Against Equality of Opportunity
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Against Equality of Opportunity Matt Cavanagh Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, 223pp. ISBN: 0 199 2434 33. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 131–133. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300060
When asked how society might be made a fairer place, and in particular what principles should govern the allocation of jobs in the service of fairness, many will answer: equality of opportunity. I tell students that this principle is a can of worms which they should investigate carefully. Cavanagh understands that a variety of principles and policies, together with their various implications and applications, parade under the flag of equality of opportunity. He’s found a nice mess which it is just the job of philosophers to disentangle, not merely because the vulgar need correction (which they do) but because philosophers (Rawls, notably, in recent times) have accorded the principle a standing which may not bear the weight it is accorded. Anyone proposing to examine this principle now has Cavanagh’s useful book to help them think through these issues. They should not be put off by the aggressively sceptical title that the book bears. In Part 1, Cavanagh investigates ‘meritocracy’, ‘the view that the best person should always get the job’ (p. 33). This is deemed to be the default reading of demands for equality of opportunity. As the argument proceeds, it transpires that there are (at least) three different views of how meritocracy might work as an equal opportunities principle and the author does not always signal which view has his attention or give these different views the same weight. The first is a moral claim: a moral wrong, an injustice or unfairness, is done when the best person does not get the job. A second, stronger view is that the principle of equal opportunity, formulated, say, as above, is a legitimate ground for government coercion; it is permissible for governments to coerce private businesses to hire the best person for the job. The third, strongest, view is that governments have a duty to forbid the hiring of anyone but the very best applicant for a job. Except where the government is itself the employer, this last view may appear too silly to be discussed, but it may re-emerge as the rationale for the prohibition of e.g. racist employment policies. In Cavanagh’s discussion of meritocracy, it is claimed to be a flaw in the meritocratic position that it may be rational but can’t support widespread state intervention (p. 44). (Later, when he discusses discrimination, he points out against the libertarian that the wrongness of some kinds of discrimination is not impugned by the judgement that it may be impolitic for the state to intervene to prevent it (pp. 172–175).)
Book Reviews
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Cavanagh does a tidy job of distinguishing a variety of ways of reading the meritocratic principle. It transpires that the more substantial the construal of this principle, the less plausible it becomes. An important thread of argument, which resurfaces several times in the discussion, concludes that the principle of meritoc
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