Ideally everyone would have equal opportunity to do anything they want to do, including start a company and/or have a family.
Are you sure this is an ideal? Michael Jordan and I don't have equal opportunity in sports. Richard Feynman and I wouldn't have equal opportunity in winning a Nobel Prize. Jude Law and I don't have an equal opportunity to be nominated for academy awards.
How do you actually make us equal in sports? I could train for years, and even take steroids, but even then, the only way I could match Jordan is if someone were to come along and break all of his arms and legs.
Or take Feynman. I loved calculus and physics in college. But I'm just not even near the level of many of the TAs and professors that taught me, let alone a genius that wins prizes. In order for me to have true equal opportunity with someone at Feynman's level, you'd have to put him in a drug-induced coma for several days of the week, lest he think about physics.
I'm not going to belabor the point with Jude Law, except to say that maybe we'd be equal if I got plastic surgery, and his face was badly injured in a car accident.
So as far as I understand it, we are all different. Some of us are better at or more suited to some things than others. There's no way to lift everyone up to the same height as the best person in a field, so equality in practice has to involve cutting down achievers. Is that really ideal?
NB: When I say "equality," I'm not talking about equality before the law, which is something I'm completely in favor of. Here I'm talking about equality in ethics - the kind of thing that philosophers (such as John Rawls) get into.
I think it is an ideal, yes. But there are other ideals it needs to be balanced against. For everyone to have equal opportunities, everyone would have to be equal, or in other words, everyone would have to be the same. Even if that were possible, it wouldn't be worth losing our diversity. (And as I mentioned above, while giving everyone equal opportunities despite their differences might be more fair to them, it could be less fair to others involved, like the startup investor.)
My point was that we need to recognize these situations where our ideals conflict, so that we can decide what balance we prefer. It seems like by accepting 'discrimination' based on intelligence or athletic ability, we are recognizing that the value of having the most skilled people doing certain jobs outweighs the unfairness to the less skilled applicants, who may work just as hard, but have no control over their innate characteristics. On the other hand, while it may be true that a person with a family has less time or energy to devote to work than a single person, or a male with a baby has more time than a female with a baby, we have decided that gender equality and the right to have a family outweigh the unfairness to the investor who would ideally take all information into account when choosing an investment. I think that's totally reasonable, but it is helpful to recognize that that is what we're doing, rather than simply making statements like "sexism is wrong", without thinking about it any further. (Because we will eventually run into a situation where our initial reaction doesn't turn out to match with our core values, and it would be good to recognize and correct that.)
Are you sure this is an ideal? Michael Jordan and I don't have equal opportunity in sports. Richard Feynman and I wouldn't have equal opportunity in winning a Nobel Prize. Jude Law and I don't have an equal opportunity to be nominated for academy awards.
How do you actually make us equal in sports? I could train for years, and even take steroids, but even then, the only way I could match Jordan is if someone were to come along and break all of his arms and legs.
Or take Feynman. I loved calculus and physics in college. But I'm just not even near the level of many of the TAs and professors that taught me, let alone a genius that wins prizes. In order for me to have true equal opportunity with someone at Feynman's level, you'd have to put him in a drug-induced coma for several days of the week, lest he think about physics.
I'm not going to belabor the point with Jude Law, except to say that maybe we'd be equal if I got plastic surgery, and his face was badly injured in a car accident.
So as far as I understand it, we are all different. Some of us are better at or more suited to some things than others. There's no way to lift everyone up to the same height as the best person in a field, so equality in practice has to involve cutting down achievers. Is that really ideal?
NB: When I say "equality," I'm not talking about equality before the law, which is something I'm completely in favor of. Here I'm talking about equality in ethics - the kind of thing that philosophers (such as John Rawls) get into.