Harsh and Disrespectful

Abstract

Many policies hinge on determining whether someone’s situation is due to luck or choice. In political philosophy, this prevalence is mirrored by luck egalitarian theories. But overemphasizing the distinction between luck and choice will lead to tensions with the value of moral agency, on which the distinction is grounded. Here, we argue that the two most common contemporary critiques of luck egalitarianism, holding it to be harsh and disrespectful are best understood as illustrating exactly this tension. Elaborating on this conflict, we argue that it should lead us to modify how luck and choice are used in theories of justice.

Relational and Distributive Equality

“…Indeed, we might even think that concern with autonomy has become something of a platitude in theorizing about distributive justice in general-amounting, as David Axelsen and Lasse Nielsen (2020: 661, n. 6) suggest, to a "thicker" version of what Will Kymlicka calls the "egalitarian plateau". 13 Finally, as several theorists have argued, appealing to a fundamental concern with autonomy has several advantages for responsibility-sensitive egalitarians in terms of providing a response to the "harshness" objection and generating action-guiding implications (Williams 2013;Meijers and Vandamme 2019;Axelsen and Nielsen 2020).…”