This collection of thirteen new essays on responsibility and distributive justice offers an array of formulations of luck egalitarianism and suggests the breadth of possible issues concerning responsibility beyond such formulations. Alongside essays on luck egalitarianism, the collection explores issues including retributive justice; our responsibility to take up the slack when some fail to do their fair share; and the threat from findings of cognitive science to traditional liberal ideas of responsibility.
For those less familiar with the topic of luck egalitarianism, Carl Knight and Zofia Stemplowska's introduction to the collection offers a concise account of the history and current state of the debate. In addition, Richard Arneson's essay, ‘Luck Egalitarianism: A Primer’, gives an especially helpful survey of the array of options faced by those constructing a theory of luck egalitarianism. These options include choosing between a fine- or coarse-grained approach when assessing responsibility; between a desert- or choice-based theory; what variant or metric of egalitarian justice to opt for; and whether to take luck egalitarianism as offering a fundamental morality or just one principle of justice among many. The reader might also explore Knight's account of the advantages of desert-sensitive rather than responsibility-sensitive justice or Marc Fleurbaey's four approaches to equality of opportunity. Alternatively, Larry Temkin's contribution offers an account of the relations between a cluster of concepts salient when discussing luck egalitarianism: as the title of his article suggests, the concepts of ‘Justice, Equality, Fairness, Desert, Rights, Free Will, Responsibility and Luck’.
However, for the most part, this collection is best suited to those interested in where the debate over responsibility and distributive justice might go next and which topics surrounding responsibility remain as yet under-explored. In what follows, I first examine what the collection offers to those already interested in luck egalitarianism. I then address its relevance to those concerned with broader questions about responsibility.
Taken as a whole, this collection of essays suggests that there may be an underlying tension between those who propose ‘asocial’ formulations of luck egalitarianism and those who are moving towards a more ‘social’ approach to a responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism. This tension is one both of method and emphasis. It is illustrated in this collection through the particular case of health policy. In his contribution, Arneson characterizes luck egalitarianism as ‘asocial’, in holding that demands of justice do not depend on pre-existing social relations or social interactions and arise regardless of whether inequalities have social or natural causes (e.g. p. 49). To illustrate, Arneson offers the case of isolated islands, the inhabitants of which never interact. We are to suppose that one island is fertile and the other rocky and barren. According to Arneson's construal of luck egalitarianism, if the person on the prosperous island could press a button to move some reasonable share of resources from their island to the person on the rocky and barren island then she has a duty of justice to do so (pp. 44–46). To ground such a duty of justice, it is sufficient that ‘some people are leading avoidably bad lives . . . and other people are better off and able to help’ (p. 44). Arneson's example is of a kind familiar to those acquainted with the luck egalitarian literature: abstract examples of one or two persons, who are considered in isolation from wider society. Examples like this are to be found in many of the essays in this collection, for instance, see the essays by Temkin and Shlomi Segall.
However, some of the essays in this collection deviate from the asocial approach to luck egalitarianism sketched above. In so doing, these essays suggest that one could take a more ‘social’ approach to a responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism: one treating social interactions as having greater importance than on Arneson's characterization, whether in one's methodology, when characterizing one's position, or in one's conception of responsibility. At the least, the essays may show that the asocial nature of luck egalitarianism should not be overstated and could, perhaps, be avoided. Proposing a more ‘social’ luck egalitarianism might be a way to answer some of the criticisms levelled at standard versions of luck egalitarianism, especially the charge that luck egalitarians pay too little attention to relations among citizens.
First, Stemplowska's essay proposes a version of responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism that respects people as moral equals by giving all ‘equal opportunity for equal interests’ (p. 128). On Stemplowska's account, we do not always have to be the most prudent we can be to be compensated for misfortune; instead, if one's interests are served by not acting as prudently as one possibly could, then society should provide compensation for resulting avoidable disadvantages insofar as one's interests are not outweighed by the interests served by retaining the resources otherwise used to compensate. This latter clause ensures that we have protection from the reckless and costly choices of others, such that we have access to the resources we need to live our lives. This approach to responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism deviates from Arneson's asocial characterization: Stemplowska's account is grounded in an ideal of social relations, where everyone respects one another as moral equals. So too, Stemplowska argues that her approach diminishes the commonly assumed conflict between responsibility-sensitive egalitarians and social egalitarians: to be treated as someone's social equal requires being treated as a moral equal, and the latter is something that making justice responsibility-sensitive promises to ensure.
Second, Avner de-Shalit and Jonathan Wolff's contribution proposes treating benefiting from our choices and bearing the costs of our choices asymmetrically, whereby good choices should be rewarded to a greater extent than bad choices should be penalized (p. 217). In defending that asymmetry, Wolff and de-Shalit seemingly adopt a more ‘social’ approach in their methodology. They move away from the single or two person abstract cases familiar to luck egalitarians, like Arneson's island case outlined above. Instead, they consider how markets work and the role of insurance in securing efficiency. Hence, rather than abstract demands of justice between inhabitants of different islands who have never before encountered one another, Wolff and de-Shalit propose a version of responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism rooted in the nature of certain kinds of social interaction in the market.
A third approach to luck egalitarianism that may be regarded as less ‘asocial’ is found in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen's contribution. He asks whether luck egalitarianism should be formulated in such a way that it applies to groups or to individuals. When luck egalitarians claim that it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own, is it groups or individuals who choose or are at fault, are worse-off, or for whom it is bad if they are worse-off? This matters because, as Lippert-Rasmussen points out, people often make decisions with others and the costs of our choices depend on the decisions of others. He thinks that answering the questions of formulation will reveal that responsibility is not as significant to justice as some luck egalitarians assume.
Finally, the contrasting asocial and social approaches to responsibility-sensitivity within egalitarianism are illustrated in Norman Daniels and Segall's conflicting essays on the role of individual responsibility in the sphere of health. Segall defends a ‘luck prioritarian’ approach to healthcare, where priority should be given to improving the health of those who make more effort towards being healthy and, among those who exert equal effort in being healthy, given to those worse-off in health. In keeping with Arneson's characterization of the luck egalitarian position, Segall holds that health inequalities are unjust regardless of whether they have social or natural causes. This is one motivation of his claim that health inequalities between men and women are unjust, just as are inequalities in health between the rich and poor, or between different races. However, insofar as one shares the popular view that socially caused health inequalities are more unjust than those that are naturally caused, assuming that one can distinguish between the two, Segall's essay demonstrates one cost of assuming responsibility-sensitivity to be asocial. Segall's version of luck prioritarianism cannot capture the intuition, one commonly shared even if explictly rejected by Segall, that there is some morally salient difference between life expectancy being affected by one's sex, as a naturally caused difference, and by one's socio-economic position, as a socially caused difference.
Daniels’ contribution further demonstrates the costs of adopting an asocial approach in the particular case of health. Daniels focuses on public health issues through examining what responsibility society bears for protecting and promoting health, along with the lesser degree to which individuals bear responsibility for their lifestyle ‘choices’. For Daniels, luck egalitarianism of Arneson's variety puts the cart before the horse: questions of social responsibility are independent of, and in general have priority over, considerations of individual responsibility. In particular, if we do not meet our social obligations, as in failing to take adequate measures to reduce smoking, that undermines the case for insisting on holding individuals responsible for their unhealthy lifestyle ‘choices’. In addition, rather than abstract examples, Daniels focuses on three real-life policy examples, which act as ‘social experiments’ into the different ways for health policy to be responsibility-sensitive.
Another contribution to the collection that raises differing questions regarding the methodology of luck egalitarianism is that by Fleurbaey. He suggests that economics could provide insights for the formulation of luck egalitarianism and, in particular, the economics literature on fair opportunities. He offers a non-formal explanation of two distinctions in ways to characterize fair opportunity that are overlooked in the existing philosophical literature.
Moving to consider essays of more general interest to those concerned with issues of responsibility beyond debates over various formulations of luck egalitarianism, Susan Hurley's contribution to the collection suggests that our notion of responsibility itself should be ‘socialized’. She argues that the traditional account of the role of responsibility in liberalism presupposes both that people have rational agency and that individual responsibility is ‘private’, in the sense of being prior to, and setting the parameters of, the public realm. Yet the findings of cognitive science trouble that conception of rational agency and individual responsibility. Reviewing studies of shortcomings in our capacities for rational decision-making, Hurley concludes that our reasoning and individual responsibility has a ‘public ecology’: it is a product of our interactions with social environments. So too, government action affects our social environments and those influences which shape our reasoning. Hurley's claim is that governments should seek to influence our ‘public ecology’ of reasoning deliberately, overtly and for good purposes, rather than adopting a model of agency wherein our reasoning is independent of such social influences and the government's role is to avoid influencing our reasoning.
Hurley's essay raises some fascinating questions about how governments should respond to ‘nudges’ and unconscious biases, questions deserving of further attention. However, I have two worries about Hurley's account of the positive role of the state. First, one might wonder whether democratic accountability will suffice to render government intervention acceptable. In particular, one might think that a government still manipulates its citizens in a troubling way if it seeks to influence their reasoning, even when abiding by the democratic restraints that Hurley suggests. Second, Hurley's account of the positive role of the state is given limited empirical support in this essay, to the extent that the question arises of whether we have good reason to share Hurley's optimism about state intervention in our reasoning processes.
A stark contrast to Hurley's approach is offered by Vallentyne's contribution, which adopts an individualistic rather than social or ecological approach to address whether and how having false beliefs affects responsibility. Vallentyne argues that the ‘imaginary outcomes’ of a choice – the outcomes we incorrectly believe will follow from our choice – can mitigate but cannot increase our ‘responsibility for value’ (p. 181). To examine the relevance of false beliefs to holding people responsible, Vallentyne uses abstract examples of single individuals, such as a benevolent doctor who mistakenly believes a painful operation will benefit a patient. In addition, Vallentyne describes an individual's choice situations as judgements between the expected value of the outcomes that would result from making each different choice. Thus, while Vallentyne acknowledges that people are not ‘perfect choosers’, he still offers a model for assessing people's responsibility for choices that relies on an idealized picture of agents making rational choices on the grounds of expected utility of different options. On his view, we should assess an agent's responsibility for her one-off choice, where this choice is modelled largely in abstract from the individual's social ecology. Vallentyne's characterization of how people choose thus seems far removed from our actual decision-making processes, especially in the light of the empirical studies Hurley discusses. Which of Hurley and Vallentyne's models of our decision-making to adopt is a pressing question within both ethics and political philosophy: choosing a social or ecological rather than an individualistic approach would shape both how we should think about individual responsibility and how a state should hold people responsible.
Another essay that goes beyond examining luck egalitarianism is David Miller’s, which asks whether we have to take up the slack if others fail to do their share in averting a harm. This, as he observes, is a crucial question in the context of global issues such as overfishing and climate change: if other nations fail to do ‘their share’ in tackling these issues, what does that mean for what is demanded of other nations (pp. 230–231)? The conclusion Miller reaches is that we are usually morally responsible only for doing our share. In a world of low compliance with measures to prevent global crisis however, as in the case of climate change, one may find this is a troubling conclusion.
Matt Matravers, in his contribution, asks whether the claim that we should share one another's fate made by Rawls in the context of distributive justice also applies to retributive justice. Matravers criticizes the supposed asymmetry between the two spheres of justice that is taken to justify attributing responsibility to those who commit crimes despite what we know about the relevance of upbringing, genes and socio-economic environment, when we would not attribute responsibility to the same individuals in matters of distributive justice because of those very same excusing factors. The task we are set, then, is to determine what sharing one another's fates would look like in the sphere of retributive justice.
The essays in this collection thus illustrate the range of ways in which considerations of responsibility might be relevant to distributive justice, beyond narrow formulations of luck egalitarianism, and, as such, should be of interest to a wide range of readers. Of particular note is Hurley's contribution, which presents a serious and as yet unanswered challenge to standard formulations of liberalism. In addition, the collection raises interesting questions over the correct characterization of luck egalitarianism, as well as over the relevance of economics and empirical findings to debates over responsibility-sensitive justice.
