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Budapest W3: Emerging Technology and Human Rights - From Chance to Choice

Buchanan, Allan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler (2000) From Chance to Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 61–82.

 Alternative interpretations of equality: 
"Equal opportunity requires only the elimination of legal barriers to similar prospects for persons of similar talents and abilities"
"Equal opportunity requires the elimination of legal and informal barriers of discrimination for persons of similar talents and abilities ("informal barriers" includes extra-legal discrimination based on race, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, class, religion, etc)"
"Equal opportunity requires not only the elimination of legal and informal barriers of discrimination, but also efforts to eliminate the effects of bad luck in the social lottery on the opportunities of those with similar talents and abilities" p.65

 "the dominant view in contemporary liberal political philosophy is that equal opportunity requires at least the elimination of both legal and informal discrimination" p.65-66

 "The Difference Principle requires that inequalities in wealth broadly construed work to the greatest advantage of the worst off" p.68

 "Rawls opts for a combination of a more restrictive conception of equal opportunity with the Difference Principle, rather than a more radical interpretation of equal opportunity that would require counteracting the effects of natural inequalities or eliminating natural inequalities altogether, if this were possible through genetic intervention" p.69

 Social Structural Variant: "preserves a clear connection with the historical roots of the notion of equal opportunity: the idea of careers open to talents, or formal equal opportunity... equal opportunity has to do not with just any inequalities, but with inequalities due to defective social institutions." p.70

 Brute Luck View: "unfair that some should have fewer opportunities as a result of factors over which they have no control - circumstances that did not result from their choices." p.70

 "there can be genetically based conditions that limit people's opportunities, and that what matters, from the standpoint of a general account of equal opportunity, is not whether they are diseases but whether they limit opportunity." p.72

 "equal opportunity has to do with ensuring fair competition for those who are able to compete and with preventing or curing disease that hinders people from developing the abilities that would allow them to compete." p.74

 "There is a principled presumption that genetic intervention to prevent or ameliorate serious limitations on opportunities due to disease is a requirement of justice. And justice may require regulating the conditions of access to genetic enhancements to prevent exacerbations of existing unjust inequalities." p.101

 "the genetic disadvantages that are adverse departures from normal functioning tend to have more serious negative impacts on opportunity." p.101

 "it is not inconceivable that we would come to reclassify as a disease any correctable genetic condition that has a significant adverse impact on equality, because we would come to regard it as an adverse departure from normal functioning." p.101

 "acknowledging a role for genetic intervention in the pursuit of justice may not require anything so radical as "genetic equality", even according  to the more radical (brute luck) theory of equal opportunity or resource egalitarianism." p.101

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