Chapter 3 - Equality, responsibility, desert

Summary

In the previous chapter, I argued that a pluralist cannot plausibly defend an unequal distribution by maintaining that its disvalue is outweighed by the value of the control that its less advantaged party has exercised in bringing it about. In the current chapter, I will examine two other ways in which a pluralist might defend the inequalities that luck egalitarians accept. Of these alternative strategies, the first is to continue to focus on the parties’ responsibility but to locate its moral significance in some factor other than their control, while the second is to turn away from responsibility and argue that the inequalities are justified because they are deserved. Although each argument has some initial appeal, I will argue that neither succeeds.

I

The first argument – that what justifies the inequalities that luck egalitarians accept is some aspect of the parties’ responsibility other than their control – owes its appeal to two facts. It is attractive, first, because attributions of responsibility have well-known normative implications, and, second, because in practice even if not always in theory, we often do hold people responsible for acts and outcomes over which they lack control. When someone negligently causes an accident or forgets to fulfill an important duty, his failure to realize what he is doing, and his attendant lack of control, generally does not lead us to say either that he is not responsible for his lapse or that his responsibility does not affect the ways in which we may or should react to him. At most, his lack of awareness may temper the harshness of the reactions that we view as appropriate.