Social Justice

Chapter 4 turns to normative political philosophy and introduces and defends the liberal egalitarian framework that provides the normative basis for assessments of policies that aim to promote social cohesion in diverse liberal democracies. Apart from the basic liberties, this framework includes a concern for equality, where a distinction between equality of opportunity and luck egalitarianism is introduced, and versions of each are developed, and it is pointed out that both these egalitarian theories can be used to support the conclusions about immigration and integration policies that are developed in the book. It is also argued that both theories should be sensitive to inequality of religious and cultural opportunities and that the concern for equality sometimes speaks in favour of multicultural policies.

Experiments and egalitarianism

In this paper, I reflect on the implications that ultimatum and dictator game experiments might have for public policy and for the debates over egalitarianism. Experiments suggest that people are more inclined to redistribute when outcomes are influenced by luck than effort. This can create difficulties for public policy when people hold contrasting views over whether luck or effort determine outcomes. The results also appear to play into forms of luck egalitarianism. However, they may also be consistent with an alternative understanding of egalitarianism as the impulse to have rules that treat people equally.

Luck egalitarianism without moral tyranny

Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy what this paper calls the moral tyranny constraint. According to this constraint, any acceptable theory of justice must preclude the possibility of an agent unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably leaving others with less advantage under conditions of full compliance with the theory. This paper argues that claim forfeiture is built into luck egalitarianism specifically to preclude such moral tyranny. However, it contends that the dominant interpretation of luck egalitarianism fails to fully satisfy the moral tyranny constraint. It offers an alternative interpretation that both eliminates the possibility of moral tyranny and rescues the position from two other prominent objections that have been directed against luck egalitarianism.

Justice, Luck, and Pairwise Comparisons

This chapter extends the anti-anti-luckist programme to political philosophy, and to the doctrine of luck egalitarianism in particular. Luck egalitarianism affirms that unchosen relative inequalities between agents are unjust. It condemns inequalities that are due to ‘brute luck’, and upholds inequalities that are due to ‘option luck’. Though it can be easily enough stated, luck egalitarianism is actually a complex theory with two separate components: egalitarianism and anti-luckism. Standard luck egalitarianism’s commitment to pairwise comparisons makes it vulnerable to what Susan Hurley calls the ‘Boring Problem’. The Boring Problem points out that any two agents in a pairwise comparison are bound to lack control over the relevant income gap between them, because each of them controls, at best, only one side of that comparison. Though Hurley herself is relatively dismissive of the Boring Problem, it is contended here that, when it is properly appreciated, it inflicts huge damage on luck egalitarianism, which needs in turn to be re-organized as a ‘baseline-sensitive’ theory that dispenses with pairwise comparisons. Baseline-sensitive luck egalitarianism makes decent progress on a number of critical fronts, particularly Saul Smilansky’s ‘Paradox of the Baseline’. But even this form of luck egalitarianism is still open to a worry about how it understands the relationship between its egalitarian default and its case for permissible inequalities, and it has less to say than it should about the structural aspects of a social system that generate inequalities.

Strokes of Luck

Strokes of Luck offers a large-scale treatment of the role of luck in our judgements about blameworthiness and responsibility, in moral philosophy, and in principles of distributive justice, in political philosophy. It takes an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ stance on these matters, and is opposed to the influential ‘anti-luckist’ views which hold that judgements of blameworthiness, or distributive relations, should be adjusted to annul or neutralize differential luck. It provides a new reading of Bernard Williams’s famous essay ‘Moral Luck’ which emphasizes the dissimilarity of Williams’s aims from the aims of Thomas Nagel and his intellectual descendants. It contends that luck egalitarianism is a structurally flawed programme, and it argues for a revised understanding of John Rawls’s justice as fairness that interprets Rawls’s hostility to factors that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ in a novel way stationed more closely to his contractarian apparatus, and less closely to luck egalitarian concerns.

What is Arbitrary about Moral Arbitrariness?

John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ is often cited as a central source of inspiration for luck egalitarianism, which is, correlatively, often characterized as a more refined version of justice as fairness. Rawls’s distributive hostility to morally arbitrary endowments is standardly interpreted as betraying hostility to distributions that are skewed by brute luck. This chapter argues otherwise. It has two main aims. First, it replaces the standard ‘Neutralization Interpretation’ of Rawls’s main arguments with the ‘Irrelevance Interpretation’. According to the Irrelevance Interpretation, morally arbitrary person endowments ought to play no role in the selection of principles of justice in the original position. According to the Neutralization Interpretation, by contrast, principles of justice ought to expunge the influence of any inequalities that are due to luck. The Irrelevance Interpretation is more permissive of inequalities, just as long as they serve some other purpose, such as improving the position of the worst-off. The Irrelevance Interpretation is also more congenial to Rawls’s investment in the contractarian machinery of the original position and the veil of ignorance.