Equality of outcome (short note)

Equality of outcome

Equality of outcome (or of result) asks that rewards such as income, wealth and other social goods be shared equally, whatever people's backgrounds, talents or efforts. Socialists, communists and anarchists, IGNOU notes, treat equality of income as the most vital form of equality. Marx's own goal was different: he set common ownership of productive resources against equal or more equal private property, and held that full social equality needs the abolition of private property, however evenly it is spread. Marxists and socialists also hold that economic inequality supports other forms of inequality, so that public control of key resources is needed. Equality of outcome differs from equality of opportunity, which only requires fair chances to compete and accepts unequal results from fair competition.

Arguments for. Opportunities cannot really be equal where family wealth passes down the generations; entrenched inequality divides society and breeds resentment; and some material equality is a condition of real liberty, since legal and civil rights mean little to a person with no job or home.

Arguments against. It overrides individual effort and choice, weakens incentives, and can only be maintained by heavy intervention in people's lives; critics say its pursuit ends in stagnation, injustice and even tyranny. Liberals therefore prefer to leave rewards to free and fair competition.

Middle positions. Most democracies adopt neither pole: they pursue equal opportunity together with a minimum of living conditions for everyone. Rawls's difference principle allows inequalities only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, which is neither equality of outcome nor mere equality of opportunity.