The ideal of equal opportunity features in a number of places in John Rawls’s theory of justice, but the most prominent one is, by far, the role it plays in his second principle of justice. The first part of that principle says that social and economic inequalities are just if and when they are attached to offices and positions that are open to all under conditions of, what Rawls calls, fair equality of opportunity (FEOP). Whereas the difference principle, the second part of Rawls’s second principle, has received enormous attention, the FEOP has received nowhere near as much. This neglect is not entirely justiied (some commentators have even referred to the FEOP as Rawls’s Trojan horse).

The FEOP has at least two noteworthy features. The first and obvious one is Rawls’s designation of his equality of opportunity as “fair.” The designator distinguishes Rawls’s ideal from “formal equality of opportunity” (which is sometimes referred to as the ideal of “careers open to talent”) (JF 43). The latter holds when institutions place no formal barriers to individuals’ attainment of scarce and competitive positions (e.g. jobs, admittance to university). This, in effect, nondiscrimination principle holds that no one should be barred from a position due to features such as skin color or sex. For Rawls this nondiscrimination understanding of equal opportunities was insuficient. This ideal of formal equality of opportunity, taken on its own, “means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for inluence and social position” (TJ 106–107).