Good Knight, and Good Luck

Luck egalitarianism is a principle of distributive justice holding that equality should obtain once the effects of luck on distribution have been eliminated. The roots of this idea can be found in John Rawls’s seminal work, A Theory of Justice, wherein it is argued that the selection of principles of justice must be insensitive to social and natural contingencies (1971: 18–19). Luck egalitarianism as an independent, explicit principle of distributive justice was most prominently developed by Ronald Dworkin (1981, 2000), however, and subsequently by two other leading political philosophers, Richard Arneson (1989, 1990) and G.A. Cohen (1989). As a result of their contributions, luck egalitarianism became (at least for a time) a central focus of egalitarian debates. Dworkin laid the foundations of luck egalitarianism by introducing the distinction between option luck and brute luck: Option luck is a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out – whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined. Brute luck is a matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles. (Dworkin 1981: 293, 2000: 73)