How do we know if people are equal? There are a number of issues at stake for contemporary philosophers when determining if the goals of egalitarian distributive justice have been achieved: defining the metric of equality, or ‘equality of what’; determining whether the goal is equality per se, or simply priority or sufficiency; and establishing whether there should be conditions for the amelioration of inequality, e.g. that it be the result of circumstance, not choice. A further, related, issue is how much egalitarians should care about outcomes; most egalitarians contend that what is to be equalised is not people’s actual shares of the good in question, but rather, the opportunities to have such shares. I counter this view with an ‘egalitarian flourishing’ approach that, in seeking to make people equal in actual wellbeing, takes exception to the role of opportunity in contemporary argument. The flourishing view means a focus on outcomes, on how people live, in order to enable people to live equally flourishing lives. I argue that if we consider the complex dynamics of choice and circumstance, the role of non-material considerations and the ideal of an egalitarian community, equality of opportunity proves to be an inadequate approach to the realisation of the egalitarian ideal.How do we know if people are equal? There are a number of issues at stake for contemporary philosophers when determining if the goals of egalitarian distributive justice have been achieved: defining the metric of equality, or ‘equality of what’; determining whether the goal is equality per se, or simply priority or sufficiency; and establishing whether there should be conditions for the amelioration of inequality, e.g. that it be the result of circumstance, not choice. A further, related, issue is how much egalitarians should care about outcomes; most egalitarians contend that what is to be equalised is not people’s actual shares of the good in question, but rather, the opportunities to have such shares. I counter this view with an ‘egalitarian flourishing’ approach that, in seeking to make people equal in actual wellbeing, takes exception to the role of opportunity in contemporary argument. The flourishing view means a focus on outcomes, on how people live, in order to enable people to live equally flourishing lives. I argue that if we consider the complex dynamics of choice and circumstance, the role of non-material considerations and the ideal of an egalitarian community, equality of opportunity proves to be an inadequate approach to the realisation of the egalitarian ideal.