In recent years some moral philosophers and political theorists, who have come to be called “luck egalitarians,” have urged that the essence of social justice is the moral imperative to improve the condition of people who suffer from simple bad luck. Prominent theorists who have attracted the luck egalitarian label include Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, and John Roemer.1 Larry Temkin should also be included in this group, as should Thomas Nagel at the time that he wrote Equality and Partiality.2 (...) However, each of these theorists asserts a different position. The common ground, if any, is obscure. The idea of luck that is invoked is not transparently clear. Anyway, the term “luck egalitarianism” was coined by a critic of the doctrine, and tendentiously defined to denote an extreme version of the view that looks implausible from the start.3 With some justice Ronald Dworkin, perhaps the chief architect of the luck egalitarian position, has denied that he is a luck egalitarian. (shrink)

Luck egalitarians typically hold that it is bad for some to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. In this paper I want to address two complaints against standard luck egalitarianism that do not question responsibility-sensitivity. The first objection says that equality itself lacks inherent non-instrumental value, and so the luckist component ought to be attached to a different pattern, say prioritarianism. The second objection also endorses luckism but worries that luck egalitarianism as conventionally (...) formulated is committed in fact to neutralizing not just brute luck but also option luck. And this would mean, among other things, compensating unsuccessful gamblers, which is something many egalitarians find counterintuitive. My aim is to show that there is a way for luck egalitarianism to meet both criticisms; that it can maintain its egalitarian credentials while avoiding the counterintuitive consequences of compensating unsuccessful gamblers. To do so, I propose, we ought to understand luck egalitarianism as resting on the disvalue of being arbitrarily worse off compared to others. In addition, I suggest, the badness of luck egalitarian inequality – that of arbitrary disadvantage – has both an inter-personal and an intra-personal dimension. (shrink)

Can outcome equality (say, in welfare) ever be unjust? Despite the extensive inquiry into the nature of luck egalitarianism in recent years, this question is curiously under-explored. Leading luck egalitarians pay little attention to the issue of unjust equalities, and when they do, they appear not to speak in one voice. To facilitate the inquiry into the potential injustice of equalities, the paper introduces two rival interpretations of egalitarianism: the responsibility view, which may condemn equalities as unjust (when they reflect (...) unequal levels of personal responsibility); and, the non-responsibility view, which does not. It then teases out the implications of these two views, in the hope of establishing that the latter is at least as plausible as the former. The paper thus establishes that the egalitarian ideal can be plausibly formulated in a way that condemns only (certain) inequalities but never equalities, and that this formulation is both coherent and attractive. (shrink)

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called ‘Equality of What?’ Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect of a person’s condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental?

Equality is a key concept in our moral and political vocabulary. There is wide agreement on its instrumental value and its favourable impact on many aspects of society, but less certainty over whether it has a non-instrumental or intrinsic value that can be demonstrated. In this project, Shlomi Segall explores and defends the view that it does. He argues that the value of equality is not reducible to a concern we might have for the worse off, or to ensuring that (...) individuals do not fall into poverty and destitution; instead he claims that undeserved inequalities, wherever and whenever we might find them, are bad in themselves. Assessing the strength of competing accounts, such as sufficientarianism and prioritarianism, he brings together for the first time discussions of the moral value of equality with luck- or responsibility-sensitive accounts of distributive justice. His book will interest readers in political and moral philosophy. (shrink)

S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

This book investigates the idea of inequality. According to the author, it does not address the question whether one should care about inequality nor which version is more plausible. Instead, its purpose is “to understand egalitarianism”, to “elucidate the notion of inequality”. The general thesis is that inequality is a “complex notion,” as shown by the fact that there are many different ways of measuring it. This is relentlessly detailed in a series of chapters that many will find rather hard (...) on the brain, with their panoplies of diagrams and technical distinctions, complete with acronyms. Still, the diagrams are clear enough, and the terminology to the point. (shrink)