Justice, Luck, and Knowledge

About the Book

The recent past has seen striking advances in our understanding of both moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility; in this view, the aim of egalitarianism is to respect differences between positions for which people are responsible while neutralizing differences that are a matter of luck. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. Her book brings the new articulation of responsibility to bear in explaining these constraints. While responsibility might help specify what to distribute, it cannot tell us how to distribute; thus, Hurley argues, responsibility cannot tell us to distribute in an egalitarian pattern in particular. It can, however, play other important roles in a theory of justice, in relation to incentive-seeking behavior and well-being. Hurley's book proposes a new, bias-neutralizing approach to distributive justice that places responsibility in these less problematic roles.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Responsibility and Justice I. RESPONSIBILITY 1. Philosophical Landscape: The New Articulation of Responsibility 2. Why Alternate Sequences Are Irrelevant to Responsibility 3. Why Responsibility Is Not Essentially Impossible 4. Responsibility, Luck, and the "Natural Lottery" II. JUSTICE 5. Philosophical Landscape: The Luck-Neutralizing Approach to Distributive Justice 6. Why the Aim to Neutralize Luck Cannot Provide a Basis for Egalitarianism 7. Roemer on Responsibility and Equality 8. The Currency of Distributive Justice and Incentive Inequality 9. The Real Roles of Responsibility in Justice 10 From Ignorance to Maximin: A Bias-Neutralizing Alternative Appendix: Outline of the Arguments Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Susan L. Hurley (1954–2007) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Review :
Luck-neutralization is a central concept in contemporary work on distributive justice, and thus moral responsibility is also a central concept (insofar as luck is what one is not morally responsible for). It is therefore fruitful and illuminating to apply important insights from responsibility theory to various theories of distributive justice. The book is written in a lively style, Susan Hurley is remarkably well-versed in the literature on free will and moral responsibility as well as distributive justice, and the ideas are vibrant and provocative...a path-breaking book. Hurley's arguments are highly original. This is an impressive and insightful book. Exceedingly rigorous...at the same time, exceptionally reader-friendly...One of the best critical introductions to the...problem of determinism and moral responsibility on the market...[this book] deserve[s] to be read by all responsibility enthusiasts...Eye-opening and exciting...incisive...carefully crafted...ground-clearing as well as path-breaking, [it is]...from start to finish, a true masterpiece of conceptual clarity and tidiness...Shrewdly analyses the relevant concepts...defuses bothersome misapprehensions and misapplications...[and] deftly pulls together the remaining strands...Deeply thought-provoking...[Both egalitarians and inegalitarians] need to rethink their positions. Hurley's penetrating treatment of [responsibility and justice] is bound to have a considerable influence on these fields. I found her subtle taxonomy of reason-responsiveness views especially instructive, and her critique of the idea that responsibility is 'essentially impossible' seems to me a tour de force. Further, the defense of a 'bias-neutralizing' conception of justice in favor of 'luck neutralizing' conceptions will surely have to be reckoned with by anyone who works in these fields. Hurley does a great service to the theory of egalitarianism by doing what most authors have shied away from doing so far, namely, opening the black box of 'responsibility' in order to examine how the various conceptions of responsibility can inform the debate about the just allocation of resources in an egalitarian society. An admirable piece of work...Hurley's book provides a very insightful discussion of the relationship between luck and justice (among several other issues). She has done egalitarians a great service in clarifying the relation between egalitarianism and luck-neutralization. Hurley's book is a first-rate achievement. It is uniformly informative and clarifying. Hurley's central thesis, that responsibility and luck-neutralization are not the basis of egalitarianism, is original and correct...To my mind, Hurley's thesis engages with many statements that leading egalitarians have put in writing. That thesis, we should recall, is obvious only once Hurley makes her compelling argument for that thesis...The book is dense with thought-provoking ideas.