‘(Luck and Relational) Egalitarians of the World, Unite!’
In recent years, egalitarian political philosophy has been marred by a family dispute between luck and relational egalitarianism. This chapter presents a certain view about what constitutes the core difference and disagreement between the two views. This enables us to set aside a number of issues, e.g., the role of responsibility, which are better discussed as intraluck or intrasocial relational egalitarian issues. Second, a defense is made of a guarded reductionist claim that any objectionable inegalitarian social relation can be analyzed as an unequal distribution of a relevantly related social good. Third, the chapter ends with a proposal of an ecumenical egalitarian theory that incorporates insights from both views, as well as a third egalitarian view: dispositional egalitarianism, which seems implicit in Samuel Scheffler’s work. A specific luck-ist version of the ecumenical view, which is grounded in the value of fairness, is tentatively suggested.