Economics and Philosophy, 11, (1995), 25-55 EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OR EQUAL SOCIAL OUTCOME? MARC FLEURBAEY THEMA - Universitede Cergy-Pontoise 1 INTRODUCTION John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony, particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on 'Equality of What?' thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how this selection ought to be carried out. Two different kinds of selection appear in this field. First, the relevant individual outcomes have to be determined. A long-standing tradition in normative economics has taken subjective well-being to be the relevant individual outcome, but there are now many objections to this viewpoint (Rawls 1982, Dworkin 1981a, Sen 1985, Cohen 1989). This first selection belongs to all individualistic theories of justice and is not specific to selective egalitarianism. What characterizes selective egalitarianism is an additional selection. Most authors proceed with this The first draft of this paper was written while I was visiting the University of California at Davis, under the program Economy, Justice and Society. Helpful comments by T. Andreani, F. Block, H. Brighouse, J. Carens, J. Dreze, L. Gevers, D. Hausman, F. Maniquet, J. Roemer, E. Schokkaert, D. van de Gaer, P. Van Parijs, two anonymous referees, and especially D. Copp and P. Mongin are gratefully acknowledged. I am very grateful to R. Ameson for his nice rejoinder in the Social Choice and Welfare conference, Caen, June 1992. I have also benefitted from discussions with C. Amsperger and W. Gaertner, and thank participants in seminars in Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve. I alone remain responsible (in the second if not in the first of the two senses of responsibility distinguished in this paper) for the errors and shortcomings that remain. 25