ABSTRACT
Discrimination, understood as differential treatment of individuals on the basis of their respective group memberships, is widely considered to be morally wrong. This moral judgment is backed up in many jurisdictions with the passage of equality of opportunity legislation, which aims to ensure that racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, sexual orientation, disability and other groups are not subjected to discrimination. This chapter explores the conceptual underpinnings of discrimination and equality of opportunity using the tools of analytical moral and political philosophy. It then explains disrespect, prejudice, and harm-based accounts of wrongful discrimination, finding that each failed to identify some cases of wrongful discrimination. Three accounts of equality of opportunity such as formal equality of opportunity, fair equality of opportunity, and luck egalitarian equality of opportunity were then considered, and it was found that these too were subject to counterexamples. It was, finally, argued that an account combining desert prioritarianism and formal equality of opportunity provided a plausible account of wrongful discrimination.
