T.R. Edward
Unregistered improvements in equality of opportunity


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward
Abstract. This paper observes that the Rawlsian concepts of formal and fair equality of opportunity do not provide a way of recognizing many actual improvements to equality of opportunity. I borrow the style of some South Asian fiction to covey the point.
Draft version: Version 3 (1st June 2023, footnote added, "nor does…")


I was probably merely bored of academic paper after academic paper, so I tried to use a fiction style to convey an issue. I was influenced by very recently reading the story "Malliga Homes" but probably more so by the fictions of R.K. Narayan, though the setting is Europe. (And also a line from Robert Webb.)


        For many years, Mr. W-nathan had worked for the post office, first as a postman and then at the service desk and finally as a department manager, but retired now, he was undertaking an adult education course in law. "Without knowing the law you can always be cheated," he would say to his children, who ignored him, finding legal statutes and articles boring and often incomprehensible. He was little disturbed by this and looked forward to meeting his classmates at a former polytechnic and the bright Microsoft Powerpoint slides, with their bullet points, that awaited. One evening in class, the lecturer introduced them to a famous American philosopher of politics and law. Some of the students believed that one day the legal system of his country would be organized on the recommended lines. Mr. W-nathan was fuming!
        Of course, as a student, one cannot just fume. One has to fume in an essay with a suitable bibliography. "Where can I get books on fair equality of opportunity?" he asked a classmate, a white English woman, a software engineer, who had taken a number of other adult education courses already: literature, film, art history, popular music.
        "This book is useful." She handed a hefty text to him.
        "The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon," he said. "Must be good."
        "There's a lot of Cambridge in comedy."
        "Have you studied that?"
        "Not yet," she laughed. "We have some local comedy, not Cambridge."
        "Everyone can make a joke, right? Or everyone has a right to make a joke anyway!" He laughed.
        "I'm just going to nip out for a cigarette. You take the book." She wore bright red lipstick, but her dreams were of the lost empire, Mr. W-nathan intuitively knew, which in her heart was not as such lost, merely a dormant volcano. Everyone else felt the future empire was Europe. The colonial instinct cannot be tamed and Italy, Greece, Holland, etc., would be the new empire. Of course Poland, which was always thought of as part of it anyway.
        That night, Mr. W-nathan tried to make his thoughts coherent. The American philosopher recommended fair equality of opportunity. If there is a job available and there are two equally suitable candidates, it is not just that the job is open to both to apply. They also stand an equal chance of getting it, even if their backgrounds are quite different, in class, religion, etc. Or at least that's the requirement for the basic structure of society. One always has to remember that qualification. Anyway, what annoyed Mr. W-nathan was that the American philosopher provides no way to recognize many improvements to equality of opportunity. A firm used to just have jobs open to different applicants, but now they are also more widely advertised. Remember when it was mainly word of mouth. And what about postal systems? What is the right to apply without adequate means of sending an application?
An adequate postal system was not even one of the primary goods in this man's philosophy, which all citizens want – liberties, equality of opportunity, wealth, what about post? Does the great American not know what life is like without an adequate postal system, post always getting lost? The question "No postal system in utopia?" entered Mr. W-nathan's mind and he felt pleased with that way of raising the issue. He was acquainted with numerous law suits because of post having got lost. The defendant would say, "We posted it, it's not our fault that the region it must cross through is like that." He would tell his grandchild when she was old enough. What plan for now? Mr. W-nathan knew he should not be thinking about this at this hour, but he did. Plan was to write: the simple distinction between formal and fair equality of opportunity, have we got one and have we now got the other too, is not adequate for detecting many of the actual improvements in equality of opportunity: better advertising, improved form,[1] better application submission system. And consequently the philosophy provides no way of rewarding the people involved in those improvements and so motivating them. What is needed are finer discriminations: a sequence of stages and then we can say, "Great, now you moved us to stage 2," or whatever.


Note
Moving out of fiction mode, I am not sure if a sequence of stages is a good idea, but it seems to me that Rawls's concepts of formal equality of opportunity and fair equality of opportunity do not in themselves provide an adequate way of registering the improvements actually carried out: many of these improvements are difficult to register with just these two concepts to evaluate progress. I tend to think of formal equality of opportunity as obtaining between persons A and B when the organization with a vacancy does not introduce any rule preventing only one of these persons from applying or having their application considered nor does the legal system have such a rule, and not covering improvements to equality achieved by advertising and postal systems (or online submission systems and their availability) and even application forms. But improvements in these respects may well not amount to fair equality of opportunity. And given that there are just these two levels recognized in Rawls's system (formal and fair, or three including nothing), what is to motivate an organization to go beyond one level, if it is likely to fail to get to the other? There is no badge in between! 


References
Bhanoo, S. 2021. Malliga Homes. In C.N. Adichie (ed.), The Best Short Stories 2021. New York: Anchor Books.
Mandle, J. and Reidy, D. (eds.), 2015. The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, J. 1999 (revised edition). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Webb, R. 2020. Come Again. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.




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[1] The most well-known form improvement for equality of opportunity is adding multiple languages, but presumably there are many others, such as clearer instructions.