Luck egalitarianism

Luck egalitarianism is a view about distributive justice espoused by a variety of egalitarian and other political philosophers. According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well off people are should be wholly attributable to the responsible choices people make and not to differences in their unchosen circumstances. This expresses the intuition that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.

Luck egalitarians therefore distinguish between outcomes that are the result of brute luck (e.g. misfortunes in genetic makeup, or being struck by a bolt of lightning) and those that are the consequence of conscious options (such as career choice or fair gambles). Luck egalitarianism is intended as a fundamental normative idea that might guide our thinking about justice rather than as an immediate policy prescription. The idea has its origin in John Rawls's thought that distributive shares should not be influenced by arbitrary factors. Luck egalitarians disagree among themselves about the proper way to measure how well off people are (for instance, whether we should measure material wealth, psychological happiness or some other factor) and the related issue of how to assess the value of their resources.

This does not seem coherent. The responsible choices people make are always the result of unchosen circumstances. The genes you are born with, the circumstances of the development of your brain, your upbringing, the decisions of your past and perhaps very different self, which information you don't know you don't have, all of these are unchosen and there is no decision making beyond the laws of physics.

I can understand wanting to indulge in our risk aversion, reducing some of the highs people can acheive with gambles to mitigate some of the lows. I would probably support this, I'm not comfortable with people's lives being endangered without their explicit consent for example and it is bad fun theory to have people lock themselves into unrecoverable positions.

Some might nitpick here that you can mitigate the lows without reducing the highs, but this is plain false for humans, since egalitarian feelings are just how our monkey brains tell us to punish those we subjectively deem too high status or perhaps "if she is brought down I or my tribe will climb up". Demands for equality are not primarily about material poverty but social equality. Only if we eliminate the social aspect of achievement, could you keep some of the high of achievement without making the less skilled or talented or lucky feel bad. I am not ready to do this. I would much prefer the alternative solution that after we ensure high status would not abuse their positions, we dial down our feelings about equality. Or better yet that we upgrade them, change them so they are tied to worth. High status people doing bad things should be swiftly brought down, but we are less envious for selfish reasons.

Kneeling before a good king is a good feeling. If it was eliminated from our minds, I say we would be impoverished.