I undertake research on equality of opportunity and education. My approach to this topic is inspired by John Rawls’ principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. I have developed and defended a revised version of that principle, according to which it is especially important that people have sufficient opportunities to develop their talents. I have drawn out the implications of this account for life-long educational opportunities and curriculum design. I have also developed a pluralist account of fairness in university admissions, which incorporates principles of equality, adequacy and parental freedom. In published research I defended a cap on the admission of privately educated students to elite universities at the proportion of school aged children who attend private schools, currently 7% in the UK. I am seeking to develop this account further in the future, specifically to develop rigorous benchmarks that can be used to evaluate admissions at elite English universities today.
I continue to contribute to debates about distributive justice, and in particular sufficientarianism. I have become associated with a version of sufficientarianism according to which sufficiency thresholds mark a change or shift in our reasons to benefit people further. I call this shift-sufficientarianism and I develop this view in my first book Just Enough: sufficiency as a demand of justice. A special issue of the journal Law, Ethics and Philosophy contains seven critical responses to the book and my own reply. Almost all sufficientarians I know reject this position. They hold, instead, that sufficiency thresholds identify a point beyond which we have no reasons to benefit people, or beyond which inequalities are not important for justice. We continue to discuss and debate the differences between us. I will reflect further on the questions and objections they raise about my position and hope to raise a few about their position in the future.