Bottlenecks

Equal opportunity is a powerful idea and one with extremely broad appeal in contemporary politics political theory and law. But what does it mean? On close examination the most attractive existing conceptions of equal opportunity turn out to be impossible to achieve in practice or even in theory. As long as families are free to raise their children differently no two people's opportunities will be equal; nor is it possible to disentangle someone's abilities or talents from her background advantages and disadvantages. Moreover given different abilities and disabilities different people need different opportunities confounding most ways of imagining what counts as equal.