{"id":25008,"date":"2014-10-17T00:01:54","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T04:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25008"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:33:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:33:21","slug":"qotd-legislating-absolute-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/17\/qotd-legislating-absolute-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Legislating absolute equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

…to oppose the notion of equality of opportunity these days is to be thought some kind of monstrous ultramontane reactionary, a Metternich or Nicholas I, who wants by means of repression to preserve the status quo<\/em> in amber. Members of young audiences to which I have spoken have almost fainted with shock when I have said that I not only did not believe in equality of opportunity, but to the contrary found the very idea sinister in the extreme, and much worse than mere egalitarianism of outcome. To say to a young audience today that equality of opportunity is a thoroughly vicious idea is like shouting \u201cGod does not exist and Mohammed was not his prophet\u201d at the top of one\u2019s voice in Mecca.<\/p>\n

Those who believe in equality of opportunity must want, if they take the idea seriously, to make the world not only just but fair. Genetic and family influences on the fate of people have to be eliminated, because they undoubtedly affect opportunities and make them unequal. Ugly people cannot be models; the deformed cannot be professional footballers; the retarded cannot be astrophysicists; the small of stature cannot be heavyweight boxers; I don\u2019t think I have to prolong this list, as everyone can think of a thousand examples for himself.<\/p>\n

Of course, it might be possible to level the field a little by legislating for equality of outcome: by, for example, insisting that ugly people are employed as models in proportion to their prevalence in the population. English novelist L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between<\/em>, satirized such envious suppression of beauty (and, by implication, all egalitarianism other than that of equality under the law) in a novel called Facial Justice<\/em>. It\u2019s not a very good novel, as it happens, but the idea is very good; Hartley envisages a state in which everyone aspires to an \u201caverage\u201d face, brought about by plastic surgery both for the abnormally ugly and the abnormally good-looking. Only in this way can the supposed injustice (actually it\u2019s unfairness) of the genetic lottery be righted. <\/p>\n

Hartley\u2019s novel is a reductio ad absurdum<\/em> of a pernicious idea. By contrast, Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cmeasurable quality of opportunity\u201d is roughly achievable by human design: only roughly, of course, because some (though few) will still be excluded biologically, and there are (again few) upbringings so terrible that they preclude opportunity for the person to become anything much. But the aspiration to deny no one a \u201cmeasurable quality of opportunity\u201d is not intrinsically nasty, as is the insistence on equality of opportunity. On the contrary; our problem is, however, that the political arrangements needed to bring this about already exist in most Western countries, and still we are unhappy or discontented. Thus we \u2014 many of us, that is \u2014 attribute our unhappiness to inequality of opportunity for fear of looking elsewhere, including inward. <\/p>\n

Theodore Dalrymple, “A More Sinister Equality”, Taki’s Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-06<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…to oppose the notion of equality of opportunity these days is to be thought some kind of monstrous ultramontane reactionary, a Metternich or Nicholas I, who wants by means of repression to preserve the status quo in amber. Members of young audiences to which I have spoken have almost fainted with shock when I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41],"tags":[198,254,827,575,267,1289],"class_list":["post-25008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-quotations","tag-equalrights","tag-gender","tag-genetics","tag-happiness","tag-justice","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6vm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25009,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25008\/revisions\/25009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}