Equality of outcome
Equalisation of outcome seems, on the face of it, neither desirable nor coherent. It
is not desirable because it would deny individual choice, and responsibility: if one
person chooses a life of leisure and another person chooses a life of hard work why
should the state seek to equalise the outcome of those choices? The outcome may
not, in fact, be susceptible to equalisation. If income level is the metric subject to
distribution, then the outcome can be equalised for that metric; but welfare (or
well-being) is also a relevant metric, and the person living a life of leisure has
presumably enjoyed greater well-being than the hard worker, such that the only
way the two can enjoy an equal level of well-being is if they had not lived their
respective lives of leisure and hard work. The point is that equality is always equality
of something, and the attempt to equalise along one metric, say income, may result
in inequality along another metric. Another difficulty with attempting to achieve
equality of outcome is that some goods are ‘positional’: a positional good is one
the enjoyment of which depends on the exclusion of others. For example, the slogan
‘elite education for all’ is a contradiction in terms. Likewise, eating at the best
restaurant or driving the fastest car depends on that restaurant indeed being better
than all the others and the car faster than all other cars. It follows that it is
impossible to equalise positional goods. It could, of course, be argued that we can
have goodeducation, restaurants or cars for all and that the desire to be better has
in fact nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the good, but simply the perceived
qualities of the good in question. The more common slogan ‘excellence for all’ still
seems oxymoronic, but if we define excellence relative to a baseline of mediocre
then it does make sense to talk of excellence for all.
Despite these objections, equality of outcome can play a role in political debate
even if it cannot be made to work as a principle. Rawls justifies inequality by use
of the difference principle, but that principle rests on recognising that any inequalities
must be to the benefit of the worst off. This argument takes equality of outcome
as the baseline against which alternative distributions are to be measured; in effect,
Rawls maintains that moral equality generates equality of outcome, but may also
generate inequality of outcome if the worst off consent to that inequality. Equality
of outcome has, therefore, a special moral status in Rawls’s theory. It should be
noted that if Rawls recognised desert as a legitimate source of inequality this strong
connection between moral equality and equality of outcome would not hold.
Rawls does not, in fact, defend equality of outcome as a substantive principle.
Anne Phillips, however, does defend this principle of equality. Much of Phillips’s
work has been concerned with political representation, and especially the under-
representation of women and ethnic minorities in political institutions, and she
takes the case of women in parliament as an example of the need for a principle
of equal outcome. The under-representation of women in the British Parliament
cannot, she argues, be attributed to lack of ability, or the conscious choice not to
enter politics, but must be a consequence of the failure of equal opportunity (Phillips,
2004: 8). Women are not denied equal access to parliamentary representation, and
many political parties now have dedicated support for female candidates, which
include women’s officers, training days, support networks and the requirement to
have at least one woman on every shortlist for candidate selection in a particular
constituency. Despite this the only political party that has been successful in
Chapter 3 Equality 69