Abstract:
The ideal of fair equality of opportunity is widely endorsed as a central commitment within liberal democracies. Given its domestic importance, the attempt to extend the ideal to the global sphere may seem to be required for those committed to our equal moral standing. The extension to the global sphere faces many important challenges, not least because there can be very different conceptions of valuable opportunities and favored social positions in different parts of the world. This chapter explores whether there are robust ways around this issue and argues that there are. More importantly, this chapter shows that underlying our convictions about global equality of opportunity lies a tangle of related intuitions that often get confused. When these are identified, they can be rewoven into a coherent account which entails important reforms in a number of domains.