In the situation envisaged, FEO assigns priority to helping a better off person in a certain respect: enable the person to have the same prospects of competitive success as anyone else with the same native talent and ambition. In contrast, priority to the worse off says institute whatever policies will increase a function of aggregate well-being that gives greater weight to achieving gains for a person, the worse off she would otherwise be. The claim then will be that if the weights are properly set, priority appropriately balances the desirability of achieving benefits for better-off and worse-off people. From this standpoint, FEO goes wrong in several ways—in privileging resources over welfare outcomes, in failing to allow inequalities that advance priority-weighted well-being if the FEO constraint cannot be satisfied, and in demanding that resources flow to better-off people, when required to fulfill the FEO constraint, even when those resources would do more priority-weighted good by being deployed elsewhere, such as to the worse off.