Fear , Control
July 23, 2025
Critical Disability Theory
July 24, 2025
Justice and Bad Luck
Justice and Bad Luck
Some people end up worse off than others partly because of their bad luck. For instance, some die young due to a genetic disease, whereas others live long lives. Is such differential luck induced inequalities unjust? Many are inclined to answer this question affirmatively.
To understand this inclination, we need a clear account of what luck involves. On some accounts, luck nullifies responsibility. On others, it nullifies desert. It is often said that justice requires luck to be ‘neutralized’.
However, it is contested whether there is any specific distributive pattern, e.g., equality, that eliminates the influence of luck can be described. Moreover, an agent’s level of effort
—something few would initially see as a matter of luck
—might be inseparable from her level of talent
—something most would initially see as a matter of luck—and this might challenge standard accounts of just deviation from equality (or, for that matter, other favoured distributive patterns).
Critically, relational egalitarians argue that so-called luck egalitarians’ preoccupation with eliminating inequalities reflecting differential bad luck misconstrues justice, which, according to the former, is a matter of social relations having a suitably egalitarian character.
Thin Luck
The concept of luck is a curious one (Dennett 1984, 92; see also Pritchard 2005, 125–133; Pritchard and Whittington 2015). To avoid various pitfalls, it helps to distinguish thin and thick notions of luck (as suggested by Hurley 2002, 79–80; Hurley 2003, 107–109; Valentine 2006, 434).
To say that something—whether a choice or an outcome (other than choice) (Collarette 2009; Scheffler 2003, 18–19)—is a matter of thin luck for someone is to say merely that this person does not stand in a certain moral relationship to a certain object, where such moral relationship essentially involves this individual in his or her capacity as a rational agent.
To say that something is a matter of thick luck is to say this and to commit oneself to a certain account of the non-moral properties in virtue of which this moral relationship obtains.
Accordingly, a thick concept of luck is a more specific version of the corresponding thin concept of luck. In either case, to say that something is a matter of luck for someone, in the sense of “luck” that is relevant to justice, is to imply that it affects this person’s interests for good or bad
Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, X is not morally responsible for Y.
In this definition, like those set out below, “X” ranges over individuals and “Y” ranges over items that can be a matter of luck for an individual, e.g., events, states of affairs, personality traits, actions, omissions, and much else.
Several views about what makes an agent responsible for something have been taken (for overviews, see Matravers 2007, 14–64; Talbert 2019). On responsibility for actions (and omissions),
(a) some emphasize the role of the ability to act otherwise (Ayer 1982; Moore 1912),
(b) others focus on whether an act is appropriately related to the agent’s real self (Frankfurt 1988; Watson 1982), and
(c) yet others think that what matters is whether the agent acted from a suitable reasons-sensitive mechanism (Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2006).
To say that an outcome conforms to (1) is to remain neutral on which of these accounts is correct. (It has become common to distinguish between attributive and substantive responsibility (Scanlon 1999, 248–251; Scanlon 2006, 72–80). The former concerns what comprises a suitable basis for moral appraisal of an agent.
The latter concerns what people are required to do for one another. While the issue of luck arises in relation to both senses of responsibility, ultimately it is the latter which, ultimately, is crucial to distributive justice, even though moral appraisal of people and their actions might have implications for what they owe one another.)
- Y is a matter of thin luck for X if, and only if, it is not the case that X deserves Y.
As with responsibility, a number of views about what makes an agent deserving are possible (Kagan 2012, 6–7; Sher 1987, 7). Some accounts hold the basis of desert to be the value of one’s contribution, while others hold the desert basis to be one’s level of effort. People who think that justice should neutralize the luck specified by (2) can disagree over these accounts.
It is worth emphasizing that thin responsibility luck and thin desert luck are independent of one another. First, X may be responsible for Y and yet not deserve Y. Thus a man who heroically throws himself on to a grenade to save his comrades, thereby losing his life, is responsible for his own death
—indeed this is what makes his act praiseworthy—even if he did not deserve to die. Second, X may deserve Y without being responsible for Y.
Thus, a poor saint who stumbles, entirely fortuitously, upon a gold nugget might deserve (in the wider scheme of things) to be enriched by his discovery even though he is not responsible for making it.
Other thin notions of luck can be described, but thin desert luck and (especially) thin responsibility luck have received the lion’s share of attention in the literature on distributive justice. While clearly different, they are occasionally conflated (as pointed out in Hurley 2003, 191–95).
Independent Notions of Luck
Some accounts of luck are neither thin accounts of luck nor aim at capturing a general moral notion such as responsibility or desert. Instead they appeal to an independent conception of luck. Lottery luck is arguably one example:
Y is a matter of luck for X if Y, from the perspective of X, is the outcome of a lottery.
The underlying idea here is that there is a sense in which the outcome of a (fair) lottery is a matter of luck for the person who participates in it whether he is responsible for it—as some accounts of responsibility imply and others do not. It can be maintained that justice is concerned with this notion of luck independently of how it relates to responsibility and desert.
Thus, an egalitarian may think that it is bad if people are unequally well off because of differential lottery luck even if he has not made up his mind whether people are responsible for differential lottery luck.
He might add that it would be illegitimate for the state to enforce equality in face of inequality resulting from a fair lottery to which all parties consented. Also, lotteries might be excellent means of making outcomes independent of the unjust biases of distributors (compare Stone 2007, 286–287), even if outcomes might be unjust despite the fact such biases played no role in their genesis.
In principle, one could also care about choice and control luck independently of how these relate to thin luck, e.g., responsibility and desert. However, philosophers who think that justice is a matter of eliminating differential luck have studied choice and control mainly because they assume that the absence of choice and control nullifies responsibility or desert
How Much Luck is There?
Accounts of responsibility or desert affect how much luck there is in the world. If, on the one hand, one accepts a hard deterministic account of responsibility, everything is a matter of responsibility luck.
A hard deterministic account of responsibility says that responsibility and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true, and, hence, that no one is ever responsible for anything.
Most believe that, if hard determinism is true, extensionally speaking, luck-egalitarianism collapses into straight equality of outcome (e.g., Smolensky 1997, 156; but see Stemflows 2008). If, on the other hand, one accepts a compatibilist, reason responsiveness account of responsibility, many outcomes will not be a matter of responsibility luck, at least for some agents.
A compatibilist, reason responsiveness account of responsibility for outcomes says that an agent is responsible for outcomes that he or she brings about in the right sort of way through the agent’s actions (or omissions) where these issue from an action-generating process that is sufficiently sensitive to practical reasons, e.g., normal human deliberation, and that actions may issue from such mechanisms whether or not determinism obtains (Fischer and Ravizza 1998).
Still, agents who act from reason responsive mechanisms may face choice situations that differ much in terms of how favourable they are in which case inequalities reflecting such differences may not be just, even if they obtain between agents who are responsible for the choices they made. For this reason (among others), it is open for compatibilist luck-egalitarians to think that little inequality can be justified by differential exercises of choice (see Barry 2005).
One issue which has received quite a lot of attention in the debate about justice and luck is the regression principle governing luck:
If the causes of Y are a matter of luck for X, so is Y.
If this principle is coupled with control or choice accounts of luck, everything turns into luck. For if we couple (9) with, say, the thick, choice-based account of responsibility luck, it follows that for my present reckless driving not to be a matter of (bad) luck, it will have to be the case that I am responsible for, and hence have chosen, the causes of my present reckless driving.
In turn, for me to be responsible for these causes I will in turn have to be responsible for, and hence have chosen, the causes of these causes of my reckless driving; and so on.
Obviously, at some point, moving back through the causal chain (e.g., prior to my coming into existence, if not long before that), choice, and thus responsibility, will peter out. So, it will follow that I am not responsible for my present reckless driving: it is my bad luck that I drive my car in a totally irresponsible way.
Generalizing this sort of reasoning, no one would ever be responsible for anything—that everything would be a matter of responsibility luck. As Thomas Nagel writes “Everything seems to result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control.
Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results” (Nagel 1979, 35; compare Strawson 1994; Watson 2006, 428).
The view that everything is a matter of responsibility (and desert) luck obviously flies in the face of our everyday ascriptions of responsibility. Accordingly, this implication of the regression principle is often deployed in a corresponding reductio ad absurdum (Hurley 1993, 183; Hurley 2003; Nozick 1974, 225; Sher 1997, 67–69; Zaitchik 1977, 371–373).
However, this reductio is perhaps too hasty. It has been argued that the principle (applied to control) is not simply a matter of “generalization from certain clear cases.” Rather, it is a condition that we “are actually being persuaded” is correct when we apply it to cases “beyond the original set”, where, on reflection, we find that “control is absent” (Nagel 1979, 26–27).
If this is right, it seems we need an alternative explanation of why moral responsibility is absent in those cases where control of causes is absent. So, for instance, if we agree that a person who offends, as an adult, because of childhood deprivation is not responsible for his action, we need to explain what, here, nullifies responsibility if not lack of control over causes of the agent’s actions.
That is, we need to explain why certain kinds of causal background to action threaten control while others do not even if we are dealing with cases with the shared feature that the agent does not control the early parts of those causal backgrounds.
Addressing this problem, Fischer and Ravizza suggest that a “process of taking responsibility is necessary for moral responsibility” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 200). They add that, since processes are necessarily historical, it follows that their account of responsibility attends to an action’s genesis or origins.
With the same problem in mind, Susan Hurley suggests that responsibility requires that the process “by which reason-responsive mechanisms and self-perceptions in relation to these mechanisms are acquired” (Hurley 2003, 51) is one in which the agent is equipped with mechanisms that are sufficiently responsive to objective reasons (Hurley 2003, 51–2).
That is, the reasons for which the agent acts must match the reasons for action that there in fact are sufficiently well, although this match need not be perfect. Whether either of these suggestions accommodates cases where, initially, responsibility seems to be undermined by lack of control of causes, remains to be seen.
Relational Egalitarianism and the Critique of Luck-Egalitarianism
Most egalitarians want to compensate people for bad brute luck but not for bad option luck. Moreover, they have tended to assume that this is essentially what justice is about.
Recently, this attitude has been criticized as either leaving out of the picture an important non-distributive egalitarian concern, to wit, an egalitarian concern for the nature of social relations, or, more radically, as being a complete misconstrue of egalitarian justice (Anderson 1999; Anderson 2010; Anderson 2012; Scanlon 2018; Scheffler 2003; Scheffler 2005; Schemmel 2021; for an overview see Fourie et. al. (eds.) 2015).
Jonathan Wolff defends the moderate position that while distributive concerns about bad brute luck are part of what justice is about, that is not the whole story:
“Distributive justice should be limited in its application by other egalitarian concerns” (Wolff 1998, 122; cp. Scheffler 2015), for the ideal of justice also includes the view that we should respect one another as equals.
According to Wolff, this introduces a reason not to strive for perfect equality of opportunity. For making people equally well off in terms of opportunity would require “shameful revelations” on the part of people who must, for instance, pass on to others (and thus themselves come to terms with) the information that they have no talent
Wolff’s point is well made, but luck-egalitarians may be able to accommodate it. First, insofar as they accept Wolff’s factual observation, they may think that this points to a strong (welfarist) luck-egalitarian reason not to implement equality of opportunity: we can know in advance that collecting the relevant information is likely to make some of those who are already worse off through bad luck even worse off.
Different Kinds of Luck
Luck is a pervasive feature of human life (Williams 1981, 21). It appears to arise in (at least) four main ways (Nagel 1979; Statman 1993, 11). First, the outcomes of our actions are affected by luck (resultant luck).
Some months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it may have seemed prudent to invest in stocks. Someone who did so may rightly see the ensuing reduction of her wealth as bad resultant luck.
Second, the circumstances in which one acts introduce luck (circumstantial luck). A person who is offered proper incentives and plenty of time to deliberate may make a wiser decision than she would under less favourable conditions; it may be by accident that she finds herself in the favourable conditions and hence makes the wiser decision (but see Pritchard 2005, 254–261).
Third, luck affects the kind of person you are (constitutive luck). Genetically, some people are at greater risk of cancer through smoking than others, and because of this it makes sense to say that some smokers are lucky to avoid cancer.
Finally, there is luck in the way one’s actions are determined by antecedent circumstances (antecedent causal luck). Children who grow up in a stimulating environment perhaps become more motivated than they would in a duller setting; yet children rarely determine the time and place in which they are raised.
When we add up resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and antecedent causal luck, the area of life that is free of luck seems to shrink “to an extensionless point” (Nagel 1979, 35; compare Parfit 1995, 10–12; Lang 2021; Levy 2014).
Luck that does not affect a person’s interests is irrelevant from the point of view of justice. But luck that does—whether the interests are characterized in terms of welfare, resources, opportunities, capabilities to achieve functioning’s, or in some other way—certainly seems relevant.
People who end up less well (or better) off than others because of luck often ask, “Why me?” (Otsuka 2004, 151–152). For instance, many affluent people, reflecting about poor people in poor countries, would be inclined to think that it is simply the latter’s bad luck to have been born in such countries.
They would further assume that it is their own good luck to have been born in affluent countries, that they do not deserve their favourable starting position, and that this makes the inequality unjust.
If those who live in poor countries were in the situation, they find themselves in through their own fault, and not victims of bad luck, no question of distributive justice would arise.
But they are not, and it seems unfair and unjust that some people’s prospects are worse than others’ simply in virtue of birthplace (Caney 2005, 122; for opposing considerations see Miller 2007, 56–75).
The underlying assumption seems to be that luck-affected differential standings are morally undesirable or unjust (Arneson 1989, 85; Tan 2012, 149–185; Temkin 1993, 200); but this assumption calls for philosophical clarification. Given the pervasiveness of luck, such clarification appears to be required whenever people end up unequally well off.
Thick Luck
The claim that something is a matter of thin responsibility luck can be combined with various accounts of responsibility and thus various accounts of luck. It is these latter accounts—thick accounts of responsibility luck—that tell us what makes a person responsible for something. On the thick, control-based account of responsibility luck:
Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, X does not and did not control Y (Otsuka 2002, 40; Sher 2014, 22–23; Zimmerman 1993, 219).
A competing thick, choice-based account of responsibility luck says:
Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not, in an appropriate way, the result of a choice made by X (cf. Cohen 2011, 13).
To see how these control-based and choice-based notions diverge, consider a Frankfurtian scenario in which Y comes about as a result of X’s choice, but X did not control whether Y came about because had X not chosen to bring about Y, then Y would have been realized through some alternative causal means (Frankfurt 1988).
Conversely, in a case in which X fails to make up his mind whether to prevent Y coming about and then finds he can no longer control the outcome, it might be said that Y does not come about as a result of X’s choice even if X controlled Y.
Often it makes a crucial difference which items Y ranges over (see Cohen 2011, 25, 93; Price 1999). Suppose, for instance, that a person deliberately, and in full control, cultivates a preference for spending leisure hours driving about in her car reasonably foreseeing that the prices of gas will stay low (Arneson 1990, 186).
Unfortunately, and unpredictably, the price of gas skyrockets and her preference becomes very costly. In this case, the fact that this person prefers to spend her leisure hours driving her car is neither bad control luck, nor bad choice luck.
However, the fact that she is worse off because of her preference may be both, since she neither chose to act in such way to make this fact obtain, nor controlled whether it did. We might say of this person that she had “bad price luck”
It has been argued that both the control-based and choice-based thick notions of luck are too broad. Most people neither control nor choose their religion, yet it seems odd to ask for compensation for feelings of guilt engendered by religious belief on the grounds that it is a matter of bad luck that one holds those beliefs (Scanlon 1975; Cohen 2011, 33–37).
To accommodate this intuition G. A. Cohen introduces the notion of counterfactual choice. One can explain this notion with the following claim:
Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not the result of a choice made by X and X would not choose Y if X could.
Given the opportunity to do so, the theist would not choose to be free of the feelings of guilt engendered by his religious convictions. Therefore, it is not a matter of luck that he has such feelings and so justice does not require him to be compensated for the feelings.
As Cohen says, the costs of the unchosen and uncontrolled commitments of the religious believer “are so intrinsically connected with his commitments that they” are not bad luck (Cohen 2011, 36; compare Cohen 2011, 88; Sher 2014, 64–66).
Just as there are different accounts of thick responsibility luck, there are different accounts of thick desert luck (for a recent discussion of the relation between luck egalitarianism and desert, see Brouwer and Mulligan 2019).
These correspond to competing accounts of the basis of desert. One notion is that of thick, non-comparative desert luck, which can be elaborated as follows is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii) X deserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that X has Y given the moral or prudential merits of X.
Theo Tion fleshed out here contrasts with that of thick, comparative desert luck:
Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii) X deserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that X has Y given the relative moral or prudential merits of X and Z and given what Z has.
It may be a matter of bad thick, non-comparative desert luck that the crops of a talented, hard-working farmer are destroyed by cold weather. If, however, the crops of a farmer who is even more hard-working and talented are also destroyed, it will not be a matter of bad thick, comparative desert luck that the first farmer’s crops are destroyed.
The list of thick notions of luck mentioned so far is not intended to be exhaustive, and each notion may of course be developed in several directions. Clearly, thick luck is quite complex.
Neutralizing Luck and Equality
Many passages in the luck egalitarian literature suggest that justice is luck-neutralization, not luck-amplification, not luck-mitigation (Mason 2006), and not luck-equalization.
Consider, for instance, Rawls’ remark that “Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors [i.e., social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune] so arbitrary from a moral point of view” (Rawls 1971, 71).
On the admittedly disputable assumption that Rawls thinks that factors that are “arbitrary from a moral point of view” and affect people’s interests are a matter of luck, one might read this passage as saying that under a just distribution, luck does not influence distributive shares (Rawls 1971, 72).
As we saw in Section 2 a similar passage can be found in Cohen’s work: “anyone who thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors thinks so because he believes that they make a person’s fate depend too much on sheer luck” (Cohen 1989, 932).
This passage can be read as suggesting that the aim of neutralizing luck justifies equality and that realizing equality will eliminate luck.
Such passages can, however, be read in other ways. Thus Rawls might simply mean to say that, while luck influences distributive shares under a just distribution, it does not do so improperly. Likewise, Cohen might be saying that, while people’s fates depend on luck under a just distribution, they do not depend on sheer luck.
And the fact that there is room for these different readings encourages us to ask exactly what role luck-neutralization can play in relation to a theory of distributive justice.
Addressing this question, Susan Hurley distinguishes between a specification and a justificatory role for the aim of luck-neutralization. In the first role, the aim specifies what egalitarianism “is and what it demands” (Hurley 2003, 147). In the second, it provides a justification for favouring egalitarian over non-egalitarian theories of distributive justice.
Hurley believes that the luck-neutralizing aim fails in both roles. If the aim were to play either role, it would have to be the case that the favoured distribution—e.g., equality, utility maximization, or maximizing the position of the worst off—limits the influence of luck on outcomes.
However, there is no clear sense in which this is the case (compare Parfit, 1995, 12). For the sake of simplicity, suppose the favoured distribution is an equal one. Suppose also that the inequality that we are concerned with exists between two people who have each been stranded on a small island.
Through sheer good luck, the first person’s island is lush and fertile, and through sheer bad luck the other person’s island is arid. It does not follow from the fact that this unequal outcome is the result of luck that, if we eliminate the inequality, the resulting equal outcome will not to the same degree be the result of luck, i.e., will not be one in which factors for which people are not responsible play no (or a smaller) causal role in bringing about the outcome.
To see this, assume we are dealing with thick, control-based responsibility luck and imagine that a powerful egalitarian intervener dumps a shipload of fertilizer on the second island so that equality in the Robinson Crusoe-like setting is realized.
Since neither of the two people controlled what happened, the resulting equality here is just as much a matter of luck for them as the prior inequality was. Since we can implement equality without eliminating luck, this shows that we can neither justify equality as a means of neutralizing luck, nor specify what equality requires as neutralizing luck. The same applies to other end-result principles
In response to this important point, it might be argued that when luck-egalitarians write about “neutralizing luck”, this is really short-hand for something like “eliminating the differential effects on people’s interests of factors which from their perspective are a matter of luck.”
This is no different from saying that affirmative action in Favor of women is a way of neutralizing the effects of sexist discrimination. In saying this, we do not imagine that affirmative action removes sexist discrimination and all its effects; we mean merely that the affirmative action program eliminates the differential effects on men and women of sexist discrimination (e.g., in university admissions).
On this reading, considerations about luck serve, not to justify equality, but to select the appropriate egalitarian view from among the large family of views that ascribe intrinsic significance to equality.
As Arneson puts it: “The argument for equal opportunity rather than straight equality is simply that it is morally fitting to hold individuals responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their voluntary choices” (Arneson 1989, 88).
Equality is the default position, morally speaking. It is not justified by appeal to luck. Such an appeal, however, explains why some deviations from this default position need not be bad from an egalitarian point of view, for in the relevant deviations it is not a matter of luck that some people are worse off than others. In response to Hurley’s point, Cohen offers a related reply:
“That it extinguishes the influence of luck is no more of an argument for egalitarianism than that it promotes utility is an argument for utilitarianism and in each case for the same reason, to wit, that the cited feature is too definitive of the position in question to justify the position in question” (Cohen 2006, 441–442; see also Vallentyne 2006, 434; Hurley 2006, 459–465).
In fact, he goes on to offer something which is more radical than the short-hand description of the luck-egalitarian aim offered in the opening sentence of this paragraph.
Since luck-egalitarians are opposed to luck “in the name of fairness” (compare Temkin 2003(a), 767) and since, no less than inequality, equality is unfair when “in disaccord with choice”, equality might be unjust for the same reason as inequality might (Cohen 2006, 444; cf. Segall 2012). Pragmatic, not principled, reasons explain why unjust equalities tend to not to be mentioned by luck-egalitarians
