5 - Accounting for Uncertain Opportunities

Summary

Justice is influenced by happenstance. This is most apparent when one examines the case of moral luck. The problem has been succinctly put by Michael Clark. He explains:

It is irrational to praise or blame people for what is not wholly within their control: ‘ought implies can’. But since our actions stem from our characters, circumstances and causal factors beyond our control, and their outcome is often unpredictable, luck appears to play a large part in determining our character and conduct, both of which we are morally accountable. (Clark 2007, 122)

Bernard Williams describes this immunity principle as ‘basic to our ideas of morality’ (1993a, 36). However, when one considers contingency, this ‘basic’ belief becomes difficult to sustain. As argued in Chapter 4, there is a degree to which contingency is involved in the determination of moral judgements – a person does not choose to be brought up in a particular culture, and there is only a certain point at which they may gain the ability to choose another life course, and even then, some of their basic traits, bodies and the like are inescapably encumbered by that experience. The self exists, and it is difficult to suggest that it is infinitely pliable or can be radically overhauled as some radical constructivists chant. ‘Our choices are constrained by causal factors not under our control’, Clark laments, ‘and the outcome of our actions is not always predictable’ (2007, 122). Moral luck has implications for the social formation of the person, not only from issues of civic ascription or self-fashioning but also assessments of attributed agency. Using these as the main through themes, this chapter looks at how luck egalitarians have addressed a set of interrelated matters that involve partiality, acquired tastes and whether luck-neutralization programmes would be too harmful to attachments, regardless of whether they are matters of chance. In short, it makes a moral and political difference in how we accommodate limitations that arise from uncertainty.

In the remainder of this chapter, I look at how issues around rights, partiality and accountability test the luck-neutralization impulse that is at the core of luck egalitarianism. To begin that exercise, given the extent to which Rawls draws upon the conception, I review Williams’ arguments on equality, counterposing them to Nozick's outright rejection of the egalitarian terms of reference.