Roemer on Equality of Opportunity

Abstract

We critically discuss John Roemer's normative criterion of equal opportunity and advance opportunity dominance as an alternative criterion for the evaluation of policies. For Roemer, strict equality of opportunity obtains when people, irrespectively of circumstances beyond their control, have the same ability to achieve advantage through their free choices. To implement this idea, Roemer sorts people with similar circumstances into types and takes their free choices to be represented by their behaviour relative to other members of the same type or, as Roemer calls it, by their 'relative effort'. He then proposes that society should maximize the average advantage of all those whose circumstances cause them to be least well–off relative to others who have expended the same degree of relative effort. We argue that typing and the relative effort metric conflate the factors for which we do and do not want to hold individuals responsible, whenever these factors are statistically correlated. Moreover, Roemer's rule for policy selection burdens the concept of equal opportunity with foreign distributive principles. Pointing to an inconsistency in Roemer's argument, we also note that his selection rule violates his own requirement of Pareto-optimality. In response to these difficulties, we advance the criterion of opportunity dominance which is Pareto optimal, maintains conceptual purity and does not conflate the factors for which individuals should and should not be held responsible. This criterion determines a set of candidate policies that are undominated in opportunity and from which a final policy must be selected by additional, conceptually distinct principles of distributive justice.

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