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REAL-WORLD LUCK EGALITARIANISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2010

George Sher
George Sher
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Rice University
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Abstract

Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if we begin with the notion of responsible choice and interpret luck in terms of its absence. I argue, further, that the difference between the two versions is significant because many real-world inequalities fall precisely in the gap between them, and that attempts to adjudicate between them lead quickly to hard questions about the relation between equality and responsibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 218 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2010

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References

1 For an influential early statement of this view, see Dworkin, Ronald, “What Is Equality? Part II: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 283–345Google Scholar. For important discussion, see Cohen, Gerald, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (July 1989): 906–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the influential series of papers by Arneson, Richard that includes “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 77–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 159–94Google Scholar; “Luck Egalitarianism and the Undeserving Poor,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 5, no. 4 (1997): 327–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Luck Egalitarianism Interpreted and Defended,” Philosophical Topics 32, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 2004): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an influential critical discussion (in which the name “luck egalitarianism” was first introduced), see Anderson, Elizabeth, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent book-length treatment, see Hurley, Susan, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

2 For related discussion, see Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, 159–68.

3 The existence of such an option is, of course, only a necessary condition for the resulting inequality's justice. For interesting discussion of some of what would have to be added to arrive at a sufficient condition, see the papers by Arneson that are cited in note 1.

4 I discuss a variety of cases of this sort, and their implications concerning the epistemic condition for responsibility, in my book Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 Richard Arneson notices the difference between these two versions of luck egalitarianism in his essay “Luck Egalitarianism Interpreted and Defended.” However, Arneson does not discuss the full range of cases (or, in my opinion, the most important class of cases) about which the two versions disagree.

6 See Smith, Holly, “Culpable Ignorance,” The Philosophical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1983): 543–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Sher, George, “Out of Control,” Ethics 116, no. 2 (January 2006): 285–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For cogent criticism, see Levy, Neil, “Restoring Control: Comments on George Sher,” Philosophia 36, no. 2 (June 2008): 213–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” 931.

9 I introduce this term in Who Knew? For some representative discussions that assert or presuppose the searchlight view, see Herman, Barbara, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 99–101Google Scholar; Wallace, R. Jay, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 139Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Michael J., “Moral Responsibility and Ignorance,” Ethics 107 (April 1997): 410–26, esp. pp. 418 and 421CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levy, Neil, “Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility,” The Monist 86 (2003): 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For further examples, see Sher, Who Knew?, chap. 2.

11 For discussion of some possible ways of defending the searchlight view, see Sher, Who Knew?, chaps. 3 and 4.

12 Dworkin, “Equality of Resources,” 302.

13 Arneson said this in the version of “Egalitarianism and the Undeserving Poor” that he delivered at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, but the quotation does not appear in the published version of that paper.

14 Arneson, Richard, “Equal Opportunity for Welfare Defended and Recanted,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 4 (1999): 489CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Arneson, “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” 85.

16 Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” 922.

17 See, e.g., Dworkin, Ronald, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 323Google Scholar.

18 Dworkin, “Equality of Resources,” 306.

19 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 160Google Scholar.

20 Dworkin, “Equality of Resources,” 284.

21 Barry, Nicholas, “Defending Luck Egalitarianism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2006): 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.