The misuse of egalitarianism in society.

• Author: Otteson, James R.
• Position: Essay

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct an egalitarian society? On certain familiar assumptions, the answer is simple enough. If we agree on what the proper conception of egalitarianism is and how it would apply to the people in our society, if we know all the relevant information about people's lives and the ways in which they depart from the proper egalitarian benchmark, if we have knowledge of the resources available to us that might be marshaled and allocated, and if we know the mechanisms by which these resources might be reliably reallocated according to the proper egalitarian benchmark, then the problem that remains is purely one of logic: the best use of our available resources is implicit in our assumptions. At that point, establishing an egalitarian society, under the assumption that it is what we want, is merely a matter of will: Do we want to effectuate such a society or not?

With apologies to F. A. Hayek (1945), after whom the previous paragraph is modeled, the problem of constructing a properly egalitarian society is, alas, not so simple. There are many difficulties that combine to frustrate our attempts to establish an egalitarian society.

In this article, I discuss some of the political-economic difficulties. By focusing on "political-economic difficulties," I accept for the sake of argument that an egalitarian society (properly conceived) is desirable, and I address three issues related to the practical instantiation of creating or taking positive steps toward creating such a society: (1) many cases of so-called brute luck, which for many commentators leads to unfair (because undeserved) inequalities justifying redress, actually result from choices whose outcomes should be respected and not corrected; (2) political and economic policies that would match up with our considered egalitarian goals are far more difficult to craft than is typically envisioned; and (3) the likelihood that such policies, even when well crafted, will work in practice the way we would ideally like them to is lower than typically envisioned. I close by suggesting an alternative conception of egalitarianism--namely, egalitarianism of respect.

Luck Egalitarianism

Based on the amount of attention it has received, perhaps the most engaging topic in egalitarianism is luck: what it is, how to recognize it, how to (or whether we can) disaggregate its effects from those brought about by nonluck factors, and what to do about it. (1) Eliminating luck and its effects in people's lives altogether, however, is impossible. There is no way to eliminate all categories of luck running from chance encounters between people who can help one another to unpredictable changes in the environment or in human society. Might we, however, be able to dull or mitigate the effects of luck? Yes, but it is a very long way between saying that "some effects of luck seem unjust or unfair" to asserting that "we now know how to solve that problem"--or indeed even to saying "we now have figured out how to plausibly address that problem."

There is in fact a chain of difficulties. We first have to specify what luck is and agree on a description of it that specifies under what conditions it is unfair. Luck egalitarians routinely distinguish what they call "option luck" from what they call "brute luck": the former comprises inequalities that arise as a result of choices people make, such as voluntary gambling; the latter comprises inequalities that result independently of agents' choices, such as accidents of birth, natural disasters, and so on. Luck egalitarians differ on whether people should be compensated for bad option luck, for bad brute luck, for both, or for neither. (2) As I argue later, however, the distinction between option luck and brute luck, which initially seems promising, turns out not to be dispositive in relatively routine, everyday cases. Even assuming that we can come to a satisfactory description of the morally relevant sense of unfair luck, we then have to figure out how we can recognize the presence of unfair luck in actual people's lives--not in hypothetical thought experiments, but in the lives of real people. The next stage of the program would be to develop policies to address or mitigate the effects of unfair luck that address or mitigate what we want addressed or mitigated and not something else--policies that (a) will not make the problem worse or create other unintended problems and that (b) can be effectuated by the actual people likely to be administrators of the relevant government agencies and not by superhumans. (3)

Before we get to this policy stage, however, we face a prior difficulty: the inequality that is often taken as reflective of luck is a symptom that has many causes. The difficulty is not just that we can measure inequality in many different ways but also that inequality is caused by many things--luck is one, but it is by no means the only one. Suppose there is a species of causal agents, call it category L, that plays a role in effectuating a species of effects, category R. But there are many subspecies of L: L1, L2, L3, ... Ln; and there are many subspecies of R: R1, R2, R3, ... Rn. To make the causal argument, one would have to show that the particular subspecies of L that one is discussing is what has led to the particular subspecies of R that one is targeting. That is very hard to do. But our situation is actually worse than that. First, we cannot be sure whether the various subspecies of L that are conceptually distinct are also ontologically distinct--that is, whether our conceptual distinctions match up with the distinctions in reality. Second, each actual instance of R will have been brought about by many causes, one (or some) of which might be in the category of L at issue, but we cannot know (a) how many other Ls might have contributed to the R we are targeting or (b) what proportion of the relevant R is accounted for--in fact, not in theory--by the particular subspecies of L we are discussing. Causal ascriptions are difficult and delicate. They may hold in the hypothetical cases we construct, but such cases typically imagine that all else is held constant and ignore how the relevant situations might have arisen historically. There is hence a substantial gap between such hypothesized scenarios and their application to real people's actual situations that renders many of our narratives about connecting Ls to Rs otiose--simply just-so stories.

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument, however, that (1) there is such a thing as undeserved bad luck and that (2) it can give rise to justified disappointment on the part of the disaffected agent. In what follows, I raise three considerations against the luck egalitarian (LE) position, even granting both (1) and (2). First, I argue that in many common, everyday cases it does not follow that the disaffected agent...