Writing in the New English Review, Dalrymple catches a glimpse of his dead father’s face in a taxi mirror (his own, in fact) and follows the thread of inherited characteristics into a meditation on the difference between unfairness and injustice, arguing that the pursuit of true equality of opportunity, taken to its logical conclusion, would require the conditions of a battery farm.
So long as circumstances have an effect on a human’s destiny, the search for perfect justice, conceived as universal fairness, will not only be futile, but harmful. It will distort effort, diverting it into useless channels, and harm real and possible progress. As a goal, its very impossibility of accomplishment will provoke resentment, and indeed is already doing so.