296 deep freedomthat the per for mance of roles gives rise to expectations and obligations,
but none so weighty that they automatically trump loyalties to people
or devotions to tasks. Roles are to be sometimes used and sometimes
bent and stretched, so long as this bending and stretching not result in
betrayal of individuals.
His life chances are not determined by the hereditary transmission of
economic and educational advantage through the family, that is to say by
mechanisms that reproduce class society. Equality of respect and of op-
portunity is sacrosanct. Inequalities of circumstance are outlawed to the
extent that they either arise from inequalities of respect and of opportu-
nity or result in them (as universally happens in a class society). Similarly,
they are prohibited if they either refl ect or reproduce privileged strangle-
holds on the po liti cal, economic, or cultural resources with which we de-
fi ne the future within the present. No free society can have a class struc-
ture. An especially poisonous form of such a structure is one that relegates
a group of people to a degree of absolute poverty or relative deprivation
that not only undermines equality of respect and opportunity but also
destroys the practical conditions of self- reliance and self- construction.
An insult more subtle but no less dangerous to freedom results from
the worship and rewarding of exceptional talents and natural endow-
ments that already fi nd powerful incentives in their own use. It is a species
of power worship that, disguised as practical necessity, recoils on its sup-
posed benefi ciaries as well as on its manifest victims— all the others— and
jeopardizes the inclusive cooperation on which a free society depends.
Th ese commitments and constraints are compatible, in a free soci-
ety, with signifi cant inequalities of circumstance. It is a greater life for
all, an enhancement of vitality diff used among many, that a free society
seeks, not a lesser life rendered palatable by insistence on a rigid equal-
ity of result. Any metric by which we could claim to judge the allowable
degree of in e qual ity compatible with this conception is fanciful.
Th e standard is not that we tolerate only as much in e qual ity as can be
justifi ed by greater wealth for all or for some, the most disadvantaged.
Th e standard is the eff ect of the in e qual ity, given the historical context
in which it arises, on the capacity of the society to outdo itself, in every
domain of its life. It does so by disengaging cooperation from the stran-
glehold of any entrenched scheme of social division and hierarchy. It
does so as well by developing a structure of public beliefs and institu-