Abstract
Critics of luck egalitarianism have claimed that, far from providing a justification for the public insurance functions of a welfare state as its proponents claim, the view objectionably abandons those who are deemed responsible for their dire straits. This article considers seven arguments that can be made in response to this ‘abandonment objection’. Four of these arguments are found wanting, with a recurrent problem being their reliance on a dubious sufficientarian or quasi-sufficientarian commitment to provide a threshold of goods unconditionally. Three arguments succeed, showing that luck egalitarians have good reasons for assisting ‘negligent victims’ on account of changes that may occur in an individual between the time of their choice and their subsequent disadvantage, bad option luck, and doubts about free will and responsibility. Luck egalitarianism is therefore shown to offer strong support for public insurance.
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Notes
An eighth counterargument to the abandonment objection rejects the major premise, and argues that justice does not require public insurance. As Hillel Steiner emphasized in discussion, avoidance of very bad outcomes for all agents, regardless of their actions, may not be an objective of justice. This avoidance might seem either not a moral goal at all, or a matter of charity rather than justice (see Cohen 1989, p. 940). While there could well be something to that line of thought, many theorists are committed to views (for instance, about basic rights) that assume something like the major premise. I will, then, focus on ways of resisting the objection that instead involve rejection of the minor premise, and defence of public insurance.
Markovits grounds assistance to the option luck needy on ‘humanitarian considerations’ rather than on (non-luck egalitarian) distributive justice considerations, and as such might be described as endorsing a non-justicial form of the sufficiency argument. His argument is distinguished from those of Tan and Segall discussed below as it sees humanitarian considerations as ‘outweigh[ing] distributive justice in appropriate circumstances’ (Markovits 2008, p. 281).
Further examination diagnoses the problem. In the main statements of the abandonment objection it is always assumed that the ‘negligent victim’ (to use Anderson’s term) faces a severe loss if treatment is not forthcoming. In setting out his version of the objection, Marc Fleurbaey is explicit that ‘[i]t is not only whether [negligent victim of a motorcycle accident] Bert is responsible or not which matters, but also the amount of welfare loss he is about to suffer following his mistake’ (Fleurbaey 1995, p. 40). But if (part) of the problem in abandonment cases is the magnitude of the loss faced, sufficientarianism is the wrong solution. As we have seen, it is indifferent both to the size of the loss faced and the cost of averting it. It is overkill for the problem at hand, for it will not only prevent abandonment in cases where the stakes are high, but also step in, at potentially massive cost, in cases where the loss faced is very small but nevertheless sufficient to drop someone marginally below the threshold.
Although Segall seems to treat the basic needs principle as something external to distributive justice, the argument would work equally well were this principle and luck egalitarianism simply treated as complementary components of distributive justice.
A referee suggests that this is an unfair assessment of Segall’s view. In chapter 8 of Health, Luck, and Justice, Segall argues that, in order to avoid levelling down, we should actually endorse a ‘luck prioritarian’ rather than a luck egalitarian principle of justice. A prioritarian will presumably not be indifferent to cost or size of benefits. However, I am here concerned with assessing whether the equality argument succeeds in providing a luck egalitarian rationale for public insurance, and luck prioritarianism will evidently not help in that respect. First, it is unclear whether it would actually justify public insurance. Segall (2010, p. 119) himself notes that his specific version of luck prioritarianism ‘tells us to compare levels of prudence first, and use the severity of the medical condition only as a tie-breaker between those who were equally prudent in looking after their health. That appears not only harsh but impractical’. Second, even if it justifies public insurance, it would not seem to do so on luck egalitarian grounds. Finally, even if it justifies public insurance, and even if it is thought to do so on luck egalitarian grounds (perhaps because one has an unusually capacious understanding of equality that encompasses prioritarianism), it clearly does not do so on grounds that have anything to do with the equality argument. The equality argument’s key feature is its acceptance of brute luck equality, a feature that is entirely absent from luck prioritarianism.
I did not recognize this in earlier work; see Knight (2005).
While this argument, like any application of a distributive theory, relies on claims that are in part empirical, these claims are not nearly as strong as the claims made by the practical argument discussed earlier. For instance, the identity argument’s claim that people who impose severe costs on themselves often undergo what matters-undermining psychological change seems far less controversial than the practical argument’s claim that some being initially better off than others is a general option-luck undermining social condition.
There is the separate issue of how much of a problem the ‘general problem’ is itself for luck egalitarianism. As this is a distinct objection to the abandonment objection, a full appraisal is beyond the scope of this article, but two points are worth mentioning. First, the fact that a normative principle is difficult to apply is a rather weak objection to it. It is not a challenge to its normative content, so the adherent of the principle can accept the objection without revising or rejecting their principles. Certainly, it would be better to accept a correct normative principle that was hard to apply rather than an incorrect one that was easy to apply. Second, I actually doubt that luck egalitarianism is really all that difficult to apply. For a simple model comparing luck egalitarianism and outcome egalitarianism in this respect see Knight and Knight (2012).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Universities of Copenhagen, Manchester, and Glasgow. Many audience members provided helpful feedback, including Richard Child, Ben Colburn, Emily McTernan, Shlomi Segall, and Liam Shields. I am especially grateful to the editors of the special issue, Nils Holtug and Xavier Landes, a referee for Res Publica, and Hillel Steiner, who provided detailed written comments. Research for this article was supported by the British Academy.
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Knight, C. Abandoning the Abandonment Objection: Luck Egalitarian Arguments for Public Insurance. Res Publica 21, 119–135 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9273-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9273-2