John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice

When and why are inequalities unjust? Luck egalitarians have argued that, as a matter of distributive justice, the focus should be on eliminating inequalities resulting from bad brute luck rather than those resulting from personal choice. G.A. Cohen, for instance, writes that his “animating conviction” with respect to distributive justice is that “an unequal distribution whose inequality cannot be vindicated by some choice or fault or desert on the part of (some of) the relevant affected agents is unfair, and therefore, pro tanto, unjust” (Cohen 2008: 7).1 Luck egalitarianism makes personal responsibility the key factor affecting the justice or injustice of an unequal distribution of goods. It recognizes that in the course of pursuing our life plans, we may voluntarily choose to work more or less to earn certain goods, and we may benefit more or less from taking calculated risks. But it also emphasizes that a great many inequalities are traceable to factors beyond even our partial control, such as the wealth of one’s parents or one’s natural endowments, and that the influence of these factors on our opportunities and outcomes should be eliminated. Luck egalitarianism has come under fire from relational egalitarians like Elizabeth Anderson (1999; 2010) and Samuel Scheffler (2003; 2005) who argue that, by focusing on responsibility and luck, it loses sight of the core egalitarian justice concern. This core concern, as Anderson puts it, is to resist oppression and to establish a community of social equals (Anderson 1999: 288-289). Because luck egalitarianism, as a matter of distributive justice, allows in principle both extreme poverty and invasive or stigmatizing judgments of personal responsibility for those who have made bad choices, it threatens those individuals’ ability to function as free and equal members of the moral community. The point is not just that ne’er-do-wells and criminals retain their basic moral rights. It is that honest, hardworking people who find themselves unable to provide for themselves (e.g., simply because their reasonable calculated risks did not work out) may then be publicly scrutinized for their failures before being provided aid. Relational egalitarians argue that whatever inequalities we allow, they must not undermine people’s social dignity.2