TROUBLED by growing inequality—as we all should be—Christine Sypnowich argues that opportunity-based egalitarianism is an insufficient tool for promoting a just society. I welcome her emphasis on equality of outcome, her focus on the non-material dimensions of flourishing, and her recognition that putting outcome-based egalitarianism into practice can be challenging because we all envision the good life differently. She effectively shows how far the landscape of liberal egalitarian thought has shifted toward opportunity-based egalitarianism over the last five decades.
In doing so, she joins a long debate over the meaning of President Lyndon Johnson’s ambiguous injunction to seek “equality as a fact and equality as a result.” This issue occupied many social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s. In thinking about how outcome-oriented egalitarian visions might be strengthened today, we should recall the pitfalls of these earlier arguments. In particular, outcome-oriented egalitarians must be explicit about the causes of unequal outcomes in order to avoid suggesting that cultural or biological factors—rather than unjust social and political arrangements—are to blame. Which results one is seeking to equalize—test scores, income, wealth, or other measures of f lourishing—also matters enormously in generating the political will to translate egalitarian theory into practice.