Paul Gomberg, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Raceand Contributive JusticeMalden, MA: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 184. ISBN 978-1-4051-6082-7(pbk), $24.95

Alexander Brown

Received: 7 November 2007 /Accepted: 8 November 2007 / Published online: 12 December 2007# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

A great many liberal egalitarian philosophers regard the issue of equal opportunity as one ofensuring not merely that all have the same legal rights of access to positions of advantage insociety (such as being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer) but also that all have a fair chance toattain them (see Rawls 1971, p. 73; Jacobs 2004, p. 9). Paul Gomberg’s book, How to MakeOpportunity Equal, defends the radical position that this kind of competitive equality ofopportunity is ‘impossible’ and that, at any rate, true equality of opportunity only comesabout when all labor, both routine and complex, is shared (pp. 1−2). Professor Gombergwrites in a hard-hitting, knowledgeable and engaging way about the problems of racism andlack of opportunity in American society and marshals an array of statistical and anecdotalevidence to illustrate his case.

Although he does not advocate that workers seize control of production throughrevolution, Gomberg is clearly a Marxist at heart arguing as he does that society ought to‘change the organization of production so that opportunity to perform complex labor isunlimited’ (pp. 166−7). According to Marx (1844, 1867), capitalist modes of productionand the specialization of human labor turn the worker into a living appendage of productivemachinery; enslaved by his productive role, his work is repetitive drudgery. For his part,Gomberg acknowledges that routine labor is concentrated within the ranks of the workingclasses but highlights the important dimension of race in the US. He argues that unequaleducational opportunities, lack of opportunity to perform complex labor and dispropor-tionate poverty among African Americans are not just class phenomena, they are the resultof historical and systematic anti-black prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping andsegregation (Chap. 1). Faced with the reply that many poor white people do as badly inschools and in the labor market as black people, Gomberg replies by insisting that the causeof lack of opportunity among the black community is anti-black racism and that if somepoor white people are doing as badly, then this is because ‘something like racism’ isadversely affecting their prospects as well (pp. 9−10).

Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2008) 11:113–116DOI 10.1007/s10677-007-9099-x

A. Brown (*)School of Public Policy, University College London, 29/30 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9QU, UKe-mail: alex.brown@ucl.ac.uk

Gomberg defends equality of opportunity to attain a constellation of ‘unlimited’ goods(p. 1), which includes the good of developing and exercising complex abilities (mastering askill or knowledge), the good of contributing our abilities to a social group (through labor)and the good of thinking well of ourselves and being thought well of by others (againthrough labor) (Chap. 6). How could a society achieve opportunity for unlimited goods?Gomberg gives the example of the skill of surgery. Suppose the opportunity to learn surgery(a complex labor) is made conditional on a willingness to teach this skill to others. Heargues that when each opportunity includes the duty to create opportunity for others in thisway, the opportunity becomes unlimited (p. 83). It seems to me, however, that at mostGomberg has shown how a limited opportunity to become a surgeon could be madesustainable from one generation to the next; not how it could be made unlimited for allwithin a generation: for even if every trained surgeon spends a certain number of hours perweek teaching new apprentices, it is scarcely imaginable that the proposed conventioncould afford opportunities to learn and practice surgery (or something comparable) to vastnumbers of people, let alone to everyone.

A central feature of Gomberg’s vision of a more equal society is the premise thatcomplex and routine labor should be shared. As he puts it, ‘[t]he spirit of sharing complexand routine labor is expressed by the idea that everyone, including doctors, cleans up’(p. 76). Once again, the parallels with Marx are striking. In The German Ideology, forexample, Marx and Engels famously wrote that ‘in communist society, where nobody hasone exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch hewishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do onething today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattlein the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,fisherman, shepherd or critic’ (1845, p. 22). While Gomberg does not argue against allspecialization of labor, he does criticize the division of labor within branches of productionand between the organization and execution of production (p. 77).

There are, of course, different ways of defending labor specialization. One is the nowwidely discredited argument that people are by their nature suited to one particular type ofwork and that a just society is one in which each person fulfils his or her natural role, anargument exemplified in Plato’s Republic. According to Gomberg, this sort of argument canalso be found in the work of numerous apologists for the slave trade in the US and incurrent work on race, education and labor. He argues that these ideas fall under scrutiny anddo not support the argument that black people are more suited to routine labor and shouldbe trained accordingly (Chaps. 10 and 11). However, a second, far more powerful,argument for the division of labor is the argument from efficiency. Put crudely, whenworkers spend all of their time engaged in a certain kind of labor they invariably perfect therelevant skills and become more productive and this additional output means that everyonecan consume more. In reply to this, Gomberg simply insists that productive efficiency is notthe be-all-and-end-all. In a society where production is orientated toward meeting needsrather than consumption, productive efficiency is less important he argues (p. 88). This maybe true, but the difficulty is, I think, that most actual societies seem to be moving awayfrom, not towards, such norms. What is more, it might be that the specialization of laborgives people the maximum opportunity to pursue valued complex activities in their ownfree time, and so it might have considerable instrumental value.

How does society ensure that positions of complex labor and prestige could be ofunlimited supply? Gomberg suggests that this could be achieved by breaking downpositions into a series of smaller complex jobs. For example, the position of a surgeon

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could be organized into a number of smaller jobs including abdominal surgeon (p. 89). Yetarguably this proposal is likely to be both very costly and drastically inefficient, and sonigh-on impossible to achieve. After all, a person cannot simply become an abdominalsurgeon overnight. A person must first acquire the skills and knowledge in order to learnhow to become a doctor, then after many years of training a surgeon and, finally, anabdominal surgeon. The upshot is that the amount of resources that would be required tomake the relevant education and training available to large numbers of people is potentiallyenormous. Moreover, once someone has the skills and knowledge to work as an abdominalsurgeon surely it is a waste of her talent to restrict the amount of time she can spend doingthat job by forcing her to engage in a prescribed amount of routine labor?

In the end, Gomberg argues for ‘contributive justice’ as opposed to distributive justice.Distribute justice construes goods such as income, wealth, opportunities and prestige asindividual rewards, where access is to these goods is often conditional on personalperformance and other merit indicators. Contributive justice, by contrast, regards theopportunity to contribute complex labor as both a duty, in the sense that persons motivatedby justice ought to develop skills and knowledge and contribute their labor to society inreturn for material needs and unlimited opportunities to contribute, and as an opportunity,which people may claim as a matter of right, in the sense that developing capacities andcontributing complex labor to society is something persons desire and may rightfullydemand an opportunity to do as a reasonable basis for social cooperation (p. 157). The ideathat everyone has a right to the opportunity to contribute complex labor is, then, adistinctive aspect of the view. In theory it means that unskilled or unemployed people sufferinjustice merely by virtue of lacking the opportunity to develop the necessary capacities orthe opportunity to contribute their complex labor.

However, what if certain people are simply unable to contribute complex labor?What if some people are able to contribute but do not wish to do so? What if taxpayersresent having to fund expensive training? What if private universities and hospitalsprefer not to make opportunities to learn surgery conditional on a willingness to teachthis skill to others? What if there simply aren’t enough complex jobs to go around?Gomberg does not endorse the use of coercive force to achieve contributive justice. Heaccepts that his proposals are utopian in the sense that they require active widespreadsupport, support which itself relies on a very different set of social norms to those wecurrently have (p. 158). Even so, he believes that these norms could be taught andinternalized over time (p. 159). However, it seems to me that this relies on certaincontroversial assumptions, not least that the denial of the specialization of labor isconsistent with fundamental human nature and the ordinary workings of most societiesacross the ages.

While Gomberg shows real insight into the deprivations and causes of deprivation facedby the African American community in the US, the main problem with the book is that hisanalysis reaches far beyond equality of opportunity properly called and into the murkywaters of the social organization of labor. On top of this, I conjecture that his utopiansolution is likely to seem attractive to only a small percentage of people (including, I daresay, a small percentage of African Americans). This is all the more problematic given that atthe outset Gomberg declares that ‘[t]his book is not concerned just with abstract socialphilosophy; it is also an effort to end the harms of racism’ (p. 10). I suspect that while manywill regard his radical proposals with great interest, when all is said and done few will bemoved by them in practice who weren’t already Marxist at heart. Nor is it immediatelyobvious why it wouldn’t be a better solution all things considered to combine freedom of

Paul Gomberg, how to make opportunity equal: race and contributive justice 115

occupation with more robust forms of anti-racism, fair equality of opportunity and perhapseven some sort of income compensation for persons who perform mainly tedious routinelabor (see Baker 1992, p. 110).

References

Baker J (1992) An egalitarian case for basic income. In: Van Parijs P (ed) Arguing for basic income. Verso,London

Jacobs L (2004) Pursuing equal opportunities: the theory and practice of egalitarian justice. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge

Marx K (1844) Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In: Colletti L (ed) Karl Marx early writings.Penguin, London, 1975

Marx K (1867) Capital: volume I. Fowkes B (trans.). Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976Marx K and Engels F (1845) The German ideology. In: Pascal R (ed) The German ideology. International

Publishers, New York, 1947Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Clarendon, Oxford

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