Mind the Economy/Justice 155

Justice before the starting line

A just society does not promise everyone the same arrival. But it can and must prevent the arrival from already being written in the departure

by Vittorio Pelligra*

31 May 2026

9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

Before the race
Circumstances, commitment and responsibility
Non-identical matches
The school that inherits inequalities
Compensating for the birth lottery

9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Sometimes injustice appears in disguise. It makes no noise and produces no immediate scandal. It comes in the form of differences. Differences in academic performance, in health, in confidence, in ambition, in ability to find one's way in the world. One child learns to read earlier, another later. One girl starts high school already knowing what university is, another knows no one who has ever attended it. Someone finds books, silence, support and encouragement at home. Someone else, however, finds weariness, precariousness, narrow spaces, nervous and absent adults not through fault but through fatigue. Then, at some point, society measures, compares, selects. Those who have done better are rewarded, those who have fallen behind are invited to try harder. It is here that inequality performs its moral trickery. It presents itself as a result, after long, behind-the-scenes work, as a precondition.

Before the race

John Roemer's most important contribution to the theory of equality of opportunity lies precisely in having forced political philosophy to shed light on this point and having attempted to dismantle the perverse logic of naive meritocracy. It is not enough to say that people should be judged by what they do and not who they are. Nor is it enough to say that competition must be open and non-discriminatory. It is necessary to ask what happened before the competition began. What resources were available. What capacities had already been formed. What expectations had been encouraged or extinguished. What wounds, shortcomings and implicit advantages had already determined the very possibility of choice. Roemer distinguishes two ways of understanding equality of opportunity. The first is the principle of 'non-discrimination'. When competing for a position, all those with the relevant qualities should be allowed to enter the competition and should only be judged by those qualities. It is a fundamental principle, a child of the Enlightenment 'carrière ouverte aux talents' (careers open to talents). Violation of this principle imprisons society in arbitrary hierarchies based on gender, social origin, ethnicity, religion. But for Roemer, this principle is not enough. Because a formally unbiased selection can still be profoundly unjust if it occurs after the conditions of people's education have been radically unequal. As he writes in Equality of Opportunity, 'Before competition begins, equal opportunities must be guaranteed, resorting if necessary to social intervention measures; once it begins, however, everyone must fend for himself' (Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 2). Before competition begins, opportunities must be made equal, including through social intervention; afterwards, individuals are personally accountable for their choices.

Circumstances, commitment and responsibility

The whole difficulty lies in that 'before'. Where does society's responsibility end and the individual's begin? Where to place the starting line? Roemer does not offer a rhetorical answer, but an analytical criterion. We must distinguish what depends on circumstances from what can be attributed to the efforts of the individual. Circumstances' are those factors that influence people's life chances and for which we cannot hold them responsible: genetic inheritance, the family they are born into, the neighbourhood in which they grow up, their parents' level of education, the language spoken at home, the richness or poverty of the cultural environment, health, the quality of available schools, the network of relationships, even the horizon of expectations that is transmitted in the first years of life. Commitment, on the other hand, is what remains in the realm of personal choice. Not because it is pure and free from conditioning - Roemer is well aware that even the ability to commit is influenced by context - but his proposal is precisely to find a way to attribute responsibility without turning circumstances into individual guilt. Hence the idea of 'types'. Individuals who share similar circumstances belong to the same 'type'. Effort should then not be compared in absolute terms between people in different worlds, but in relative terms within one's 'type'. Two people have made a comparable effort not when they have devoted the same number of hours to study, but when they occupy the same position in the effort distribution of the group to which they belong, defined by the circumstances that have conditioned their existence. The student at the 50th percentile of effort among those from fragile families and the student at the 50th percentile among those from advantaged families must be considered, in this sense, equally deserving, even if, due to different circumstances, their effort will generate different results.

The political implications of this reasoning are clear. A just society will work to compensate for differences in circumstances so that, for the same relative effort, outcomes are not systematically different. "Equality of opportunity requires that we compensate people for differences in their circumstances insofar as those differences affect educational performance, but not that we compensate for the consequences of different effort" (p. 7). Justice does not, therefore, according to Roemer, consist in erasing all differences in achievement, nor in denying personal responsibility, it consists, rather, in ensuring that what we are not responsible for does not determine what we can become. This is why Roemer shifts the discussion from moral abstraction to institutional design. How should schools be financed? How should educational resources be distributed? What does it mean to guarantee access to health? How much and how should we invest in early childhood, income support, scholarships? How should we organise orientation, training, active employment policies? In this theoretical framework, equality of opportunity is anything but a slogan. It is rather an institutional technology.

Non-identical matches

The decisive point is that treating everyone equally does not necessarily mean treating everyone fairly. This is perhaps the hardest lesson to accept for a public culture accustomed to confusing equality with 'sameness'. If two children have different needs, giving them both the same thing may mean leaving the initial gap intact. "There is nothing that is as unfair as making equal parts between unequals" wrote Don Lorenzo Milani in his Letter to a teacher. If one arrives at school having already received years of linguistic stimulation, reading, conversations, travel and family support, while the other arrives with a much more fragile heritage, the same classroom, the same desk, the same teacher, the same book do not necessarily produce the same opportunity. Roemer says this with a clarity that should become an ordinary criterion for evaluating public policies: 'Building identical schools and equipping them with identical teachers in different communities where children live in very different conditions will not, in principle, guarantee them equal opportunities for success' (p. 24). The reason is simple. An opportunity is not a thing. It is not a building, a desk, a canteen, a computer or a scholarship. These are tools. Opportunity is the actual ability to transform those means into real learning, choices and possibilities. Roemer goes on to write: 'An opportunity is an abstract thing. It is not a school, nor a plate of nourishing food, nor a cosy dwelling, but rather it is a capacity that is developed by making appropriate use of that school, that food and that dwelling' (ibid.) Opportunity is a capacity that takes shape in the appropriate use of what we receive. But precisely this capacity is not evenly distributed. It depends on prior conditions, on habits, on security, on language, on health, on relationships, on trust. That is why an opportunity policy cannot limit itself to distributing equal objects. It must question the different capacities of people to transform those objects into a possible life horizon.

The school that inherits inequalities

Here the Italian school becomes an exemplary test bed. The Constitution assigns it an emancipatory task: that of removing obstacles and opening paths, breaking the hereditary transmission of destinies. Yet, all too often, teachers and managers find themselves operating under difficult conditions because the institution as a whole is called upon to compensate for enormous inequalities with insufficient resources, too short a timeframe and blunt instruments. The Invalsi data continue to show, year after year, the weight of socio-economic, cultural and geographical context on learning. Students from more advantaged families perform better, and these gaps are intertwined with profound territorial differences. In some areas of the country, schools still manage to partially correct inequalities of origin, in others they risk recording, certifying and even amplifying them. The institution that should prevent fate from turning into destiny sometimes ends up putting a public stamp on what the lottery of birth has already produced.

Seen through Roemer's eyes, this is not just a question of expenditure. It is a question of the architecture of justice. A school that is only formally equal can produce profoundly unequal opportunities. An even distribution of resources can become regressive if it ignores that some territories, some families, some children need more schooling, more time, more care, more continuity, more guidance, more support. Not to be favoured, but not to be disadvantaged twice. First by circumstances and then by institutions that pretend not to see them. A Roemerian education policy should then start with some very concrete questions. Where are family, social and territorial disadvantages concentrated? Which schools receive students with greater economic, cultural and linguistic fragility? Which communities have fewer early childhood services, fewer libraries, less transport, less full-time, less orientation possibilities? Which students need more accompaniment in the transition between school cycles, in accessing university, in entering employment? The answer to these questions cannot only be to try to guarantee the same programmes, the same infrastructure and the same school calendar for everyone. The answer should be customised and provide for differentiated resources, proportionate, that is, to the extent of the problems to be solved and the obstacles to be removed. And it is not just a question of how much is invested but how the expenditure is composed. Basilicata, Calabria, Sardinia and Sicily, for example, have the highest expenditure per student than Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna and, at the same time, the worst results in terms of the percentage of third-grade students with insufficient skills. This confirms that the problem is not the amount of money per student, but its composition. In the southern regions almost everything goes into salaries due to the high age of the teachers and very little remains for services: full time, canteens, psycho-educational support, transport. The important relationship is therefore not between expenditure and results, but between the composition of expenditure and results. Where expenditure is oriented towards student services, results are better. Where it is almost entirely absorbed by personnel costs, high expenditure does not translate into quality.

Compensation for the birth lottery

This applies to schools, but not only to schools. It goes for health, because being born in a disadvantaged context often means being exposed to worse environmental conditions, less prevention, higher incidence of chronic diseases, more difficult access to care. It applies to early childhood policies, because the early years are where inequalities begin to settle. It applies to university, because the right to study cannot be reduced to the abstract proclamation that everyone can enrol, if then the cost of living, lack of housing, geographical distance and lack of cultural capital make that possibility impracticable. It is true for the labour market, because access to the best professions often depends on informal networks, unpaid internships, availability for long periods of uncertainty that only some families can afford to finance.

Justice of opportunity, therefore, is not a light justice. It is not the convenient formula by which one gets rid of the issue of equality by establishing equal rules for all and let the best man win. It is, on the contrary, one of the most demanding forms of public justice, because it asks institutions to intervene before the race begins, when inequalities are still less visible but already very powerful. It asks to invest where political performance is less obvious: in young children, in the suburbs, in inland areas, in difficult schools, in fragile families, in the silent passages where it is decided whether a person will learn to think himself capable or not.

There is, in all this, also a different idea of merit. Merit does not disappear. But it stops being the moral legitimation of inequality. It becomes something that can only be recognised after questioning the conditions under which it has matured. A society that rewards achievement without looking at what happened before the starting line is not celebrating merit but advantage disguised as talent. A society that, on the other hand, takes Roemer's perspective seriously knows that effort is only morally meaningful if people have had comparable opportunities to exert it. A competition in which effort is not already bent by the invisible weight of circumstances.

That is why equality of opportunity never coincides with simple identical treatment. Sometimes justice must give more to those who have received less, not to produce an inverse privilege, but to reduce an original disadvantage. It must invest more where the starting conditions are more fragile. It must recognise that neutrality, in an unequal world, can become complicity. Saying 'same rules for all' may sound impartial, but if some arrive at the starting line with light shoes and others with ankle weights, the impartiality of the rule only serves to make the injustice of the race more acceptable.

Repairing departures then means assuming justice as the permanent maintenance of possibilities. It is not enough to declare a path accessible if for many that path remains socially, culturally, economically impracticable. It is not enough to tell young people that the future is in their hands, if we do not first ask ourselves what we have placed in those hands.

A just society does not promise everyone the same outcome. It could not do so, of course, without denying freedom and responsibility. But it can and must prevent the arrival from already being written into the departure. This is the most concrete measure of equality of opportunity.

* Professor of Economics - Director, C-BASS, Center for Behavioral and Statistical Sciences, Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari