How thick a notion of equality should we have?

This evening at the Ideas Cafe, we discussed how far our society should go to provide equality of opportunity to its citizens.

I was introduced to the thick and thin notions of equality some time ago.  One good example of a thin notion of equality brought up by Mano at the meeting is having equal washroom space for man and woman in public buildings.  This would be equal but it does not address that more female washroom space is required to handle the same amount of female users as compared to male users.

A thicker notion of equality would take that into account and assign more washroom space for female washrooms.

Another example of thicker notion of equality is to provide breakfast for hungry children who do not learn well because they did not have breakfast before going to school.  The thinner notion of equality is to just provide the education to all children whether they are hungry or not.  The thicker notion of equality is to help the hungry children by providing them breakfast so that they are as ready to learn as the other children are.

But how far should we go with this?

Mano said that surely we want a society that values merit and that we should encourage all the worthy participants base on their merits.  If some of these participants started off from a more disadvantaged position, our society is missing their contribution if we do not bring them to the same starting point as others.

Rafi thought that we should be valuing participants based on their merits at the moment when merit is measured even if they happened to be lucky enough to be starting with an advantage.  It is difficult and futile to go too far back and try to make things up.

Shula said that as a society, we have to decide whether equality of opportunity is the highest ideal or whether equality of opportunity is just a means to help us get to a better society.

Presumably, if equality is the ideal, we will have to make things up to make it equal.  If equality is just a means to a better society, we should just look at merits at the moment without regard to what led to the current state of affairs.

Perhaps something in between is best?

Shula also offered that we can look at a thin notion of equality as removing barriers to equality.  The thick notion of equality then gets into compensating for the lottery of birth and circumstances.

But is providing breakfast to hungry children in schools removing barriers or compensating for their home circumstances?

Once we start compensating,  we run into the dangers of pulling the front runners back or equalizing everyone to the lowest performance level.  We also start creating injustice to individuals that are caught not getting opportunities that they should have because these opportunities are granted to others who had been disadvantaged in some way.

Rafi said some temporary adjustments are required to reverse the social inertia of stereo types, life styles, and identities; but these adjustments have to be temporary.  However, we all know that once implemented, these adjustments themselves become very difficult to remove.

We also discussed the point that these adjustments for disadvantaged groups may reduce the respect of their achievers who may have achieved without the help of the adjustments.  However, the benefit of a more equal society may be worth this.

It was a very lively and enjoyable meeting.