The Incompleteness of Luck Egalitarianism

Abstract

Luck egalitarianism makes a fundamental distinction between inequalities for which agents are responsible and inequalities stemming entirely from luck. The aim of the view is, other things being equal, to ignore the former and rectify the latter. The ideal situation is that each person exerts an equal amount of control over her place in the distribution, and that deviations from distributive equality caused solely by luck are minimized. The essential thought behind luck egalitarianism is agnostic on the metric of equality. You can have a luck egalitarian theory about welfare, or resources, or several other metrics. We need only keep in view that these theories aim to make distribution (of whatever metric) shaped primarily by things for which the agent is responsible, such as informed and free choices, and to compensate for inequalities stemming solely from luck.Paradigm forms of luck that generate unjust inequalities are the wealth or class of the family to which one is born, discrimination based on one's sex or race, and the market value of one's native endowments (the portion of one's talents that are purely innate rather than intentionally cultivated). The view is compatible with great levels of distributive inequality, so long as those inequalities have the proper sorts of causes.When a bearer of an inequality is responsible for her condition, that inequality can be just.(Open access, non-formatted) Long, Ryan (2011). The Incompleteness of Luck Egalitarianism. Social Philosophy Today 27:87-96.

Being Responsible and Holding Responsible: On the Role of Individual Responsibility in Political Philosophy

“…As Ryan Long (2011) argues, the value of choice is "ecumenical" in the sense that it can be defended from a broad set of philosophical and ideological views.…”

“…This may not worry pluralist luck egalitarians too much. Pluralist luck egalitarians are open to values other than equality, and could therefore, in principle, acknowledge both the value of accountability and self-creative responsibility separately (Temkin 2003;Cohen 1989;2008), and, indeed, they often invoke some kind of sufficiency threshold to protect minimal agency (Segall 2010;Long 2011) In other words, they could say that what justice requires is a responsibility-sensitive equal distribution-i.e. because equality is valuable-but that this value should be weighed against other values when considering how to set up society, and that the value of self-creative responsibility could be one such value against which distributive equality should be weighed.…”