170 Book Reviews

out what the possibility of such critiques represents: a book chock-full of

thought-provoking argument and analysis. The argument is not perfect
(is it ever?), and the analysis sometimes leaves the reader hungry for
more (a common issue), but the book is certainly an unparalleled accom-
plishment in the subfield. Metz has written the most thorough treatment
of the issues available to date, with plenty of new material to ponder and
critique, and an impressive overview of a field that is increasingly im-
portant. Despite the criticisms in this review, the book is undoubtedly an
important one, and will certainly advance the debate—if not through the
“fundamentality theory,” then certainly through the many arguments
proffered against other views in the literature.

Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-19-981214-1, vii + 269 pp.

John Baker, University College Dublin

Equality of opportunity is the most popular egalitarian principle of our

time: “Nearly everyone believes in some conception of it” (256). Joseph
Fishkin starts this very interesting book by suggesting two of its main
attractions: that it combines the values of equality and freedom, and that
our opportunities have profound effects on who we become (2-3). But
there is another reason for the popularity of equal opportunity, one that
he refers to at other points, namely, that it presents itself as a conception
of equality that is consistent with enormous inequalities of wealth, in-
come, power, status, and other social goods. It therefore typically plays
an important role in the ideological defense of capitalism, by suggesting
that the inequalities it generates can be perfectly fair. Egalitarians will
consequently be interested in how any theory of equal opportunity treats
that issue; I will return to it towards the end of this review.
Following a helpful Introduction, chapter 1 initiates Fishkin’s argu-
ment by surveying some of the existing literature on equal opportunity,
showing how it fails to resolve some central problems. The problem of
the family is that our opportunities are too deeply affected by our up-
bringing. The problem of merit is the difficulty of identifying the features
of people that equal opportunity could permit to affect their prospects.
The problem of the starting gate is that there is no single point in peo-
ple’s lives at which one could defensibly say that they are thenceforth
responsible for what happens to them. The problem of individuality is

© Copyright 2015 by Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 41, No. 1 (January 2015): 170-178.
DOI: 10.5840/soctheorpract20154119
 Book Reviews 171

that familiar conceptions of equal opportunity fail to reflect the diversity

of people’s commitments. All of these problems call for a new approach.
Chapter 2 begins by deepening the criticism of “intrinsic difference
claims”—claims that certain inequalities between people result from dif-
ferences in their natural talents as distinct from their environments.
Through a very clear account of some fundamental truths of contempo-
rary genetics, Fishkin compellingly demonstrates that no such claim is
tenable. He goes on to set out a model of human development that de-
picts the inextricability of “nature and nurture,” before criticizing the
very idea of equal opportunities. The purported conclusion of the chapter
is that equalizing opportunities is “conceptually impossible” (128).
Chapter 3 sets out Fishkin’s position, which he calls “Opportunity
Pluralism.” The major shift of perspective he proposes is that instead of
thinking of equal opportunity as a mechanism for ensuring that people
get what they deserve, we should think of it as a way of widening every-
one’s opportunities, particularly those of the people with the most limited
range of them. Opportunity Pluralism has four core components. The
first is a plurality of values and goals, including a wide and publicly
acknowledged diversity of conceptions of flourishing. The second is for
as many as possible of the goods and roles that people value to be non-
positional, non-competitive, and accessible independently of one another
(“unbundled”). The third component is a plurality of paths leading to
these valued goods and roles, dispensing as far as possible with “bottle-
necks” on the way. Finally, there are multiple, competing sources of au-
thority in relation to all these goods, roles, paths, and bottlenecks, with
encouragement for new “experiments in living.” The most novel idea
here is that of a bottleneck, which Fishkin defines as “a narrow place in
the opportunity structure through which one must pass in order to suc-
cessfully pursue a wide range of valued goods” (13). Most of chapter 3
consists of a detailed analysis of the “dynamics” of bottlenecks and of
the principles that should apply to them. That discussion leads into a
treatment of flourishing, perfectionism, and priority.
The fourth chapter of Bottlenecks applies Opportunity Pluralism to
three issues of American public policy. The first is the role of social class
as a bottleneck, highlighting how class position controls access to the
financial resources necessary for basic goods; how it regulates access to
college, and thereby to further opportunities contingent on having a de-
gree; and how it functions through geographical segregation to limit some
people’s opportunities. The second question is how the organization of
paid work leads to restrictions of occupational choice and mobility and to
gender inequalities. The third part of the chapter analyzes antidiscrimina-
tion law in terms of bottlenecks. A brief Conclusion follows.
172 Book Reviews

There is a lot to like in Bottlenecks. I particularly recommend the dis-

cussion of nature, nurture, and human development in chapter 2 (83-
115). The idea that we all have certain built-in “natural” capacities, and
that it would somehow be all right if our achievements reflected these
capacities, seems to have a very deep purchase in modern culture, re-
inforced by endless popular discussions of genetics. Fishkin’s case for
saying that everything about us is 100% genetic and 100% environmen-
tal is a powerful antidote to that view. A key idea here is that nothing
happens to any organism except in interaction with some environment or
other, and that an organism’s interaction with different environments
yields different outcomes. If within a given environment one person
thrives and another doesn’t, that does not show the natural superiority of
one to the other, but only their superiority within that environment, an
environment that can be altered. Fishkin’s subsequent modeling of how
human development works does a great job of showing how our interac-
tions with our environments over our whole lives affect our traits and
abilities. A central implication of all this is that Rawls’s idea of Fair
Equality of Opportunity, and any other view that relies on the idea of
natural talents, is completely untenable.
Another important theme in this book is that anyone interested in
equal opportunity needs to pay attention to the overall opportunity struc-
ture of a society: “an intricate lattice of forking and intersecting paths,
leading to different educational experiences and credentials, different
jobs and professions, different roles in families and communities, and
different goods of intrinsic or instrumental value” (130). Two of
Fishkin’s touchstones are societal forms that have very strict opportunity
structures, the “warrior society” and the “big test” society. A warrior so-
ciety has only two statuses, privileged warriors and disadvantaged non-
warriors. In a big test society there are many roles, but access to the most
desirable ones is controlled by performance on a single test taken at age
sixteen. These are “unitary” opportunity structures that place severe lim-
its on many people’s opportunities for flourishing; the big test is the par-
adigm case of a bottleneck. Fishkin calls for “pluralist” structures that
open up more paths to everyone, leading to a wider range of the many,
largely incommensurable, roles and goods they might come to value.
Fishkin’s analysis of the ways that opportunity structures constrain
people’s opportunities is also very helpful, by distinguishing different
dimensions for assessing particular constraints. One dimension is their
“legitimacy”: to what extent is a specific qualification or skill really nec-
essary for performing a particular job? How costly would it be to change
the rules? In antidiscimination law, the ideas of a bona fide occupational
qualification, of disparate impact or indirect discrimination, and of rea-
 Book Reviews 173

sonable accommodation focus on such questions. But we should also

consider the “severity” of a constraint, which itself factors into its perva-
siveness and strictness. A constraint is more pervasive if it blocks a
broader range of opportunities; it is more strict the more absolutely it is
applied. A legitimate constraint may restrict some people’s opportunities
so severely that it ought to be changed. These criteria provide a useful
framework for analyzing restricted opportunities and for thinking about
how to reform them.
So far I have praised the virtues of Bottlenecks without using the idea
of a bottleneck. How much does this concept add to Fishkin’s position?
“Bottleneck” is a metaphorical use of a term that is already being used
figuratively when we talk of, for example, a traffic bottleneck or a bot-
tleneck in production. It relates strongly to a whole set of spatial terms
we tend to use when talking about equal opportunity: journeys, path-
ways, destinations. One of the primary uses Fishkin makes of the term is
to distinguish widening a bottleneck from going around it, just as we can
ameliorate a traffic bottleneck both by widening a road and by building a
by-pass. But I wonder whether the constraints on opportunity that he dis-
cusses really fit the metaphor all that well. For one thing, both literal and
figurative bottlenecks slow down the flow of wine, or traffic, but they
don’t in the end prevent anything from getting through. The big test, by
contrast, permanently prevents failures from accessing the things that the
test is a passport to. So even this paradigm case is more like a selective
gateway, or a filter, than a bottleneck.
Here is Fishkin’s most general definition of a bottleneck:
Whenever some people’s opportunities are constrained relative to those of others, some-
thing in the opportunity structure is doing the constraining. Something is interacting with
some characteristic of the relevant set of people in a way that cuts them off from many
opportunities. That something, whatever it may be, constitutes what I am calling a bottle-
neck. (143, emphasis in original)

What are those somethings? Consider the bottleneck of having to go

through college to access a wide range of job opportunities (205-12).
This bottleneck perpetuates class inequality, because people from privi-
leged class backgrounds are better equipped to pass through the bottle-
neck than people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Now suppose we
adopt a range of policies designed to provide greater access to college to
working-class students: need-based aid, more state support for higher
education, programs to improve the high school performance of working-
class students, and so on (209). Those help some of them through the
bottleneck, but they don’t widen the bottleneck (which would require
increasing the total number of places)—they prevent others from going
through. Who are those people? What effect does this have on the oppor-
174 Book Reviews

tunity structure as a whole? The metaphor here lends itself to the ideas of
helping through and of widening, but it distracts us from the fact that
reforms may create new exclusions.
Another class-based bottleneck Fishkin examines is the “geography
of opportunity,” through which the prospects of people who live among
the privileged have better life chances than those who live among the
dispossessed. He traces the multiplicity of factors that contribute to these
inequalities, one of which is access to networks of people who encourage
better school performance, provide more accurate information, and con-
trol entry to training and employment. Is it really illuminating to describe
this complex set of social conditions and processes as a bottleneck? It is
certainly something that constrains some people’s opportunities relative
to those of others. But it strains my imagination to try to think of this
geography as a “narrow place in the opportunity structure” that people go
through, or to think of greater integration as a way of helping working-
class children through it. And if we ameliorate this constraint by provid-
ing work experience programs and better mentoring and career guidance
to students in disadvantaged schools, does that count as going around the
thing that constrains them? It may reduce the degree to which it con-
strains them, but the metaphor of going around suggests that we have
avoided the constraint entirely, which isn’t true. None of this undermines
the substantial analyses and recommendations that Fishkin offers when
discussing constrained opportunities. But it does cast doubt on whether
the central image of Bottlenecks is as illuminating as he makes out.
One of Fishkin’s key arguments is that we should abandon the idea of
equal opportunity altogether in favor of opportunity pluralism. Equal
opportunity, he maintains, doesn’t even make sense: it is impossible in
theory and not just in practice. But it seems to me somewhat telling that
his claims to this effect are often embellished with a certain rhetoric. For
example: “making developmental opportunities strictly or precisely
equal turns out to be an idea without a clear meaning” (118, some em-
phasis added); “There is no stage at which it is possible to make oppor-
tunities entirely equal” (254, some emphasis added); “the chimera of a
state of affairs in which everyone’s opportunities are literally equal”
(255, emphasis added). Does anyone actually aspire to making opportu-
nities strictly, precisely, entirely, or literally equal? Political theorists are
well accustomed to inevitable vaguenesses and approximations, so the
issue in question had better be more than that.
Fishkin’s case against equality is concentrated at the end of chapter 2,
where it proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, he considers a “sim-
ple equalization problem” of two children, A and B, one of whom needs
an aide to participate fully in the classroom. What would count as equal
 Book Reviews 175

opportunity, he asks, if A does worse than B when she has no aide, better
than B when she has an aide but B does not, and worse again when they
both have aides? Fishkin considers and rejects three proposals for equal-
izing their opportunities: providing aides only to children with certified
disabilities; providing the two pupils with equally costly support; and
placing the pupils in the same environment, irrespective of their needs.
None of those is acceptable: “we have to give people opportunities they
can actually use ... Because people are different, they require different
opportunities in order to develop and grow” (118). Fine, but how does it
follow that making their opportunities equal has no clear meaning? Since
this is by design a “simple” problem based on a common standard of do-
ing well, the obvious answer to the question of what counts as equal op-
portunity is to provide them with whatever enables them to do equally
well. The first stage of the argument against equality neglects this obvi-
ous answer.
The second stage of the argument relies on the plurality and incom-
mensurability of people’s goals and commitments. Incommensurability
entails that there is no “objective way” to determine whether it is better
to have, for example, “opportunities that might lead to a career in fashion
design or opportunities for religious development and growth that might
lead to a life in the ministry” (121). I found Fishkin’s discussion here a
little confusing. What’s in question is whether it makes sense to talk
about two people, call them Coco and Martin, having equal opportunities
when they have incommensurable goals: how can we compare Coco’s
opportunities to do fashion with Martin’s opportunities to be a minister?
This is not the same question as asking how we can “stand outside the
person and determine which paths and opportunities are best for him”
(121). That question has a clear enough answer, given Coco’s and Mar-
tin’s different personalities and goals. Why does it seem harder to answer
the real question, of what counts as providing two people with equal op-
portunities? The argument Fishkin gestures towards here seems to run
like this: (a) equal opportunity, if it meant anything at all, would mean
giving them each such opportunities as would enable them to achieve
equal well-being; but (b) they have different and incommensurable con-
ceptions of well-being; therefore (c) nothing counts as equal well-being;
a fortiori (d) nothing counts as the set of opportunities that would enable
its achievement. The problem with this (admittedly reconstructed) argu-
ment lies in inferring from (b), the impossibility of comparing the value
of two ends, that (c) it is impossible to compare the well-being of people
with these different ends. Suppose, however, that, subject to certain ca-
veats, we hold that people flourish just to the extent that they succeed in
living a life that they themselves value. Then the fact that A values one
176 Book Reviews

thing and B values something else does not stop us comparing their well-
being at all. That way of thinking does face certain well-known prob-
lems, requiring appropriate caveats, some of which are discussed in
Fishkin’s own discussion of flourishing. I’m not claiming that it is an
easy answer to the problem of diversity, only that it is an answer that
Fishkin does not give enough attention to.
The third stage of the argument is based on what Fishkin calls the
“endogeny of preferences and goals” (121): that they depend on the set
of developmental opportunities and experiences we happen to have. Why
should this dependence make it difficult to say whether one person’s op-
portunities are as good as another’s? Here again Fishkin seems to con-
fuse the question by setting out an example in which it is difficult to de-
cide what would be best for one person: whether a child would be better
off living with her father in the suburbs or her mother in the city. Both
options will provide her with opportunities to thrive—“a life she values”
(124)—but according to different preferences and goals, developed with-
in different environments. For the example to be relevant, however, it has
to be taken as equivalent to comparing the opportunities of someone
growing up in the suburbs with those of someone else growing up in the
city. If each of them ends up with a life she values, why should the fact
that they value different things show that their opportunities were not
equally good? Fishkin does not seem to provide any argument here.
I conclude that Fishkin fails to demonstrate that we should give up
talking about equal opportunities altogether. That conclusion is strength-
ened by reflecting on his own insistence on giving priority to people
“whose opportunities are relatively more constrained” than those of oth-
ers (187; cf. similar phrasing at 143 quoted above and elsewhere). To
have any bite, that aim requires a fairly robust capacity to work out if
some people’s opportunities are more constrained than those of others.
The greater the obstacles posed by pluralism, incommensurability, and
endogeneity to saying whether A’s opportunities are more constrained
than B’s, the less scope there is for prioritizing the opportunities of either
of them. In his Applications chapter, Fishkin makes it clear that he
thinks, as most egalitarians do, that people’s opportunities are more con-
strained the lower they are in the class hierarchy; that women’s opportu-
nities are more constrained than men’s; that the opportunities of the cate-
gories of people protected by antidiscrimination legislation are more
constrained than those of their counterparts. That is, we live in societies
marked by gross inequalities of opportunity. Removing these features of
the opportunity structure might not create strict, precise, entire, or literal
equality, but it would certainly promote equality.
These issues are connected in various ways to the question I raised at
 Book Reviews 177

the start, the relation between equality of opportunity and inequality in

the other conditions of people’s lives. In the simplistic, unitary theories
that Fishkin criticizes, it is presupposed that everyone wants to rise to-
wards the top of a hierarchy defined by shared values. Unfortunately, the
hierachy inevitably generates inequalities of opportunity. The ideological
function of equal opportunity is to legitimate the hierarchy by, among
other things, downplaying its role in subverting equal opportunity itself.
If we shift our model to Opportunity Pluralism, how do things look? Are
we still to assume that there major inequalities of condition? Does Op-
portunity Pluralism help to legitimate them by aiming to give everyone a
fair chance? But do these inequalities nevertheless impede us from real-
izing Opportunity Pluralism in the first place? In which case, does Op-
portunity Pluralism perform an ideological role by distracting us from the
inequalities of condition that undermine it?
With respect to the first question, it seems clear that Fishkin envisions
even the best societies to be marked by considerable inequalities of con-
dition. Noting the problems that arise when “the distribution of income
and wealth remain very unequal,” Fishkin calls for “limiting inequality of
income and wealth,” but objects to “perfect material equality due to con-
fiscatory taxation” because that would make it “too difficult for people to
choose lives in which they prioritized money to different degrees in rela-
tion to other values” (203, emphasis in the original; note also the qualifi-
cation “perfect” and the pejorative term “confiscatory”). In his overall
discussion of social class (199-219), he convincingly identifies class as a
problem, but he nowhere suggests the abolition of class itself as a solu-
tion. In his discussion of gender in “the world of work” (by which he
means paid work), he analyzes some of the obstacles to combining par-
enting with “a full, flourishing work life” (224), but he nowhere suggests
that the occupational structure of society should be transformed so that
all forms of employment contribute to flourishing. In his discussion of
antidiscrimination law (231-53), he acknowledges the corrosive influ-
ence of prejudice, but he does not consider the solution that people
should truly accept each other as equals. Of course, many people believe
that social inequalities are inevitable, and that it is precisely the job of
equal opportunity to make them as fair as possible. But Fishkin never
says that explicitly. Perhaps he thinks that the more closely we ap-
proached a condition of Plurality of Values and Goals (135), the less it
would matter whether there were inequalities of income, wealth, status,
job satisfaction, or respect and recognition, because although some of us
would want high incomes and so on, most of us wouldn’t care: we would
no longer be playing a zero-sum game. All of which looks decidedly like
a legitimation of inequality.
178 Book Reviews

The trouble is that, as Fishkin often emphasizes but not always in

these terms, “a greater equalizing of social conditions” (81) does matter
to the realization of Opportunity Pluralism. Consider, for example, the
class-based inequality of social networks (social capital) that Fishkin
cites as an impediment to the opportunities of working class children
(215-19). It is not just that this inequality makes it easier for privileged
children to achieve higher incomes, status, power, and so on, but that the
overall range of opportunities open to them is less constrained than those
of their disadvantaged peers. Opportunity Pluralism would therefore be
promoted by equality of social capital, that is, by precisely the kind of
equality of condition that it seems to treat as impossible, undesirable, or
both.
That kind of “deep connection” (81) between Opportunity Pluralism
and equality of condition could be replicated in many dimensions of
equality. If some parents have “a full, flourishing work life” and others
don’t, which children are likely to have more constrained developmental
opportunities? If some people occupy positions of power and others posi-
tions of subordination, which of them are likely to have more constrained
opportunities in the future? Unequal social relationships of disdain,
abuse, and violence, as well, clearly constrain the opportunities of people
on their receiving end.
Regardless of the degree of plurality and incommensurability of goals
and values in a modern society, promoting Opportunity Pluralism re-
quires a much more radical equalization of the conditions of social life
than Fishkin seems to acknowledge, and therefore much more of the
zero-sum conflict that he hopes to avoid. Greater equality of condition
would of course make some conceptions of flourishing unattainable—
indeed, morally unacceptable—because they required privileges that no
one could legitimately expect. But that restriction on plurality is entailed
by Fishkin’s principle of prioritizing the opportunities of the most con-
strained.
Fiskin has written an interesting, imaginative book that helps us to
shift our thinking about equal opportunity from making inequalities fair
to enabling everyone to flourish in a pluralist, cooperative society. But
that enabling can only be advanced as part of a radically egalitarian pro-
gram. The cost of pretending otherwise is to turn Opportunity Pluralism
into an ideological cover for its negation.
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