Fair Equality of Opportunity, Social Relationships, and Epistemic Advantage

Abstract

Abstract Social relationships affect economic opportunities not simply by influencing the development of individuals’ talents and aspirations but also by generating certain relational epistemic goods, which provide employers with reasons for hiring those whom they share a social relationship with. This chapter argues that fair equality of economic opportunity requires fair epistemic opportunity—a fair distribution of opportunities for epistemic advantage, defined in terms of ‘holdings’ of relational epistemic goods. Fair epistemic opportunity can be realized by either (1) regulating upstream opportunities to acquire relational epistemic goods, through policies of social integration and associative inclusion, or (2) cancelling the downstream effects of relational epistemic goods on individual prospects by imposing a norm of anonymity on hiring practices. The chapter argues that there are reasons of justice, efficiency and practicality to prefer the latter strategy. The argument has implications for how the practical requirements of the human right to work should be understood.