Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome
How to harmonize two undesirable ideals
The political back-and-forth on Twitter between self-identified proponents of “the left” and “the right” regularly revolves around the issue of equality in society.
These conversations more often than not degenerate into shouting matches about caricatures of each other’s definition of equality.
The two main forms of equality operative in these debates are ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’ — sometimes referred to as equality and equity for short.
Equality of opportunity seeks to grant every citizen the same opportunities, so that they can achieve whatever outcome their best abilities can get them. Equality of outcome seeks to extend different opportunities to each citizen, calculated based on their situation and ability, so that all can achieve the same outcome.
Both stand opposed to an unequal aristocracy where both opportunities and life outcomes are highly determined by birth — born to poor parents, one stays poor; born to rich parents, one stays rich.
Both forms of equality can sound really good, but as we’ll see below, the naive ideals are far from ideal.
Equality of opportunity seeks to level society’s playing field to afford each and every citizen life outcomes that purely depend on their ability and effort, not on any other attribute of theirs, such as race, social status, gender, etc.
An equal society, according to this vision, is mainly pursued by ensuring that education is available to all and that the only discriminating factor used to arbitrate entry into the workplace is a person’s ability.
However, proponents of equal opportunity often ignore that the playing field cannot be levelled completely.
Plato, for example, envisions that his Utopia — his ideal Greek city — will start by
“sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and by taking possession of the children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their parents.” (The Republic, Book VII).
Plato lays his finger on one of the blind spots in the eyes of equality of opportunity: the accident of birth is very hard to do away with. Certainly, a society pursuing equality of opportunity may be more equal than an aristocracy, but too little credit is given to the inequalities that exist between people simply for having grown up in different families. Plato addresses this issue to an extent, but his solution is, I hope, too authoritarian for our tastes.
More generally, equality of opportunity glosses over the elements of chance and contingency that mark life and are by definition beyond our control, out of reach of our levelling efforts. The diseases and disasters that befall some and not others decisively push the ideal of complete equality of opportunity beyond the horizon.
Take, as a less catastrophic example of the arbitrariness of life, the way societies value and reward some abilities, and not others. Football players should daily thank God on their knees that we take such interest in their specific talents. In societies less interested in sports, many of them would be shovelling manure around the farm (not to disparage the farm worker; on the contrary, their work should probably be more highly valued).
Pursuing equal opportunity to its full extent would therefore of necessity degenerate into a totalitarian project. It would involve removing all differentiating factors related to birth and childcare by raising children in a completely uniform environment (or even better: creating a society of genetically identical clones). It would involve homogenizing society’s valuation of abilities through thought control. And still, full equality of opportunity would be out of reach — though tantalazingly close — because of disease and other agents of societal chaos that differentially affect people.
Seeking complete equality of opportunity is therefore simultaneously impossible and highly detrimental to the outcomes of life. Obviously, almost nobody pushes the logic to this extreme, but it serves to show that the ideal is not so ideal after all.
Finally, the very foundation of equality of opportunity may be seriously questioned: why draw the line around the individual? Why denounce the unequal distribution of opportunities in society, while at the same time enshrining the unequal distribution of abilities among people as normative, sacred?
Equality of opportunity’s individualism and exclusive focus on a person’s ability leads in its extreme forms to a profound lack of compassion for the many people with abilities that are of no interest to society, and dis-abilities in the areas that society has decided in fact do matter.
Equality of outcome seeks to address these issues, recognizing that the playing field cannot be levelled completely, that opportunities (let alone abilities) cannot be completely equally distributed. Instead, what must be done is to ensure that, irrespective of opportunity and ability, all have the same life outcomes.
An equal society in this perspective is mainly pursued by redistribution of wealth and affirmative action.
In light of the societal average, the shortages that some experience are supplemented by the abundance that others produce. The famous Marxist slogan articulates it well:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Those who can produce more give to those who need more in order to achieve the same outcomes.
Perhaps surprisingly, this Marxist communal vision has its roots in the early church, whose life was described as follows:
And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44–45)
However, a key problem for achieving full equality of outcome is the compulsion usually required to achieve it. Unless all in society voluntarily and wholeheartedly agree to this extreme redistributive scheme, as was apparently the case with the early church, it must be enforced. The state must use its violent, coercive power to take the wealth from the haves that are unwilling to share, to give to the have-nots.
Besides redistribution of wealth, another common strategy in equality of outcome thinking is affirmative action: those that typically have fewer opportunities are positively discriminated when they seek access to education and jobs, so that they can attain life outcomes like those that have naturally access to more opportunities.
The great downside to this strategy is obviously that people with greater abilities may be denied important opportunities and fail to achieve life outcomes that their abilities and equal opportunities otherwise would allow because they are fit to equality of outcome’s Procrustean bed. Also, in many cases, positive discrimination tends to follow racial lines, because opportunities are in many countries unequally divided among the ‘races’. In doing so, positive discrimination can perpetuate instead of transcend racial thinking.
Furthermore, a basic question arises: in what ways must outcomes be equal? Must we all live in the same houses, work the same jobs, wear the same clothes? Taken to their logical conclusions, equality of outcome and equality of opportunity converge on similar totalitarian solutions that homogenize and standardize people as much as possible, in order to ensure either equal outcomes or opportunities.
Finally, while equality of opportunity destructively embraces individualism, equality of outcome errs on the side of collectivism. While this may avoid individualism’s potential lack of compassion for people with less valued abilities, collectivism tends to lead to a neglect of individual responsibility. If outcomes are guaranteed, if I can get jobs based on my skin colour rather than my abilities, why apply maximal effort to develop my abilities and use every opportunity that presents itself to me?
In the culture wars about these two forms of equality, both sides tend to see very clearly the other’s shortcomings, but not their own. Both sides support ideals that can only ever be hoped to be achieved by extreme totalitarian regimes, and yet even then they are unlikely to be completely realized.
The middle road between these two extremes would suggest that in society we owe it to each other to guarantee that all have a decent, basic level of life outcomes, regardless of effort and ability. Simultaneously, it would suggest that we all owe it to ourselves and others to take advantage of whatever opportunities are presented to us, to enhance our own life outcomes and our ability to guarantee those of others.
When recommending a church community in Greece to send help to churches in Jerusalem during a famine, Saint Paul wrote:
Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” (2 Corinthians 8: 13–15)
Note that for Paul, equality means that all should have enough (equality of outcome), though how much exactly would depend on effort (equality of opportunity).
Ultimately, though, it is not through legislation, but through transformed hearts that we will joyfully apply as much effort as we can in life, while sharing abundantly what we have with others.
