Equalizing opportunities: compensation and backlash

 Moral and political philosophers—and the general public, as evidenced in much public opinion research (cf. project "Personal data as a new productive asset")—typically object when the life opportunities available to an individual are shaped by morally arbitrary characteristics, such as the wealth of one’s parents or the quality of schools at the place of birth. Yet government policies aimed at promoting equal opportunities also raise normative questions. For example, many philosophers agree that it is permissible for state institutions to treat individuals unequally to promote equal opportunity at the societal level, for instance via ‘positive discrimination’ policies like electoral gender quotas and race- and gender-based affirmative action in education and workplace. But such actions are often accompanied by popular backlash. How should we think about backlash to the state’s promotion of equal opportunity from a philosophical and normative standpoint? Further, while opportunities are rarely a zero-sum game, social scientists of the URPP and beyond take great interest in the phenomenon of downward mobility, and have studied its incidence, underlying causes, and consequences on outcomes such as voting behavior. There is a distinctively normative question that follows from this research: Given changes in how opportunities are distributed in society, what—if anything—should the state do for individuals who experience downward mobility? And how do we normatively evaluate the trade-offs between fostering opportunities for some social groups that potentially come at the expense of other social groups?

Prof. Francis Cheneval
Project Leader
Department of Philosophy

Friedemann Bieber
Post-Doc
Department of Philosophy

No data sets being used for this project.

For further information about the project and data availability please contact: friedemann.bieber@philos.uzh.ch