Luck egalitarianism and the currency of egalitarian justice: is the right reading of egalitarianism that its purpose is to eliminate involuntary disadvantage, and what is the proper metric of egalitarian equalisation?

G. A. Cohen, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The right reading of egalitarianism is that its purpose is to eliminate involuntary disadvantage. The key distinction is between brute luck (the fortunes that befall a person independently of her chosen risks) and option luck (the fortunes that result from gambles the person chose to take). Egalitarian justice requires that brute luck be neutralised; whether option luck must be respected, or whether option luck too produces inequalities the egalitarian cannot accept, is a question I came to view with greater scepticism in my late writings.1

The proper metric of egalitarian equalisation is neither welfare alone (Dworkin's objection to the welfarist view has force) nor resources alone (Dworkin's positive proposal is too narrow) nor capabilities alone (Sen's metric drops welfare components that egalitarians must care about).23 The right metric is a hybrid: opportunity for advantage, where advantage includes welfare components, resources, capabilities, and the conditions that bear on the production of all three.

The luck-egalitarian framework is compatible with Dworkin's principal insights about responsibility while being broader in metric than his resources-only specification.4

Sources

  1. Finally, in Section 6, I claim that Amartya Sen's writings on "capability" introduce two answers to his "Equality of what?" question, each of which has its attractions but which differ substantially in content, as I shall show at length elsewhere. > CURRENCY OF EGALITARIAN JUSTICE The latter kind of luck is option luck. The distinction between brute and option luck comes from Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," p.
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, p. 5
  2. And if we shift to the wholesale responsibility motif, then we can wonder why beings who are only in a limited way responsible for the effort they put in may be held wholly responsible for how their tastes develop. 4. Relocating Dworkin's Cut a. Ronald Dworkin denies that equality of welfare provides the right reading of the egalitarian aim, and I agree with him about that.
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, pp. 13–14
  3. Those two classifi catory judgments are reasonably uncontentious, and they are the ones I need to sustain the criticism of Dworkin which arises from refl ection on the case of involuntary pain. (I warned at the outset that my positive proposal would be crude. One thing that makes it so and makes me wish that it will be superseded is The quoted material is from Dworkin, "Equality of Resources," p. 335.
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, p. 19
  4. Someone commented that the italicized substitute gives Nozick everything that he wants. But that isn't so. Nozick wants the Chamberlain example to show that egalitarianism violates all three of liberty, justice, and the Pareto Principle, even though he does not clearly distinguish those See Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, chapter 4, section 7. different purposes of his parable.
    On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, p. 131

Where the argument is made

  • 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice' (Ethics 99, 1989, 906– 44) — the founding statement of luck egalitarianism, reprinted as Chapter 1 of On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy (Otsuka ed. 2011)
  • 'Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities' (1993, in Nussbaum and Sen eds., The Quality of Life) — the companion paper, reprinted as Chapter 2
  • 'Expensive Taste Rides Again' (2004, in Burley ed., Dworkin and His Critics) — the welfarist reply to Dworkin, reprinted as Chapter 4
  • 'Luck and Equality: A Reply to Hurley' (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72, 2006) — Chapter 5
  • 'Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice, And: Does Option Luck Ever Preserve Justice?' (2009, in de Wijze, Kramer, Carter eds., Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice) — the late wavering on option luck, Chapter 6
  • 'Sen on Capability, Freedom, and Control' (excerpts from Cohen's review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined) — Chapter 3

How the argument was received

Luck egalitarianism became, in the 1990s, the dominant working specification of egalitarian justice in analytical political philosophy. The principal critic is Elizabeth Anderson, whose 1999 Ethics essay 'What Is the Point of Equality?' charges luck egalitarianism with harshness toward the imprudent — those whose bad option-luck destitution the framework leaves uncompensated — and with focus on compensation rather than relational equality (equality in the standing of citizens to one another). My late writings ('Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice', 2009) acknowledge the force of the Anderson worry and concede some ground on whether option luck preserves justice. The Dworkin disagreement on metric (welfare vs resources) was the original occasion for the 1989 paper; Dworkin replied and we exchanged in the 1990s; the welfarist component of my position survived the exchange. The Sen disagreement on capabilities is a friendly one: capabilities are important but are not the whole story, and the welfare components Sen excludes (the affective conditions of well-being) must enter the metric.