Equal Opportunity

Despite the reprieve given regarding the Buchanan piece, I went ahead and gave it a look since it dealt with my chosen topic of justice or fairness. This appears to have been a fortuitous decision. One of the first ideas addressed by Buchanan is the question of what is equal opportunity really is. I imagine an ethicist or researcher would have a difficult time finding someone who actually believed that there was no right to equal opportunity, but I'd never given clear thought to what is really meant by the words. Buchanan identifies three levels of equal opportunity. The first two are similar in that they both promote a world where people of similar talents and abilities are given the same prospects. The difference being the first requires only the elimination of legal barriers where the second requires that both legal and "informal" barriers be eliminated. (An example of these barriers was given to be institutional racism that didn't rise to the level of legal discrimination.) The third version of equal opportunity required not only the removal of barriers for people of similar abilities, but also a "leveling of the playing field" so that people of lesser abilities could have the same prospects for success. This definition of equal opportunity is troubling when considered in the context of genetic modifications because of the forms that this leveling of the playing field might take. For example, if modern biomedical technology brought us to a place where a person's capability to reason could be enhanced through genetic modification, might this third interpretation of equal opportunity require "us" to provide the person with the crappier roll of the genetic dice an enhancement so he might have access to a level playing field? BUT....... What if the genetic enhancement IS the prospect? Does the "genetically inferior" have more right to enhancement than the guy with the better roll of the dice??? Quite the quandary. One must admit that the idea of a world where everyone has the exact same abilities, either through birth or enhancement sounds a bit spooky.
Yet another facet of this argument harkens back to the debate about what is illness or deficiency and what is just simple human difference. Yet again we use intelligence as our surrogate, but many others might do as well, for example athletic ability. If we decide at some point that a right exists to the "repair" of a genetic flaw, but not to enhancement, where do we draw the line? Triple digit IQs? Quite the quandary indeed.