I think it is an ideal, yes. But there are other ideals it needs to be balanced against. For everyone to have equal opportunities, everyone would have to be e

I think it is an ideal, yes. But there are other ideals it needs to be balanced against. For everyone to have equal opportunities, everyone would have to be equal, or in other words, everyone would have to be the same. Even if that were possible, it wouldn't be worth losing our diversity. (And as I mentioned above, while giving everyone equal opportunities despite their differences might be more fair to them, it could be less fair to others involved, like the startup investor.) My point was that we need to recognize these situations where our ideals conflict, so that we can decide what balance we prefer. It seems like by accepting 'discrimination' based on intelligence or athletic ability, we are recognizing that the value of having the most skilled people doing certain jobs outweighs the unfairness to the less skilled applicants, who may work just as hard, but have no control over their innate characteristics. On the other hand, while it may be true that a person with a family has less time or energy to devote to work than a single person, or a male with a baby has more time than a female with a baby, we have decided that gender equality and the right to have a family outweigh the unfairness to the investor who would ideally take all information into account when choosing an investment. I think that's totally reasonable, but it is helpful to recognize that that is what we're doing, rather than simply making statements like "sexism is wrong", without thinking about it any further. (Because we will eventually run into a situation where our initial reaction doesn't turn out to match with our core values, and it would be good to recognize and correct that.)