Do you consider yourself more left or right wing?

[sc94597]

Chrkeller said:

sc94597 said:

Okay but your disagreement then is with equality opportunity as well as equality of outcome. 

If different people have different resources available to them at birth, and no capacity to bridge that gap unless they make even more exceptional decisions given the constraints they inherited, then there really isn't equality of opportunity. There is just mere equality before the law. 

Yes, that is what I believe.  

Right.

Legal egalitarianism and equal opportunity are two different things. Some argue you can't truly have the first without minimally having some degree of the second, and of course the second requires the first in legal societies, but that is an entirely different discussion. 

Both are also different from equality of outcomes (at least at the individual level.) 

Personally I prioritize positive freedom (with negative freedom as a necessary delimiter) over "equality" of any kind and that is why I disagree with luck egalitarianism as the sole structuring philosophy of society. 

The goal of society, in so much as it makes sense for it to exist, should be to maximize the ability of individuals to self-determine the circumstances of their life and to multiply their capacities (productive and non-productive) in so much as they don't interfere with others' capacity to do this. Equal opportunity can help in this direction, but it isn't an end in itself, and optimizing for equal outcome (at the level of individuals) almost certainly doesn't enable this.