'Really' Equal: Opportunities and Autonomy*

Equality of opportunity has become the default position in contemporary liberal democracies, something to which no one could seriously object. Apart from its seeming obviousness (who would not prefer more opportunities to less, and who would say that their distribution should be unequal?), it has two especially compelling attractions for political theorists. The first is that it recognises that different things matter to different people, hence that societies cannot equalise simply by handing out identical parcels of goods or activities. It seems, that is, to solve the 'equality of what?' conundrum. The second is that it acknowledges people as responsible agents, accountable at least to some extent for the choices they make and the things that they do. John Roemer speaks for many when he says that 'one, if not the, major