Abstract
The subject of equal opportunities has been more and more present in today's modern societies for many decades now. Some use it as a descriptive term for an approach intended to provide a certain social environment in which people are not excluded from the activities of society, such as education, employment, or health care, on the basis of immutable traits.
This led to the principle of affirmative action, where a society recognizes that some individuals may face more difficulties than the others in several situations (when it comes to get a job, or rent an apartment for instance), and then decides to help these people in order to compensate the original inequality.
Some theorists compare it as an inequality to erase a first inequality. Then, the concept of equal opportunity is closely aligned with the concept of equality before the law, and ideas of meritocracy, but mustn't be confounded with the concept of equality of outcomes; individuals may have the same chances to attain a certain level of welfare, but some of them may happen not to attain it, for personal or contextual reasons.
