Abstract

The main philosophical contribution of this review is its critical discussion of luck egalitarianism’s Boring Problem. Luck egalitarians want to draw a distinction between inequalities that are due to luck and inequalities that are controlled by the worse-off party. More specifically, they want to say that the former are unjust while the latter are just. This allows them to maintain that a person who imprudently wastes her resources and ends up worse off than another as a result is not the victim of injustice and is, thus, not entitled to equalizing transfers. The Boring Problem threatens to collapse this distinction. It contends that all inequalities are due to luck because any given inequality is not merely a function of the worse-off party’s will but also the better-off party’s will: had the latter also made some imprudent choice, then there would be no inequality (as both parties would be equally badly off). If this is right, luck egalitarians lose their ability to declare some inequalities controlled and, therefore, just. Against this conclusion, the review argues that there are two senses in which a person might control an outcome. She weakly controls the outcome if it is a function of her will. By contrast, she strongly controls the outcome if she both weakly controls it and also weakly controls every other state of affairs on which that outcome depends. The review then notes that all inequalities are due to luck only if one takes luck to be the absence of strong control. However, it argues that luck egalitarians have three good reasons to insist that luck is merely the absence of weak control. Thus, the Boring Problem fails to undermine their posited distinction between just, controlled inequalities and unjust, luck-based inequalities.