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This chapter focuses on the neutralization approach and raises a difficulty inherent in it. In particular, it argued that the aim of neutralizing the effects of differences in people's circumstances runs counter to some widely held moral intuitions. For if we suppose that justice or equality of opportunity requires the neutralization of these effects, then it would seem that each of us has a reason to refrain from behaving in any way that would advantage our children relative to others. Yet that, in turn, would entail that we have a reason (even if that reason is inconclusive) not to pass on our skills and experience to our children, or even spend ‘quality time’ with them, when we know that doing so would advantage them. This is strongly counter-intuitive. In place of the neutralization approach, justice requires us to mitigate the effects of differences in people's circumstances.

In order to defend a version of the mitigation approach as opposed to the neutralization approach, a plausible set of principles that might constitute that approach must be identified. The strategy here is to work from the bottom up: to seek defensible principles to govern specific goods or specific aspects of people's circumstances, and then to see whether they can be grounded in more abstract principles. The chapter focuses on three areas: access to qualifications, the giving of gifts and bequests, and the effects of differences in natural talents and abilities. The principles that emerge should be thought of as working together to spell out what kind of impact differences in social circumstances and natural endowments may justly have upon access to advantage. These different principles have different characters: some are best understood as quasi-egalitarian, whilst others are grounded in a moderate version of the sufficiency view.

This chapter argues that particular versions of the mitigation approach may also incorporate ‘quasi-egalitarian principles’ — principles which hold that certain kinds or degrees of inequality are objectionable. It is also maintained here that a defensible version of the mitigation approach might incorporate more than one kind of principle — it need not consist entirely of quasi-egalitarian principles, nor need it be exhausted by a prioritarian or sufficiency principle — and, furthermore, that different kinds of principles might be appropriate for different goods or different aspects of people's circumstances.