One of the interesting things about "equality of opportunity", as a concept, is that while it's often used as a conservative talking point ("equality of opportunity, not equality of result"), if one actually takes it seriously, it would require a pretty radical reordering of our social structures from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to actually establish equality of opportunity? For example, one would have to either eliminate economic inequalities altogether or (this is no easier) eliminate their impact in terms of how they affect the starting positions of young people. Whatever world that looks like, it's very distant from our own.
In the meantime, though, those of us who do take "equality of opportunity" with a modicum of seriousness try to accommodate the actually extant inequalities with some imaginative guesswork. We see two candidates, one with perhaps slightly lower test scores but who has overcome significant adversity, the other with higher numbers but no such disadvantages, and try to ask ourselves the counterfactual: "How would the first candidate have performed had they started on equal footing with the second?" It's an imprecise art and that leaves a lot of room for subjectivity (and complaints), but it at least tries to answer the question nominally posed by "equality of opportunity" in a realistic manner.
Yet there's another dimension of equality of opportunity that I think sometimes gets overlooked, which is that even where starting points are equal, results may differ depending on what the starting point is. Let me explain:
Imagine we were trying to rank the "merit" of 100 people, and assume for sake of argument it is possible to do this in an objective way (we can rank everyone from 1 to 100). The equality of opportunity issue noted above concerns how we make "adjustments" to the ranking based on differences in starting points -- some faced significant hardships and adversity, others were provided substantial mentoring and support for them to flourish -- and the problem is that this is all counterfactual.
But suppose we could do the social scientist's dream and send all 100 people to an alternate reality where they start off in exactly the same position -- they all face (the same) significant hardships and adversity which they need to overcome. If they all faced the same hardships, we might say that that the resulting 1 - 100 ranking was an objective determinant of merit.
However, now suppose we send those same 100 to a different alternate reality. Here, too, they all start off in exactly the same position. But this time, instead of all facing (the same) hardships and adversity, here they all are provided the same support and nurturing (they start of equivalently advantaged, rather than disadvantaged). Once again, at the end of the experiment we rank everyone 1 - 100. But my guess is that the rank order in Alternate Reality #1 would be different from that produced in Alternate Reality #2. The skillset that yields high performance under conditions of adversity is not the same as the skillset that yields high performance under conditions of support and nurturing.
All of this is a long-winded way of asking: which do we care about more? Again, note that this isn't the easy in theory/hard in practice question of comparing one candidate who faced adversity against another who was given support. In our hypothetical, all candidates are both equally supported and equally disadvantaged (in the two realities). So the question here is whether our vision for the "best" candidate -- the ideal we are trying to approximate via our guesswork adjustments -- is the person who thrives under conditions of adversity or the person who outperforms in ideal circumstances.
Of course, the actual answer is "it depends". Some jobs or social roles we know demand significant resilience in the face of hardship, and so we want the person who can perform best in those circumstances. More broadly, I think we find intuitively attractive the idea that this sort of scrapper is particularly praise-worthy compared to those who "had it easy". Yet there is another frame where we would want that everyone would get the support, resources, and nurturing that would best position them to thrive. We don't want to haze people for its own sake; we should hope to construct social roles in such a way that their occupants are not having to scrape and scrap for traction but are put in the best position for success. Yet the fact that different people would be (even under a genuine "equality of opportunity" ideal) the "best" performers under these two frames is interesting to me; it underscores how there is an inescapable element of normative choice even in the best case scenarios of what a meritocracy might be.
There's no big moral here, just another meditation on the complexities of equality.
