The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy

David Estlund (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376692.001.0001
Published: 2012 Online ISBN: 9780199968886 Print ISBN: 9780195376692

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CHAPTER

3 Justice 
Richard Arneson

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376692.013.0003 Pages 58–75

Published: 18 September 2012

Abstract
This article analyzes conceptions of justice, identifying some fault lines in current discussions about
what we owe one another. It explores utilitarianism; John Rawls and the critique of utilitarianism;
Lockean libertarianism; the capabilities approach and luck egalitarianism; Ronald Dworkin's equality
of resources doctrine; interpersonal comparisons, welfare, and equality versus su ciency versus
priority; and democratic equality and equality of social relations.

Keywords: utilitarianism, John Rawls, libertarianism, Locke, egalitarianism, Ronald Dworkin, equality of
resources, social relations, equality
Subject: Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Just about everything concerning the topic of justice is contested. Even the name is controversial (Nozick
1974). In this chapter, the term justice refers to fairness in the distribution of bene ts and burdens to
1
persons in society. There are at least four ideas at work here, each one variously interpretable: (a) what
counts as a “fair” distribution, (b) how to conceive of bene ts and burdens, (c) what the necessary and
su cient conditions for being a person (a being whose condition matters for purposes of justice) are, and
(d) what the relevant individuation conditions for a society are, or, alternatively put, what the spatial and
temporal scope of justice principles is. The latter two are important issues, but the discussion here
2
concentrates on the rst and second.

I follow John Rawls (1999) and assume that judgments of justice have priority over other normative
judgments. If a society is unjust, it ought to be changed to eliminate the injustice, whatever other nice
features the society might have, even if those nice features would be threatened by moves toward justice.
Like the other terminological decisions discussed so far, this one has controversial implications, and, in
particular, it exerts pressure toward adoption of an expansive and inclusive account of justice, so that it can
be plausible to deny that a society that is unjust might nonetheless (all things considered) be worth
preserving as it is in order to preserve its desirable nonjustice attributes. Viewed this way, justice
 assessment is fundamental moral assessment and the principles of justice are the fundamental moral
principles. The treatment of the topic of justice that follows is not comprehensive but merely examines
some recent prominent proposals.

p. 59
1. Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism comes in many versions and forms. For our purposes two are relevant. The utilitarian
principle of right action is that one should morally always do whatever act, among those available, that

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would bring about the largest aggregate utility. The aggregate utility of a choice is the sum of its impacts,
positive or negative, on each a ected person. The maximization of utility can also be embraced as a
standard of justice—institutions, laws, social practices, social norms, individual acts, and anything else that
have a causal impact on aggregate utility can be regarded as more or less just, depending on their degree of
utility maximization.

Utility here is individual good or welfare—what makes a person’s life better or worse for that very person.
Di erent accounts of individual good yield di erent versions of utilitarianism. Two prominent accounts are
hedonism and desire satisfaction. According to the former, utility is pleasure and the absence of pain;
according to the latter, utility is satisfaction of noninstrumental desire, with each desire weighted by its
intensity.

Internal to utilitarianism is an arithmetical egalitarianism. Everyone’s identical welfare gains and losses
count exactly the same in the determination of right action and policy choice. In this respect, utilitarianism
opposes aristocratic and other elitist views that accord extra moral value to achieving welfare gains and
avoiding welfare losses for the aristocrats or people who count as elite by high placement on some favored
dimension of assessment.

Utilitarianism is proposed as a theoretical criterion of right action and policy. Acceptance of it in this role
does not commit one to acceptance of it as a practical decision-making guide. Given that when human
individuals choose how to act they tend to be ill-informed, favor themselves and those near and dear to
them, and are not very good at rationally incorporating information they do have into calculations of what
to do, utilitarianism would be a poor decision-making guide for most people in most circumstances. Hence,
the utilitarian should favor establishing laws, institutions, social practices, social norms, and even public
and private moralities that will operate to produce the best possible results as assessed by the utilitarian
standard. In terms made familiar by R. M. Hare, the utilitarian needs to distinguish di erent levels of moral
thinking (Hare 1981; see also Railton 1984). At the theoretical level, the utilitarian standard of justice is that
policies should maximize aggregate utility, but at the practical level, the norms that guide lawmakers,
policy planners, and ordinary citizens should be whatever would best advance the theoretical aim. What
these should be depends on the empirical facts.
p. 60
2. John Rawls and the Critique of Utilitarianism

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most profound contribution to its subject since the writings of
Hobbes, aims to provide a substantial alternative to utilitarianism, which Rawls takes to be the dominant
way of thinking about social justice within the broadly liberal tradition of political philosophy. Rawls objects
that utilitarianism is not at its root a liberal theory; utilitarianism does not safeguard the rights of
individuals. The objection is that utilitarianism ignores the separateness of persons or what Rawls calls the
“distinction between persons” (Rawls 1999, 24). The problem (in part) is aggregation. A rming that we

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should always do what maximizes the sum total of utility implies that if in peculiar circumstances entirely
crushing one person’s life prospects would bring about small gains for many people, perhaps already very
well-o people, the numbers might yield the result that sacri cing one person for the sake of gaining
bene ts for many is what we should do. By the same token, eliminating the basic liberties of some for the
sake of welfare gains for others might in principle be the right policy according to utilitarianism, depending
on the amounts of utility gains and losses that alternative policies would bring about.

Denying these claims, Rawls identi es the substance of justice with what would be chosen by free and equal
rational persons in a setting that is designed to be fair for the purpose of choosing principles of social
regulation. The philosophically favored interpretation of that choice problem Rawls calls the “original
position.” Its decisive feature is the veil of ignorance, which stipulates that the imagined parties choosing
principles are to be ignorant of all particular facts about themselves and aware only of general facts of
physical science and social science. Rawls argues that the principles of justice that would be chosen in the
original position are a principle requiring equal civil liberties for all and a principle to the e ect that social
and economic inequalities are acceptable just in case they (a) are attached to positions and o ces open to all
under fair equality of opportunity (FEO) and (b) maximize the bene ts going to the worst-o social group.
(For more on these ideas, see the chapter on Rawls by Leif Wenar in this volume.)

Civil liberties such as free speech are important for justice as de ned in a broad way of this chapter, but I
ignore them and simply assume that we are arguing among positions that agree about free speech and other
basic democratic rights. Rawls’s view on justice then encompasses FEO and the di erence principle. FEO
obtains in a society when (a) all may apply for positions of advantage, applications are assessed on their
merits, and those who submit the most meritorious applications are selected and (b) all have a fair
opportunity to become quali ed for such competitions, so that any members of society with the same native
endowments of talent and the same ambition and diligence have exactly the same prospects of competitive
p. 61 success. FEO holds that if there are to be social inequalities, the superior positions must be open to all on
a basis of FEO. The di erence principle determines when there should be such inequalities and how large
they should be. Institutions should be arranged so that social inequalities work to make the position of the
worst-o social group as favorable as possible. The inequalities that are just are those that are functional in
this sense.

The Rawlsian principles measure the bene t levels that individuals achieve in terms of their holdings of
primary social goods. These are resources and opportunities, distributable by society, that every rational
person wants more of rather than less or, in a later formulation, that individuals would want if they give
priority to developing and exercising their moral powers to cooperate with others on fair terms and to form,
pursue, and revise as appropriate a conception of the good.

The idea that what we owe to one another is a fair share of primary social goods involves a division of
responsibility between society and the individual. Given a fair share of resources, liberties, and
opportunities, each of us has his or her own life to lead and is responsible for his or her choice of life aims,
life strategies, or evolving plans of life meant to ful ll those aims.
 Proposing a rights-based doctrine that emphasizes individual liberty in several ways, Rawls o ers a version
of philosophical liberalism that is a distinct alternative to utilitarianism, in which rights and liberties are
regarded as means to a more ultimate moral goal.

3. Lockean Libertarianism

A take-no-prisoners assault on philosophical liberalism appeared in 1974, just three years after the
publication of Rawls’s book. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia weaves together the natural rights

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doctrine of John Locke and Ayn Rand style libertarianism (see Nozick 1974; Locke 1690; Rand and Branden
1964). In Nozick’s synthesis, individuals have absolute, exceptionless moral rights to live as they choose
and do as they wish with whatever they legitimately own, provided they do not harm others in certain
wrongful ways, especially through force, fraud, theft, assault, or causation of physical damage to the
property of others. On this view, if one has a moral right to X, one is at liberty to do X and others are under
an enforceable moral duty not to interfere (in certain ways). Moral rights are waivable, transferable, and
forfeitable. One may always allow another person to do to one what one has a right that the other not do.
Any right one has one may give to or trade with another person, and by violating rights of others one may
come to forfeit some of one’s own rights.

The core of the libertarian doctrine of rights is the a rmation of self-ownership. Each person is deemed to
p. 62 be the full rightful owner of him- or herself, which means that the entire bundle of rights standardly
associated with ownership of material things is held by each individual person. Being the full owner of
oneself, others have no property rights at all over one’s body and no enforceable rights to use one’s body to
bene t others or behave as they wish. No one, then, has any positive rights to aid from others, absent
voluntary contract or promise of such aid, and not even aid in the protection of one’s Lockean rights. Moral
rights according to the libertarian are agent-relative side constraints to be respected and not goals to be
3
promoted. In deciding what to do, within the limits of libertarian rights, one subtracts from the set of
options any that would violate the rights of others and is morally free to choose any action from the
remaining set of possible actions.

The distinctive character of Nozick’s libertarianism reveals itself in his account of justice. People’s holdings
of private property in various parts of the earth are morally legitimate, just in case each person gets
property by voluntary transfer from someone who is entitled to it, who in turn received it from someone
who was entitled to it, and so on, all the way back to an initial legitimate appropriation of unowned material
stu . Legitimate appropriation of private property occurs against a background in which all people
provisionally have rights to use freely any part of the earth. One may eat the fruit that grows on trees and cut
down the trees to build res, but any improvements one makes on unowned land would be available for free
use by others. In this setting, one may appropriate unowned moveable pieces of the earth or tracts of land as
one’s private property provided that doing so does not make anyone’s condition worse than it would have
been under a regime of continued free use. Continued ownership remains subject to this Proviso, so one’s
property right in an object diminishes or lapses if one’s ownership comes to render others worse o than
they would have been under free use, but apart from that condition, Nozick envisages self-owning persons
acquiring full, permanent, transferable, and bequeathable private property rights over material things. (The
story about intellectual property would presumably also incorporate a version of the Proviso.) Nozick
develops a right-wing libertarianism in contrast to the left-wing versions that start with the claim that
whereas each individual person owns him- or herself, the earth belongs to all people in common,
generation after generation (Vallentyne and Steiner 2000).

This entire edi ce appears to rest on a at denial of the claim that anyone owes anyone anything except to
refrain from harming in speci ed ways and to keep one’s voluntary contracts and promises. Why accept this
 denial that morality includes any requirements of bene cence? Nozick sketches an argument on this point.
He suggests that the ideal that morality consists of absolute, exceptionless side constraints is best explained
by the “separateness of persons” idea—the idea that each is the full, rightful owner of him- or herself and
no one is properly a resource for any other person—and from this separateness of persons claim (along with
some uncontroversial further premises) one can derive the full doctrine that the side constraints that bind
p. 63 us are the Lockean libertarian rights. If the argument could be lled out successfully, one could not deny
that the substance of morality is Lockean libertarianism without denying that morality consists in absolute,
exceptionless side constraints of any sort.

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Nozick himself does not work out this argument sketch in detail, and it is hard to see how this might be
done, so assessing the argument is di cult. I make two tentative remarks. One is that the starting point is
eminently contestable. That there are some moral principles that are fundamental, and thus hold
necessarily and universally, is plausible. But that such principles take the form of side constraints such as
“Never steal anyone’s property for any purpose” or “Never assault an innocent, nonthreatening person” is
doubtful (Sen 1982). One can imagine an unending series of scenarios in which the consequences of not
acting contrary to such rights become worse and worse and, at some point in the progression, a reasonable
person will judge that the right gives way. A second remark is that it is radically unclear why a morality of
absolute side constraints must assume the shape of Lockean libertarian rights as Nozick construes them.
The absolute side constraints on one’s choice of options might for all that has been said include a constraint
not to be a free rider on fair cooperative schemes for delivering public goods and a constraint that one
provide easy rescue to those in peril. The second-mentioned “constraint” is a positive duty to aid, but so far
we have not been given reason to accept that constraints are limited to duties not to harm and do not extend
to duties to aid.

One might object that positing a moral duty to help others or to promote the ful llment of everyone’s moral
rights cannot be squeezed into the framework of an absolute side constraint view because one would have to
draw arbitrary lines across continuous curves charting how much one might be obligated to provide for
others by way of bene t at what cost to oneself. However, if line-drawing of this sort poses a problem for a
morality of absolute side constraints, this is a problem that is in any case one the doctrine faces, whether or
not duties to aid are included. Does the absolute side constraint against harming others forbid me from
in icting even a jot of damage on the persons or property of others as side e ects of pursuing my own
projects, and does it forbid me from in icting even a tiny risk of causing such harm on others? (See Railton
2003.) I conjecture that if the absolute side constraint advocate can develop plausible nonarbitrary
proposals for drawing moral lines marking reasonable tradeo s among con icting values, the person will
have the theoretical resources to include duties not to free ride and duties to aid—duties that are anathema
to the Lockean—in the array of side constraints to be respected.

Even if the idea of regarding natural moral rights as conceived by Nozick as absolute and exceptionless turns
out to be a dead end, this would not dispose of Nozick’s claims regarding what rights we have and what we
owe each other. Lockean libertarian rights could be reinterpreted as allowing exceptions and as coexisting
with duties of bene cence. How plausible such a moderate Lockeanism would prove to be is a further issue
(on which, see Simmons 1992).
p. 64
4. The Capabilities Approach and Luck Egalitarianism

Imagine two persons who have equal holdings of primary social goods such as income and wealth. One is
legless, and one has fully functioning legs; otherwise they are similar. The former must spend most of her
income to gain mobility, which the latter receives naturally and for free. Amartya Sen points out that
according to the primary social goods standard, the condition of the two is the same, but for justice
purposes, this is not right: The legless person is clearly seriously disadvantaged. More generally, individuals
vary widely in the quality of their personal traits that bear on their ability to achieve worthwhile aims, and

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the relevant measure of a person’s condition for purposes of justice is accordingly not her resource share
but what she is enabled to be and do that she has reason to value, given her resources, personal traits, and
other circumstances. In Sen’s terms, the relevant basis of interpersonal comparison for justice is each
person’s set of capabilities to achieve functionings he has reason to value (Sen 1992). Martha Nussbaum
amends Sen’s proposal by specifying that justice requires that each person should be enabled to achieve an
adequate or decent level of functioning in each of the several varieties of functioning that taken together
constitute a decent or good enough human life (Nussbaum 1992, 2006).

Will Kymlicka (2002, 73–74) writes, “When inequalities in income are the result of choices, not
circumstances, the di erence principle creates, rather than removes, unfairness.” To appreciate this worry,
imagine a society that is regulated by Rawls’s principles and in which those who end up worst o in social
primary goods are all slackers—people who avoid remunerative hard work as much as possible—and many
of those better o in terms of primary social goods are not favorably endowed in personal traits but simply
engage diligently and steadily at remunerative hard work. It does not seem just that in these circumstances
society is arranged for the maximal bene t of the slackers. This thought is the nub of the doctrine that has
come to be called “luck egalitarianism” and that is most thoroughly articulated in some writings by Ronald
Dworkin.

5. Ronald Dworkinʼs Equality of Resources Doctrine

Ronald Dworkin writes that his theory of justice aims to make people’s personal resources sensitive to their
choices but insensitive to their circumstances (Dworkin 2000, 89). This seems to dispose of the slackers.
p. 65 Dworkin explicitly works to develop an account of social justice, including an account of justice that
incorporates an adequate view of personal responsibility into the view of what we owe one another insofar
as we are resolved that when acting through the state we shall treat each other as equals (see also Cohen
1989).

According to Dworkin, justice requires equality of resources. This ideal is met when external resources are
initially distributed via an auction in which all persons have equal bidding power and variability in people’s
endowments of personal resources is o set by a hypothetical insurance market in which individuals have
the opportunity to insure against having low marketable talent and another hypothetical insurance market
in which individuals can insure against being a icted by handicaps. These markets are hypothetical
because we assume counterfactually that all individuals lack any knowledge of the market price their talents
might fetch and lack any knowledge of their particular likelihood of being struck by a genetic or early
childhood disability. By extending the domain of advantages and disadvantages that individuals incur, all of
which are to be balanced in the calculation that determines fair distribution, Dworkin’s construction
accommodates the worry about the narrowness of primary social goods calculation described three
paragraphs above.

If we add to this picture the supposition that, after receiving a fair share of resources as dictated by the ideal
auction and insurance markets, individuals interact in a fair framework for interaction and have the
 opportunity to insure at market rates against any misfortune they dread, we now have in mind a pure
starting gate theory of justice. After an initial fair (equal) allocation that ideally compensates for bad brute
luck, individuals thereafter experience luck only as mediated by their choices—option luck. So there should
be a once a lifetime or once a generation initial distribution of resources to secure that all are treated as
equals in the justice domain.

Matters are more complicated, however. Dworkin a rms that when ordinary insurance for future
contingencies is unavailable, and when people have not received an equal start in life and then come to
experience good and bad luck as they live their lives, justice requires that social arrangements such as a tax

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and transfer scheme be put in place that allocate to people what they would have been entitled to according
to the insurance choices that the average member of the community would have made if she had had the
opportunity to purchase insurance at competitive market rates in a fair initial situation (with everyone
being fully informed of all information relevant to choice and commanding equal resources according to the
equality of resources ideal).

The average member of the community, fully informed, might well choose to insure against misfortunes
that she could avoid by her choices, because she knows that although she could, she likely won’t, and the
consequences would be bad, and helpful remedies are available. Perhaps the already-discussed slackers
should get some compensation, in Dworkin’s rami ed view.

Leaving the exegesis of Dworkin to the side, it is not so clear that, at the level of theoretical moral principle
at least, the theory of justice ought to hold individuals responsible for their choices in the sense of denying
p. 66 that predicaments that they fall into as a consequence of their choices trigger any obligation on the part
of others to rescue the choosers from these predicaments or to compensate them for resulting losses. One’s
poor choices and the low-quality preferences that motivate them may simply re ect one’s poor genetic and
early childhood socialization endowments of preference forming and choice-making and choice-executing
ability. Even if the individual is properly held responsible for his choices, to some degree, the task of sorting
out what one is and is not responsible for begins to look tricky and might turn out to be intractable.

6. Interpersonal Comparisons, Welfare, and Equality versus

Su iciency versus Priority

Suppose there is a correct objective measure of the good quality of an individual’s life, assessed from a
prudential standpoint (for discussion, see Par t 1984). Just suppose. How well a person’s life goes for that
very person can be decomposed into several components—for example, pleasurable experience,
achievement, systematic knowledge, and love and friendship. How well a person does on each of these
dimensions can be assigned a score, and there is an index or formula that enables us to compute, for any
combination of scores on the several dimensions, the individual person’s positive well-being score, and
there is a similar measure of bads, the di erence between positive and negative yielding the person’s overall
well-being level. This measure is cardinally interpersonally comparable. (The idea of a numerically precise
measure is dubious, but we might hope for partial comparability and inexact, rough cardinal interpersonal
comparisons.)

Let us say that a welfarist approach to justice holds that there is an interpersonal measure as just described
and that this is the appropriate measure of people’s condition for determining what we morally owe to one
another. Both of these claims are controversial. Still, I assume that welfarism has an appeal.

Welfarism might consort with a wide variety of types of moral principle that might serve to regulate the
distribution of social bene ts and burdens. Some would be frankly elitist—steak and ale for the aristocrats;
hamburgers and water for the common folk. Let us focus on principles that are egalitarian just in holding
 that a welfare gain or loss of a certain size has the same moral value, no matter whether it goes to you or me
or anyone else, and no matter whether it goes to any member of any ascriptive group such as aristocrat or
peasant or Croat or Serb or the like. We can distinguish several broad principles a broadly egalitarian
theorist might adopt. A su ciency principle holds that society should be arranged so that everyone attains a
good enough or su cient level of well-being—a well-being number that indicates a decent quality of life. A
p. 67 principle of equality holds that society should be arranged to that everyone attains the same level of well-
being. A maximin principle holds that society should be arranged so as to maximize the level of well-being of
whoever is worst-o in this respect.

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Su ciency notions play a useful role in public policy, as when we de ne a poverty line and seek policies that
bring as many as possible to that line. However, at the level of fundamental principle, the objection arises
that there is no nonarbitrary way to determine where to draw the line of su ciency, so wherever we draw
the line, it cannot have the importance for just policy that the su cientarian takes it to have. Equality
doctrines prompt the objection that it does not matter morally how one person’s condition compares to that
of another, so a fortiori it does not matter morally (except perhaps instrumentally) that everyone has the
same or is treated the same in any respect. Equality is a more plausible idea when construed as an
a rmation that all individuals have equal basic moral worth and dignity or that each person’s interests
should count the same as any other’s in determinations of what we owe to one another. But equal worth
does not imply equal shares. (See the chapter by Anderson on “Equality” in this volume.) Maximin looks to
be an extreme doctrine, as it were, a dictatorship of the worst o . Why should a jot of extra well-bene t for
the worst o take precedence over any amount of well-being gain for any number of better-o persons?

Prioritarianism names a family of doctrines that deny that it is intrinsically morally important how one
person’s condition compares to that of another yet a rm a version of the maximin idea that justice requires
giving priority to improving the condition of the worst o (Par t 1991). Priority holds that one ought to
choose actions and policies that maximize moral value, which accrues only from bene t to persons (or
avoidance of loss). The moral value of gaining a bene t for a person is larger the greater the well-being
increase the person obtains from it, and larger the worse o the person would otherwise be in lifetime well-
4
being.

Prioritarianism is a close cousin of utilitarianism and will attract some of the same objections. The entire
extended family of welfarist approaches to justice is also vulnerable to attack and has been attacked
vigorously, from a range of viewpoints including those of Rawls and Dworkin, whose views we have already
canvassed.

Equality, su ciency, and priority are principles of distribution that can just as well be formulated in terms
that do not assume interpersonal comparisons of welfare. Broadly speaking, an egalitarian distributive
principle stipulates that better-o people have a special obligation to make sacri ces to improve the
condition of those worse o . “Better o ” and “worse o ” need not be de ned in terms of welfare or well-
5
being. The assumption of the welfarist is that, at least at the level of fundamental principle, what we should
be concerned about is the overall quality of each person’s life, assessed in terms of what fundamentally
makes a life go better or worse for the one who lives it. The most straightforward objection to welfarism
denies the possibility of cardinal interpersonal welfare comparisons. One can always concoct a measure of
welfare, but one can concoct any number of them, and there is no basis for nonarbitrary choice of any one.
p. 68 Addressing the objective list advocate, one can ask, what warrants placing these items on the list and not
others, and no good answer will be forthcoming. So goes the skeptical response. If it is on the right track,
any attempt to incorporate interpersonal welfare comparisons in a theory of what we fundamentally owe
each other is bound to be incorporating false claims at the heart of the theory.

A second line of objection does not deny the possibility of a welfarist measure but denies it could be fair to
establish an enforceable system of justice on its basis, given that in modern diverse societies ordinary fairly
 reasonable people fan out into allegiance to many con icting conceptions or morality and human good. It is
deemed to be disrespectful and unfair to impose social obligations on people on the basis of a public ranking
system that con icts with their own fairly reasonable (reasonable enough) views of their own good.

A third line of objection a rms a division of moral responsibility between the individual and society that is
said to con ict with any welfarist approach. Society—all of us taken together—is responsible for providing
a fair share of opportunities and resources and liberties to all, and what people then do with their own lives
is up to them and not the proper business of society. Given a fair distribution in the context of fair social
arrangements, each individual is responsible for the quality of her life. This does not mean that she is

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obligated to aim prudently at the maximization of the quality of her life but rather that sheer shortfalls in
well-being do not trigger justice obligations in others to make good the shortfall.

Welfarists have responses to these three lines of argument, which might or might not be adequate (Arneson
2004). At this point I leave this debate and inquire what options remain for justice if cardinal interpersonal
welfare comparisons are eschewed.

One option is to base interpersonal comparison for purposes of justice on people’s holdings of, or access to,
a limited set of uncontroversial external goods, especially goods that are useful for carrying out a wide array
of life plans. This is roughly the idea of Rawlsian social primary goods. This idea is a icted by a di culty
already mentioned. People di er greatly in their talents and in their circumstances, and these greatly a ect
what any individual is enabled to be and do with a given set of external resources.

Another option involves comparing people’s situations without reliance on interpersonal welfare
comparisons. This project has been worked out in considerable detail under the heading of what economists
call the “theory of fairness” (Varian 1974). The core idea is that of an envy-free distribution—one in which
no one would prefer the situation of any other person to one’s own. Initially the thought is that each person
compares the consumption and leisure bundle she gets with the consumption and leisure bundle of every
other person. The comparisons are then extended, for example, to situations involving production of goods.
In the most general case, one compares the total set of external resources and circumstances plus talents
and personal traits that any other individual has to those one has. When people di er in both internal and
external resources and have di erent preferences, bringing about an envy-free distribution is not generally
p. 69 possible. Several conceptions of fair distribution have been identi ed that are satis able across the
generality of cases without relying on interpersonal comparisons (see Fleurbaey 2008). To get a sense of the
character of this approach, consider the egalitarian-equivalent distribution. Suppose there are a number of
individuals. Each one has personal traits for which he is deemed personally responsible, along with
circumstances (these will include some of his personal traits) for which he is deemed to be not personally
responsible. There are external transferable resources, either just given to the justice agency or possessed by
individuals, but such that they can be taken from present possessors and redistributed. To obtain the
egalitarian equivalent distribution, we set a reference level of internal resources (traits and circumstances)
and give maximin priority “to individuals whose current level of well-being would be obtained with the
least resources if their circumstances were of the reference type” and if their traits for which they are
responsible remained as they actually are (Fleurbaey 2008, 63).

The fairness approach just sketched holds that if the individual satis es her preferences, she lives well in
her own terms (though one cannot say she lives better than others who fail to satisfy their preferences). The
welfarist disputes both taking preference satisfaction to be the ultimate desideratum and denying the
coherence of individual comparisons.

A test case for assessing these approaches to justice is their response to the willing addict (righteous dope
end). This person prefers above all to use heroin frequently, is glad to have this preference, and cares little
or nothing for anything else. He prefers more years of life as an addict to fewer, but prefers a shorter life
 expectancy as an addict to a longer life expectancy as a nonaddict. He is neither cognitively impaired nor
mentally ill, and his preference for heroin was not formed in debilitating circumstances. To sharpen the
case, suppose that by some intervention one could alter the wiling addict’s preferences so that he comes to
lead a ful lling life by the objective list standard, but in that event the person remains wistful for the life of
the addict and never comes to prefer or endorse the course his life has taken. The welfarist and the fairness
approach advocate will be, in theory, utterly opposed as to the right moral response here, though practical
considerations might soften the con ict at the level of policy proposals.

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7. Democratic Equality and Equality of Social Relations

Luck egalitarian doctrines have attracted estimable critics, including Elizabeth Anderson (1999) and Samuel
Sche er (2003). Consider a simple, strong version of this doctrine: Unchosen and uncourted inequalities
should be eliminated, and chosen and courted inequalities should be left standing. One concern is that
p. 70 voluntariness of choice varies by degree along several independent dimensions, and it is not so clear how
to integrate these dimensions into a single measure of voluntariness or how to respond to the range of
partially voluntary choices.

Another criticism is that voluntary choice does not have the make-or-break signi cance for justice that luck
egalitarianism assigns it. This criticism echoes a criticism of the Lockean libertarian treatment of voluntary
choice, which, it is objected, the luck egalitarian swallows in a misguided attempt to accommodate
conservative criticisms of left-wing theories of social justice. Common sense rejects the rigid position that if
someone has become entangled in an unfortunate predicament through her own fault or choice, those who
enjoy good fortune have no moral obligation of justice to lend a helping hand. By the same token, many
would hold that when someone attains wealth and privilege that she would not have gained but for the sheer
good brute luck of having received a favorable genetic endowment or early upbringing, there is no
imperative of justice that requires eliminating this inequality, brought about by unchosen luck.

One possible response to this criticism is to point out that the personal responsibility factors that the luck
egalitarian emphasizes might be considerations that a ect what we owe to one another by way of justice
even if these considerations do not entirely rule the roost. That one is badly o , or worse o than others,
might generate a reason to help one, a reason that is dampened though not entirely eliminated the more it is
the case that one has arrived in this unfortunate situation through one’s own choice or negligence. In
forming a considered judgment on this issue, it is hard to make further progress in the absence of a speci c
proposal that says what other factors are important for justice and how weighty a consideration personal
responsibility is by comparison with these other factors.

This issue is further complicated by the obvious fact that, on any account of justice, factors that are
standardly bundled under the category of personal responsibility will have instrumental signi cance.
Holding people responsible for their choices can simply mean establishing carrot and stick incentives, so
one gains an advantage for oneself if one behaves in a way that is deemed socially desirable and su ers a
disadvantage if one behaves in a way that is deemed socially undesirable. For example, the di erence
principle might be better ful lled by social policies that promote full employment than by direct cash grants
to the group of people that is worst o in terms of primary social good holdings. Private voluntary
associations will also deploy responsibility practices in pursuit of their own aims. If one wants to build a
successful stamp-collecting club, one will do best to set up practices that will reward those who are
assiduous in promoting the club’s aims. For the assessment of luck egalitarianism, the question is whether
or not, setting aside instrumental uses, some notions of personal responsibility have intrinsic moral
importance.
 The democratic equality theorist does not so much deny that responsibility has intrinsic moral signi cance
but rather urges that the luck egalitarian misconceives its character. Elizabeth Anderson (1999) proposes
that the egalitarian should a rm equality in social relations, equality of status. In a just society, democratic
p. 71 equality prevails. What justice requires is that every member of society is enabled throughout her adult
life to participate as a fully functioning member of a democratic society. Each should be continuously
enabled to function in all of the ways that together constitute full membership in a democratic society. This
is a version of a su cientarian doctrine: Each individual must be sustained at a “good enough” threshold
level of capability to function as a full equal participant in a democratic society.

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A conception of individual and collective responsibility is implicit in the democratic equality ideal. All of us
together are responsible for bringing it about that each person is sustained at the decent threshold level of
capability. If one falls below some threshold, no matter how this comes about, one is entitled to the help
that restores one to the good enough level. Because the entitlement is to capabilities or real freedom to gain
the relevant functioning achievements, responsibility rests on each individual to behave in ways that will
transform the capabilities into achieved functionings at the good enough level. (To say that I am responsible
for sustaining my own good health provided circumstances are arranged so I have the real freedom to do
that is to say that if I fail to act to sustain my own good health, no one is morally obligated to make good the
shortfall in my good health functioning.) Beyond the good enough level, provided there is a fair framework
for interaction in place, individuals are on their own, in the sense that others are not responsible for helping
them gain or sustain levels of advantage past the minimum needed for full participation.

From the democratic equality standpoint, luck egalitarianism appears to be both too harsh and unforgiving
in its treatment of those who end up below the good enough capability level via their own choices and too
intrusive in demanding redistributions of resources involving people who are above the good enough level
but to varying degrees. Consider rst those who end up below the democratic equality good enough level.
According to the luck egalitarian, these people merit help only if their predicament is not of their own
making, so procedures must be installed that attempt to sort the deserving from the undeserving needy and
channel aid only to the deserving. This is unfair to those who are denied aid on the basis of moralistic
judgments regarding their conduct and also unfair to those who receive aid only after being subjected to
what has been called “shameful revelation”—being required to provide evidence that one lacks normal
abilities and opportunities and hence should not be deemed personally responsible for being needy in a way
that absolves others of obligations to help. In either case, the needy are not being treated with the respect
that every person is owed.

Consider next the worry that luck egalitarianism is too intrusive. According to the simple luck
egalitarianism under review, unchosen and uncourted inequalities should be undone whether or not the
people who get the short end of the stick are below the good enough threshold or above it. The inequality in
life prospects between Bill Gates and Donald Trump, if it is brought about by brute luck factors, merits
redress, in just the same way and for just the same reason that the inequality between Bill Gates and a needy
homeless person (who has not chosen or courted his needy homeless state) does. The democratic equality
theorist surmises that something is awry here. The luck egalitarian justice conception illicitly extends the
domain of egalitarian concern.

p. 72 The root of the di culty, according to the democratic equality critic, is that according to luck
egalitarianism, sheer unchosen bad luck su ces to trigger justice demands for compensation and
redistribution. But the mere facts that you were born with greater native talent potential and are more
physically attractive are not plausibly understood as triggering egalitarian justice demands, nor does the
sheer brute luck that an uninsurable meteor shower damages my crops and not yours generate a demand on
my part for compensation from you and other lucky persons. As Anderson puts it, the proper concern of
egalitarianism is oppression, which is always socially caused.
 There are two components to luck egalitarianism—“luckism” and egalitarianism. Both come in di erent
versions. The democratic equality critique attacks both components. The components function in tandem,
so the best response to the democratic equality critique identi es the most plausible and promising
combinations of them.

Regarding egalitarianism, the democratic equality critique revisits the disagreement among equality,
su ciency, and priority views that we have already discussed. The su ciency doctrine faces the objection
that there is no nonarbitrary line of su ciency; there are simply di erent dimensions of human well-being,
each of which varies by degree. The democratic equality theorist has a response: that the signi cant line

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marks the threshold level of capability which one must be above to be a fully participating member of a
democratic society. This standard is vague and somewhat unspeci c, but maybe that is not an objection.
Maybe the line that morally matters is a vague, blurry line. The standard presupposes a commitment to the
idea that a just society must be a democratic society, but perhaps that too is acceptable. If the society is ruled
by dictatorship, or divided by caste hierarchy, the democratic equality ideal says one ought to shift to
democracy and eliminate the castes.

What level of access to resources one needs to be a full participating member of a democratic society is
surely to some considerable extent relative to the wealth of the society one inhabits. A level of wealth that
would render me an excluded outsider in contemporary Europe or the United States might be su cient for
full participatory status in India or an even poorer democratic society. The democratic equality justice
perspective thus seems to have somewhat conservative implications regarding global justice. A world could
consist of fully democratic societies, each meeting the democratic equality standard even though the level of
wealth di ers enormously from society to society. In fact, one could face grim life prospects, a life of utter
squalor, but still have the capability to be a full functioning member of a democratic society provided most
others also face squalid life conditions. From the luck egalitarian perspective, something is askew in the
democratic equality view. That people are living avoidably squalid lives through no fault or choice of their
own does not register as a consideration at all, much less a decisive consideration, in the democratic
equality perspective in the determination of what we owe to one another.

Samuel Sche er (2003) o ers another interpretation of the democratic equality ideal, or perhaps another
aspect of it. He characterizes the egalitarian society as one in which relationships among people are
p. 73 unmarred by inequalities of status, power, rank, and authority. An egalitarian society is a society of
equals. Justice is ancillary to social equality: The distribution of resources and opportunities is just, at least
in part, to the degree that it promotes rather than undermines relations of equality. This is an attractive
idea, but, as he notes, it is also somewhat elusive and hard to interpret. Inequalities of status, power, rank,
and authority are widespread in existing democratic societies. Employers have power and authority over
employees, physicians over patients, professors over adult students, and so on. In the public and private
sector, many people work in large bureaucracies organized as top-down hierarchies. These inequalities are
part of the fabric of modern society, not alien to it, many of us suppose. Widespread acceptance of great
inequality in relationships challenges the idea that the fundamental egalitarian ideal is social equality
understood as equality in relations among people.

One line that might be pursued allows that equality in relationships is one value among others and is often
overridden by other values. So, perhaps, a lot of social inequality is acceptable all things considered in a
society that adheres to democratic equality ideals. One might also distinguish constrained and
unconstrained social inequality and interpret democratic equality as opposing only the latter or mainly the
latter. Relationships of inequality in status, power, authority, and rank are constrained to the degree that
subordinates in these relationships have acceptable exit options and to the degree that those on top are
checked by e ective accountability practices. An accountability procedure in an organization gives superior
o cials incentives to use their power and institutional privileges in ways that advance morally legitimate
organization goals rather than the private aims of the o cials.
 From the luck egalitarian perspective, the ideal of equality in relationships looks to be an unlikely candidate
for the role of fundamental organizing value for justice. From the social equality or democratic equality
perspective, if I su er bad life prospects and am looking forward to grim quality of life, I have no valid moral
complaint if the overall distribution of bene ts and burdens that includes giving me the short end of the
stick promotes overall achievement of the appropriate level of equality of power, authority, rank, and status
across society.

The luck egalitarian ips this perspective on social equality. For the luck egalitarian, power, authority, rank,
and status are tools for promoting justice values, and society should be arranged so that the formation and

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distribution of these tools e ciently serves justice values—luck egalitarian aims. Here there is a rock-
bottom disagreement.

8. Conclusion

In this essay I have identi ed some fault lines in current discussions about what we owe one another.
Lockean libertarians think we owe each other nothing except not to harm or interfere in certain ways. Other
p. 74 theorists hold that every human being, just in virtue of being a human being, is owed help toward being
enabled to lead a decent-quality life, and owes everyone else in turn. From that starting point,
disagreements proliferate. Who owes help to whom, and on what occasions, and on what basis? Recent
discussions make progress on all of these questions, but de nitive answers seem to be, so far, elusive.

Notes
1. The term distribution here allows a process/product ambiguity. Fair distribution can refer to a fair process of distributing or
to a fair pattern that results from the process.

2. Notice that (c) is too narrowly framed. A full treatment of distributive justice should specify a fair distribution of benefits
and burdens across persons and human individuals that are not persons and nonhuman animals that are also not
persons.

3. To see this distinction, consider this example: Suppose you could prevent two people from breaking promises they have
made but only by yourself breaking a comparably important promise you have made to some other person. The ordinary
norm of promise-keeping is agent relative: It says to the agent that she should not break the promises she has made, so
this ordinary norm implies one ought not to break oneʼs own promises even to reduce the overall amount of promise-
breaking generally, at least up to a point.

4. Why lifetime well-being? One could also apply the doctrine to individuals at a time, priority being given to those who are
worse o now (see Mckerlie 2001).

5. Equality of wealth would require redistribution toward me if I have far less money than the average. My life might be going
splendidly despite my lack of cash.
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