The family of theories dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism’ represent an attempt to infuse egalitarian thinking with a concern for personal responsibility, arguing that inequalities are just when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, choice, but are unjust when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, luck. In this essay I argue that luck egalitarians should sometimes seek to limit inequalities, even when they have a fully choice-based pedigree (i.e., result only from the (...) choices of agents). I grant that the broad approach is correct but argue that the temporal standpoint from which we judge whether the person can be held responsible, or the extent to which they can be held responsible, should be radically altered. Instead of asking, as Standard (or Static) Luck Egalitarianism seems to, whether or not, or to what extent, a person was responsible for the choice at the time of choosing, and asking the question of responsibility only once, we should ask whether, or to what extent, they are responsible for the choice at the point at which we are seeking to discover whether, or to what extent, the inequality is just, and so the question of responsibility is not settled but constantly under review. Such an approach will differ from Standard Luck Egalitarianism only if responsibility for a choice is not set in stone—if responsibility can weaken then we should not see the boundary between luck and responsibility within a particular action as static. Drawing on Derek Parfit’s illuminating discussions of personal identity, and contemporary literature on moral responsibility, I suggest there are good reasons to think that responsibility can weaken—that we are not necessarily fully responsible for a choice for ever, even if we were fully responsible at the time of choosing. I call the variant of luck egalitarianism that recognises this shift in temporal standpoint and that responsibility can weaken Dynamic Luck Egalitarianism (DLE). In conclusion I offer a preliminary discussion of what kind of policies DLE would support. (shrink)

Social egalitarians hold that one fundamental requirement of the ideal of social equality is that people should stand in relations of non-domination to one another. In the light of this, they reject luck egalitarian principles of justice as incompatible with a society of equals, because the former violate the non-domination requirement. I call this the domination objection. In this paper I examine its force against Dworkinian resource egalitarianism. There are two reasons why equality of resources might be thought to be (...) vulnerable to it. First, Dworkin has been interpreted to maintain that as long as people’s preferences are authentic, people should be consequentially responsible for the choices that flow from such preferences. However, Dworkin’s view on when people’s choices should be considered to be authentic does not rule out that the latter are sometimes influenced by norms and processes that are the outcome of domination and oppression, and so holding people fully consequentially responsible for choices that are the outcome of such preferences is itself unjust. Second, equality of resources objectionably permits bad-option-luck victims to become vulnerable to domination. I argue that Dworkinian egalitarianism is not susceptible to either of the two parts of the domination objection and defend the view that it is—contrary to the social egalitarian criticism—faithful to the social egalitarian demand for non-domination. (shrink)

Oppression can be unjust from a luck egalitarian point of view even when it is the consequence of choices for which it is reasonable to hold persons responsible. This is for two reasons. First, people who have not been oppressed are unlikely to anticipate the ways in which their choices may lead them into oppressive conditions. Facts about systematic phenomena (like oppression) are often beyond the epistemic reach of persons who are not currently subject to such conditions, even when they (...) possess adequate information about the particular consequences of their choices. Second, people may be (much) less responsible for remaining in oppressive conditions, even if they are responsible for entering circumstances of oppression. Oppression that results from a person’s choice may cause or contribute to dramatic changes in that person, and these changes may be sufficient to undermine the person’s responsibility for the results of her earlier choice. (shrink)

This paper explores how luck egalitarianism fares in capturing our intuitions about the fairness of market-generated outcomes. Critics of luck egalitarianism have argued that it places no restrictions on what outcomes are acceptable, at least when all agents are equally situated before entering the market, and that this gives us a reason to reject it as an account of fairness. I will argue that luck egalitarianism does make specific judgements about which market-generated outcomes are compatible with maintaining a fair distribution. (...) In addition, I will argue that luck egalitarian prescriptions accord with our pre-theoretical intuitions about the (un)fairness of certain market-generated outcomes. Securing these points both speaks in favour of luck egalitarianism as an ethical principle and provides a framework within which to analyze the fairness of practical, real world cases. (shrink)

According to luck egalitarianism it is bad or unjust if someone is worse off than another through no fault or choice of her own. This article argues that there is a tension in standard luck egalitarian theory between justifying absolute and comparative welfare levels. If a person responsibly acts in a way that brings her welfare level below that of others, this is justified according to the theory. However, even if we can say that the person's new welfare level is (...) justified in absolute terms, it is less clear that her now being worse off than others, is justified. The reason is that while she has in one sense chosen her welfare level, she has not chosen to be worse off than others. Her relative standing, something with which egalitarians ought to be concerned, is determined by her choices in conjunction with the choices of all others. But no individual controls the choices of all others. Hence, for any one individual it is the case that her relative standing is beyond her control. Some responses to this problem are available. It is doubtful, however, that these are entirely successful. (shrink)