Equality (Ann Speaking)
						MAIN PATH: Malik
			John			Malik

I applaud you, Fred, for taking that position. I know you don't approve of racial discrimination, but I also know that it is not easy for you to approve policies that interfere with the free market. Sometimes I like you Burkeans. Still, I want to push you to go further. There's something important in Malik's distinction between formal freedom and effective freedom. The same could be said for formal equality and effective equality. We should apply that distinction to this situation.

In order for people to be able to take advantage of opportunities, they need at least the modest resources necessary to develop their natural abilities. Think of the daughter of a sharecropper in Georgia in 1935. Even if we had outlawed racial discrimination at that time, what sense would it make to say that she and a middle class kid in Cleveland have equal opportunities?

Poor children, white or black, fall short of effective equality of opportunity as long as we are only talking about formal equality (which Dee advocates) or non-discrimination (as you advocate).

Equal opportunity, to be effective, must include at least a very solid basic education through high school. Then we can say that people have had the chance to use and develop their natural abilities. We should create a situation in which people of roughly equal natural abilities have roughly the same chance to succeed. That's my definition of equal opportunity.

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