Luck egalitarianism is a view about distributive justice espoused by a variety of egalitarian liberal and left-wing political philosophers. According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well off people are should be wholly attributable to the responsible choices people make and not to differences in their unchosen circumstances. This might be thought to express the widely-held intuition that is it a bad thing if people are worse off than others through no fault of their own. Luck egalitarians therefore distinguish between outcomes that are the result of brute luck (e.g misfortunes in genetic makeup, or being struck by a bolt of lightning) and those that are the consequence of option luck (such as career choice or fair gambles). Luck egalitarians disagree among themselves about the right way to measure how well off people are and the related issue of how to assess the value of their resources. Luck egalitarianism is intended as a fundamental normative idea that might guide our thinking about justice rather than as an immediate policy prescription. The idea has its genesis in John Rawls's thought that distributive shares should not be influenced by morally arbitrary factors, but Rawls was not himself a luck egalitarian. Prominent advocates of the view have included Ronald Dworkin, Richard Arneson, Gerald Cohen, John Roemer, and Eric Rakowski. The position is controversial within liberal egalitarianism, and the philosopher Elizabeth S. Anderson has been a vocal critic of it on the grounds that it expresses a demeaning pity towards the disadvantaged, a criticism not accepted by luck egalitarianism's proponents. Distributive justice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Egalitarianism is the moral doctrine that equality ought to prevail among some group along some dimension. ... Look up liberal on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Liberal may refer to: Politics: Liberalism American liberalism, a political trend in the USA Political progressivism, a political ideology that is for change, often associated with liberal movements Liberty, the condition of being free from control or restrictions Liberal Party, members of... In politics, left-wing, political left, leftism, or simply the left, are terms which refer (with no particular precision) to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of socialism, social democracy, or liberalism (especially in the American sense of the word), or with opposition... John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ... Ronald Dworkin (born 1931) is an American philosopher, especially noted for his contributions to jurisprudence including legal philosophy, political philosophy, and moral philosophy. ... Gerald Allen Jerry Cohen, (born 1941) is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. ... John Roemer is an American economist. ...

References

• Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (2000).
• Susan L. Hurley, Justice, Luck and Knowledge (2003).
• G. A. Cohen, 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', Ethics (1989), pp. 906-944.
• Richard Arneson, 'Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare', Philosophical Studies (1989), pp. 77-93.
• Elizabeth S. Anderson, 'What is the Point of Equality?' Ethics (1999), pp. 287–337.

External links

• BEARS Symposium on Anderson's critique of luck egalitarianism including a contribution from Richard Arneson and a reply by Anderson