Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism (...) is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

Should we let personal responsibility for health-related behavior influence the allocation of healthcare resources? In this paper, we clarify what it means to be responsible for an action. We rely on a crucial conceptual distinction between being responsible and holding someone responsible, and show that even though we might be considered responsible and blameworthy for our health-related actions, there could still be well-justified reasons for not considering it reasonable to hold us responsible by giving us lower priority. We transform these (...) philosophical considerations into analytical use first by assessing the general features of health-related actions and the corresponding healthcare needs. Then, we identify clusters of structural features that even adversely affected people cannot reasonably deny constitute actions for which they should be held responsible. We summarize the results in an analytical framework that can be used by decision-makers when considering personal responsibility for health as a criterion for setting priorities. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that the state must provide parental subsidies if, and to the extent that, individuals would, under certain specified hypothetical conditions, purchase ‘insurance cover’ that would provide the funds they need for adequate childrearing. I argue that most citizens would sign up to an insurance scheme, in which they receive a guarantee of a means-tested parental subsidy in return for an obligation to pay a progressive income tax to fund the scheme. This argument from insurance bolsters (...) the weaker case that proponents of parental subsidies might offer were they to rely exclusively on arguments from fair play and efficiency. (shrink)

In the luck egalitarian literature, one influential formulation of luck egalitarianism does not specify whether equalities that do not reflect people’s equivalent exercises of responsibility are bad with regard to inequality. This equivocation gives rise to two competing versions of luck egalitarianism: asymmetrical and symmetrical luck egalitarianism. According to the former, while inequalities due to luck are unjust, equalities due to luck are not necessarily so. The latter view, by contrast, affirms the undesirability of equalities as well as inequalities insofar (...) as they are due to luck. The symmetrical view, we argue, is by far the more compelling, both by internal luck egalitarian standards and in light of the external rightist emphasis on choice and responsibility to which luck egalitarianism may partly be seen as a response. Our main case for the symmetrical view is that when some people, against a background of equal opportunities, do not exercise their responsibility to the same degree as others, they cannot justifiably call for equalizing measures to be put in place. Indeed, such measures would be positively unfair. The symmetrical view, accordingly, rejects compensation in such cases, whereas the asymmetrical view, implausibly, enjoins it. We also examine two objections to this argument. First, that this view fails to qualify as genuinely egalitarian, instead collapsing the notion of equality into the notion of desert. Second, that the opposing asymmetrical view, in contrast to the symmetrical view, can draw support from its compatibility with sufficientarian concerns. Both objections are rebutted. We conclude that luck egalitarians are best served by endorsing the symmetrical, luck-neutralizing stance. (shrink)

Should we grant a fresh start to those who come to regret their past lifestyle choices? A negative response to this question can be located in the luck egalitarian literature. As a responsibility-sensitive theory of justice, luck egalitarianism considers it just that people’s relative positions reflect their past choices, including those they regret. In a recent article, Vansteenkiste, Devooght and Schokkaert argue against the luck egalitarian view, maintaining instead that those who regret their past choices in health are disadvantaged in (...) a relevant way and should receive compensation. Employing the ideal that people should be made equal as measured by equivalent resources, they purport to show the fairness of such an arrangement through a hypothetical scenario. Relaxing the implicit assumptions of this scenario brings forth several unattractive consequences of the fresh-start idea. The main problem is that in striving to ensure that people’s past choices do not affect their own opportunities, the authors must accept that these choices put heavy strains on the opportunities available to other people. Furthermore, the luck egalitarian position is more compelling than they admit. (shrink)

The scarcity of livers available for transplants forces tough choices upon us. Lives for those not receiving a transplant are likely to be short. One large group of potential recipients needs a new liver because of alcohol consumption, while others suffer for reasons unrelated to their own behaviour. Should the former group receive lower priority when scarce livers are allocated? This discussion connects with one of the most pertinent issues in contemporary political philosophy; the role of personal responsibility in distributive (...) justice. One prominent theory of distributive justice, luck egalitarianism, assesses distributions as just if, and only if, people's relative positions reflect their exercises of responsibility. There is a principled luck egalitarian case for giving lower priority to those who are responsible for their need. Compared to the existing literature favouring such differentiation, luck egalitarianism provides a clearer rationale of fairness, acknowledges the need for individual assessments of responsibility, and requires initiatives both inside and outside of the allocation systems aimed at mitigating the influence from social circumstances. Furthermore, the concrete policies that luck egalitarians can recommend are neither too harsh on those who make imprudent choices nor excessively intrusive towards those whose exercises of responsibility are assessed. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how language and linguistic membership might feature in luck egalitarianism, what a luck-egalitarian theory of linguistic justice would look like, and, finally, what the emphasis on language teaches us about the validity of standard luck-egalitarian assumptions. We show that belonging to one language group rather than another is a morally arbitrary feature and that where membership of a specific linguistic group affects individual chances, the effects of such bad brute luck ought to be neutralized on (...) the luck-egalitarian view. We assess two ways of redressing those kinds of unjustified inequalities: the ‘universal language’ option and the ‘linguistic advantages for all’ option. But we also argue, in the second part, that exploring luck egalitarianism through the lens of language exposes some difficulties intrinsic in many existent luck-egalitarian theories. We argue that treating circumstances one identifies with as choices is problematic. In addition, we argue that the linguistic preconditions of both the capacity to be responsible as well the exercise of responsibility complicate the idea of individual responsibility on which most luck-egalitarian theories rely. We conclude by suggesting the need to develop a luck-egalitarian theory of justice which is less reliant on causal features of the distinction between choice and circumstance and which is more sensitive to the idea of collective cooperation as opposed to individual responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as (...) it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration. (shrink)

According to luck egalitarianism, inequalities are justified if and only if they arise from choices for which it is reasonable to hold agents responsible. This position has been criticised for its purported harshness in responding to the plight of individuals who, through their own choices, end up destitute. This paper aims to assess the Harshness Objection. I put forward a version of the objection that has been qualified to take into account some of the more subtle elements of the luck (...) egalitarian approach. Revising the objection in this way suggests that the Harshness Objection has been overstated by its proponents: because luck egalitarians are sensitive to the influence of unequal brute luck on individuals’ choices, it is unlikely that there will be any real world cases in which the luck egalitarian would not have to provide at least partial compensation. However, the Harshness Objection still poses problems for the luck egalitarian. First, it is not clear that partial compensation will be sufficient to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Second, the Harshness Objection raises a theoretical problem in that a consistent luck egalitarian will have to regard it as unjust if any assistance is provided to the victim of pure option luck, even if such assistance could be provided at no cost. I consider three strategies the luck egalitarian could pursue to accommodate these concerns and conclude that none of these strategies can be maintained without either violating basic luck egalitarian principles or infringing upon individual liberty. (shrink)

There has recently been a revived interest in temporal justice among political philosophers. For example, lone mothers have, on average, 30 h less free time per week than people in couples without children. Recent work has focussed on free time as a distinct distributive good, but this paper argues that it would be a mistake for a theory of temporal justice to focus only on shares of free time. First, I argue that the concept of free time does not succeed (...) in tracking discretionary control over time. All of time is a resource, and the particular moral relevance of free time must be established otherwise. Second, hours of time differ in use value, and we cannot fully track our concerns about the allocation of time, whether free or necessary, without taking this into account. We care about free time but also about ‘quality time’. To explain this observation, I develop an account of the value of time as a resource. The value of time periods differs with the prospects for which a time period can be used, that is, what we can do and be with it. What we are allocating when we are allocating time is not just hours; it is hours of time with a certain value. Finally, I argue that a concern for the value of time is compatible with a resourcist theory of temporal justice. (shrink)

We pose the question: Is consumer sovereignty in the healthcare market fact or fiction? Consumer sovereignty in healthcare implies that society benefits at large when healthcare organizations compete to develop high quality healthcare products while reducing the cost of doing business (reflected in low prices), and when consumers choose wisely among healthcare products by purchasing those high quality products at low prices. We develop a theoretical model that encourages systematic empirical research to investigate whether consumer sovereignty in healthcare is fact (...) or fiction. In doing so, we develop a series of theoretical propositions that may demonstrate that consumer sovereignty is more fiction than fact. Specifically, healthcare consumers lack the ability, motivation, and opportunity to choose healthcare products that are high in quality and low in price. Similarly, healthcare firms lack the ability, motivation, and opportunity to compete in ways to develop and market higher quality products at lower prices. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a fairly prominent theory of justice. While there are many versions of LE, they all agree that, at least to some extent, it is unjust for individuals to lose the opportunity for welfare at least when that loss occurs through no fault of the individual’s own. Many writers take LE to have direct political implications; they write as if the truth of LE entails that resources should be taken from some – perhaps those who enjoy lots of (...) unearned welfare – and delivered to those who suffer through no fault of their own. I argue that luck egalitarians should refocus their thinking on what I call a “Systemic Model” of compensation. This model holds that what matters most to offsetting bad brute luck is that individuals have opportunities to make up for losses of welfare and political systems should be designed to prevent some individuals from capturing resources in a manner that frustrates the ability of others to offset their own losses due to unearned bad luck and political systems should aim to maximize the opportunities individuals have to make up for their own bad luck. (shrink)

Conceptions of desert and responsibility have had a powerful influence in justifying economic inequality. Currently, they are being reaffirmed in policies advocated by the centre left in Britain. In contrast, luck egalitarianism, one of the dominant theoretical positions in contemporary political philosophy, puts equality at the top of the agenda and notoriously undermines traditional notions of desert and rejects the conception of personal responsibility on which traditional ideas rely. Although luck egalitarians are sceptical about desert and redefine responsibility to reduce (...) its role in arguments for just distribution, they nevertheless retain a commitment to holding people responsible for the distributive consequences of what they freely choose to do. They attempt to demonstrate that equality can be reconciled with responsibility. I will argue that luck egalitarians have not gone far enough in eliminating desert and responsibility from the armoury of social justice, and that their own arguments should have led them to do so. My aim in this article is to push the ideas implicit in luck egalitarian's arguments to their logical conclusion. I argue that for practical and conceptual reasons, they should have formulated their theories as though hard determinism is true, or nearly true, even if it is not. Denying the pertinence of judgements of desert and responsibility to questions of distributive justice removes an obstacle to egalitarian aims by suggesting a more egalitarian distribution than one that is hostage to voluntary choice. It could be accepted that luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the concept of personal responsibility without accepting the conclusion that considerations of responsibility should be abandoned. However, any plausible account of responsibility would demonstrate that existing inequalities are undeserved, and that these inequalities make a mockery of politicans current emphasis on personal responsibility. (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)

Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person's standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken (...) in conjunction with the observation that semiotic objections are generally flimsy, failing to identify anything wrong with a practice as such and having limited capacity to generalize beyond particular contexts. (shrink)

Historically, it is safe to say that very few laws did as much to stoke inequality as laws touching descents and hereditary transmissions. This paper attempts to see if the classical liberal tradition can endorse inheritance taxation so as to further fair equality of opportunity, as well as to lessen inequality of undeserved wealth. It argues that fair equality of opportunity is a necessary feature of market societies to make sure that they remain competitive. Hence, inheritance taxation is most likely (...) necessary from a classical liberal point of view as an instrument of social mobility to counter notable problems of social immobility, say hereditary vocational stratification, which a system of private property rights creates. (shrink)

Historically, it is safe to say that very few laws did as much to stoke inequality as laws touching descents and hereditary transmissions. This paper attempts to see if the classical liberal tradition can endorse inheritance taxation so as to further fair equality of opportunity, as well as to lessen inequality of undeserved wealth. It argues that fair equality of opportunity is a necessary feature of market societies to make sure that they remain competitive. Hence, inheritance taxation is most likely (...) necessary from a classical liberal point of view as an instrument of social mobility to counter notable problems of social immobility, say hereditary vocational stratification, which a system of private property rights creates. (shrink)

In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls ‘Kids Pay’, depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in (...) this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children’s needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs. (shrink)

Conceptions of desert and responsibility have had a powerful influence in justifying economic inequality. Currently, they are being reaffirmed in policies advocated by the centre left in Britain. In contrast, luck egalitarianism, one of the dominant theoretical positions in contemporary political philosophy, puts equality at the top of the agenda and notoriously undermines traditional notions of desert and rejects the conception of personal responsibility on which traditional ideas rely. Although luck egalitarians are sceptical about desert and redefine responsibility to reduce (...) its role in arguments for just distribution, they nevertheless retain a commitment to holding people responsible for the distributive consequences of what they freely choose to do. They attempt to demonstrate that equality can be reconciled with responsibility. I will argue that luck egalitarians have not gone far enough in eliminating desert and responsibility from the armoury of social justice, and that their own arguments should have led them to do so. My aim in this article is to push the ideas implicit in luck egalitarian's arguments to their logical conclusion. I argue that for practical and conceptual reasons, they should have formulated their theories as though hard determinism is true, or nearly true, even if it is not. Denying the pertinence of judgements of desert and responsibility to questions of distributive justice removes an obstacle to egalitarian aims by suggesting a more egalitarian distribution than one that is hostage to voluntary choice. It could be accepted that luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the concept of personal responsibility without accepting the conclusion that considerations of responsibility should be abandoned. However, any plausible account of responsibility would demonstrate that existing inequalities are undeserved, and that these inequalities make a mockery of politicans current emphasis on personal responsibility. (shrink)

In the literature on the so-called numbers problem, some authors have recently argued that the individualist lottery (IL) avoids the flaws of the proportional lottery. This article first presents two recent defenses of the IL, and then argues that both are implausible if we focus, as we should, strictly on their non-consequentialist aspects. This conclusion holds even if we take account of the fact that the IL is arguably that solution to the numbers problem which best meets the marginal difference (...) criterion. The upshot is that non-consequentialists should toss a coin rather than spin a wheel in conflict cases (if and when they must do either). (shrink)

This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...) interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions. (shrink)