How Can We Promote Equality?

We have already seen some of the basic disagreements between socialists and liberals over the best way to achieve equality — one side stressing public control over key economic resources, the other stressing open and fair competition. While the relative strengths and limits of each of these views continue to be debated the world over, any real attempt to promote equality also needs to work out what concrete principles and policies to actually put in place. In particular, this raises a genuinely contested question that runs through the rest of the chapter: is the use of affirmative action — giving deliberate, positive support to historically disadvantaged groups — justified as a way of bringi …