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According to John Rawls, "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions." 1 Like Gaul, justice is tripartite. Rawls affirms an Equal Liberty Principle that guarantees equal basic or constitutional liberties for all citizens and a Difference Principle that requires inequalities in the distribution of certain social and economic benefits, the primary social goods, to be set so that the long-term holdings of primary social goods are maximized for the citizens whose holdings are least. Sandwiched between these two principles is a Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, which has stimulated much less commentary. 2 Yet this Principle is plausible, controversial, and has radical implications for the design of social policy and legislation in modern democracies. This essay assesses Fair Equality of Opportunity and offers reasons for rejecting it. The Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle holds that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. This last condition is glossed as follows: Institutions should be arranged so that any two persons with the same native talent and the same ambition should have the same prospects of success in the competition for positions of advantage that distribute primary social goods. Fair Equality of Opportunity is contrasted with a weaker principle of equality of opportunity that Rawls names "Careers open to talents." The weaker principle requires that positions of advantage should be open to all citizens on a competitive basis, with posts and offices given to those who are best qualified according to impartial criteria of merit suited to the particular post or office that is being filled. 3 Fair Equality of Opportunity can be regarded as an extension of the ideal of nondiscrimination. Living in a society cursed by bigotry, race hatred, misogyny, class division, and similar evils, we can appreciate the ideal of a world in which these evils are entirely overcome, at least within the public realm of civil society. THE PROBLEM OF STUNTED AMBITION In one respect, Fair Equality of Opportunity is inadequate to guarantee that discrimination or oppression is not influencing the distribution of positions of advantage. Imagine a society in which positions of advantage such as jobs and places in schools are assigned by selection according to merit, and effective educational and compensatory institutions operate to offset the advantages of fortunate family position, so that Fair Equality of …