality of opportunity. (UPSC CSE Mains 2020 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- Equality of opportunity is an extremely attractive idea that is concerned with what is described as the starting point in life. The implication is that equality requires that all individuals begin from a level playing field. However, the consequences of this need not be egalitarian at all. Precisely because everyone started equally, unequal outcomes are acceptable and legitimized. This inequality would then be explained in terms of differing natural talents, ability to work hard or even luck.
- Constructed like this, it seems that equality of opportunity provides an equal opportunity to compete in a system that remains hierarchical. If so, then it does not appear to be a substantially egalitarian principle. Equality of opportunity, thus, points to an inegalitarian society, albeit based on the exalted ideal of merit. This idea rests itself on the distinction between nature and convention, the argument being that distinctions that emerge on the basis of different natural qualities like talents, skills, hard work and so on are morally defensible. However, differences that emerge out of conventions or socially created differences like poverty, homelessness are not. The fact, however, is that it is a specific societal predilection that makes a natural distinction like beauty or intelligence a relevant ground for making distinctions in society. Thus, we see that the distinction between nature and convention is not as clear-cut as egalitarians imply.
- Equality of opportunity is institutionalized through the acceptance of keeping careers open to talents, providing fair equal opportunity, and the many variations on the principle of positive discrimination. All of these work to make the system of inequality seem reasonable and acceptable. The underlying assumption is that so long as the competition has been fair, advantage itself is beyond criticism. There is no doubt that a system such as this would create people, who concentrate only on their talents and individual attributes. This robs them of any feeling of community with their people, because they can only think in terms of competing. Perhaps, the only community this can create is a community of the successful on the one hand, and a community of the unsuccessful on the other which blames itself for its supposed failure. Yet another problem with equality of opportunity is that it seeks to create an artificial disjunction between the successes and failures of one generation and the next.
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