What’s Wrong with Equality of Opportunity: Christine Sypnowich with Ben Burgis

The last decade has delivered increasingly bleak portraits of vast inequalities in income, wealth, health, and other measures of well-being in many rich countries. What should we do about them?
One common response is to argue that inequality is only a problem to the extent that it reflects unequal opportunities. In much of the West, political discourse tends to converge on the assumption that our egalitarian aspirations are realized once we have ensured equality of opportunity. Going further - aiming for equal outcomes - is often considered unreasonable, naïve, or even authoritarian.
In this conversation with Ben Burgis, philosopher Christine Sypnowich argues that this view is seriously mistaken. She will explain why opportunity talk - and a host of ideas associated with it, including flawed conceptions of choice and personal responsibility - plays far too central a role in prevailing arguments for equality. For Sypnowich, an egalitarian society should not shy away from a concern with outcomes. Its goal must be that people live equally flourishing lives, not merely that they have the opportunity to do so.
Event date: May 9, 2023
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