PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

If the 62 world's richest people own as much as the half of the global poorest (Hardoon, Fuentes-Nieva and Ayele 2016), this is more than worrying and socially unacceptable, especially given that many of this poorest half are children. Increasing educational access and achievement of these children (but also of the poor in general), who are often powerless to defend themselves and to fight for their rights, might be one important leverage to increase their long-term opportunities. Education is known to influence health outcomes, job market entry, control over life, and so on, as Keisha Ray (2016) argues convincingly. Education might be especially important for the multiply disadvantaged. Thus, we strongly agree with Ray that society has a moral obligation to deliberate about all potential means to improve the conditions of disadvantaged individuals (with/without diseases) for the sake of justice. Despite these agreements, however, we find ourselves rather baffled by the central proposal in this article. A basic source of confusion is the article's conceptual carelessness: Ray intermingles poverty, social disadvantage, genetic disadvantage, socioeconomic disadvantage, poor parenting, bad teaching, and poor schooling, allowing the reader no precise grip on the individual or social factors that the proposed intervention of cognitive enhancement (CE) is meant to address. In this commentary we use the nonspecific phrase “poor and disadvantaged children” to denote the highly generalized target of “opportunity maintenance.”