Philosophers writing about egalitarian distributive justice have recently focused upon two issues: the site and the scope of distributive justice. The site of distributive justice is its subject matter. Some believe that principles of justice apply to a society's basic social institutions, but not to the day-to-day choices of individuals. Others believe that citizens should conduct their daily lives in accordance with such principles. The scope of distributive justice is believed by some (‘cosmopolitans’) to be global and by others to be confined to individual societies. Alongside the question of the proper scope and site of justice another issue has emerged, largely as a result of the congealing of contemporary theories of justice into two competing approaches: democratic equality and luck egalitarianism. This is the issue of the ground of egalitarianism. On what basis do we justify distributive equality? Luck egalitarians, according to Tan, think distributive equality matters because people's shares should be determined by their choices and not their luck. Proponents of democratic equality claim that distributive equality is required by democracy because it is necessary for equal citizenship.
Tan's book addresses all three of these debates. It has two aims. First, he organizes and tidies the philosophical landscape, clarifying exactly what is at issue and at stake. This involves conceptual work but, of course, cannot help but be partisan in a certain sense; proponents of competing views disagree not just substantively but about how best to characterize the dispute between them. (Indeed, I think both types of egalitarians might reject Tan's claim that the debate between them centers upon the proper ground of equality.) Tan's second aim is to defend a particular approach: global institutional luck egalitarianism. He argues that the site of justice is institutions, the scope is global and the ground of equality is the luck/choice principle.
Tan's arguments are thorough and lucid and reveal an excellent command of current political philosophy. He begins by arguing that the institutional view, which is consistent with both democratic equality and luck egalitarianism, is the only approach that can accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. Some citizens will have conceptions of the good that are inegalitarian. To require them to conduct their daily lives in accordance with egalitarian principles would violate their liberty to pursue their reasonable ends. Next, Tan defends luck egalitarianism primary by carving out a ‘modest account’. On this account, the luck/choice principle is a grounding principle and the substantive principles it implies apply to institutions only when people are above a threshold of sufficiency. This version of luck egalitarianism, Tan claims, can evade various objections, including the claim that luck egalitarians must abandon the imprudent and compensate any natural disadvantage a person might have. In the final portion of the book, Tan explains why luck egalitarianism entails cosmopolitanism and shows that his institutional version can avoid a popular reductio argument against global luck egalitarianism. Further, he criticizes non-cosmopolitans, arguing that they have not adequately supported their thesis that shared citizenship is normatively relevant to distributive justice.
I have some worries about Tan's institutional version of luck egalitarianism. The first thing to notice is that Tan uses ‘institutional’ in two senses and its not clear how these two notions relate to one another. Initially, Tan characterizes institutional views as those that identify institutions, and not individual actions, as the site of justice. ‘Institutional’ is contrasted with ‘personal’. Later, in defending luck egalitarianism against standard objections, he contrasts ‘institutional’ with, for lack of a better term, ‘cosmic’. He claims that his account, unlike extant accounts, is institutional in the sense that it is concerned not with matters of luck in themselves, but rather with how institutions deal with matters of luck. It is not unjust, he says, when people suffer bad luck; it is unjust when institutions are arranged so that they convert matters of luck into distributive advantages and disadvantages for persons.
This institutional-not-cosmic approach contains an ambiguity.Footnote 1 If the ambiguity is resolved in a way that that best encapsulates Tan's examples, the institutional view seems implausible and fails to capture the point of luck egalitarianism. If the ambiguity is resolved in the other direction, the view is more plausible and is, moreover, sufficient to counter the reductio argument against global luck egalitarianism. Tan does not need, then, the less plausible institutional view to counter this objection.
Tan's claim that institutional luck egalitarianism prohibits institutions converting matters of luck into distributive inequality can be taken, first, to mean that it is unjust when institutions cause people's bad luck to disadvantage them. (Call this the ‘weak institutional view.’) Second, it can be taken to mean that it is unjust when institutions cause a matter of circumstance to make people unlucky by disadvantaging them. (Call this the ‘strong institutional view’, because it requires that bad luck have an institutional cause in order for the deficits it produces to be compensable.) To understand the difference between the weak and the strong accounts, consider the example that Tan uses to illustrate institutional luck egalitarianism. He asks us to consider a fictional world in which blue-eyed people as such are discriminated against. On his institutional view, Tan says, the blue-eyed are owed compensation for their deficits because institutions have converted a matter of luck – eye-color – into a distributive disadvantage. But notice that in this case, the bad luck itself (and not merely the disadvantage) has an institutional cause and the bad luck is constituted by the disadvantage. The blue-eyed would not be unlucky, nor suffer the distributive deficits in which their bad luck consists, if they did not live in a society that penalizes blue-eyed people. This example suggests that Tan holds the strong institutional view. What he thinks is unjust is when institutions cause people to be unlucky by disadvantaging them.
Yet Tan also says that the blind are owed compensation should institutions convert their luck into disadvantage. This might suggest that Tan holds the weak institutional view, for the misfortune of being blind has a non-institutional cause but might still be converted by institutions into disadvantage. And on the weak view, it is unjust when institutions convert luck – whether that luck has a ‘cosmic’ or an institutional cause – into inequality. However, Tan holds further that the shortsighted are not owed compensation for their deficits. The only way to square the case of shortsightedness with the case of blindness, since neither of these types of bad luck has an institutional cause yet only one is compensable, is to attribute to Tan the strong institutional view. He thinks that the blind are owed compensation only to the extent that social institutions penalize or neglect the blind. This makes the case of blindness analogous to the case of having blue eyes in his fictional example: one's blindness can generate claims for compensation only to the extent that one's social institutions fail to accommodate the blind and, by doing so, cause the blind to have the bad luck of suffering deficits. To the extent that the blind might suffer deficits not attributable to neglectful social institutions but instead to their blindness itself, they are not, on Tan's account owed compensation.
The point of luck egalitarianism, as Tan himself concedes, is to ensure that people's shares of goods are determined by their choices and not by their luck. So, luck egalitarians believe that social institutions should prevent people's good or bad luck from being transformed into distributive advantages or disadvantages. If this is so, then it should not matter, it seems, whether a person's luck is institutionally caused or ‘cosmic’. Being a woman (which is not ‘cosmically’ unlucky) should not be permitted by institutions to generate inequality and being hit by a falling tree limb (which is ‘cosmically’ unlucky) should not be permitted by institutions to generate inequality. Tan's view, then, fails to capture the point of luck egalitarianism because it confines injustice to cases, such as sexism or ableism, where a person's bad luck consists in the lesser prospects her institutions afford her due to her circumstances.
As a type of institutional luck egalitarianism, global institutional luck egalitarianism is concerned with how global institutions treat matters of luck. So global institutional luck egalitarianism is not concerned with the bad luck per se of being born in a resource-poor country. Rather it is concerned with how, for instance, legally enforceable immigration restrictions convert such matters of luck into global distributive inequality. This approach, according to Tan, can avoid the following objection. Global luck egalitarianism requires wealthy nations to transfer goods to poorer nations who are faring badly due to the bad luck of having fewer resources within their borders. This requirement implies that if we earthlings became aware of alien beings who are worse off than we are because their planet happens to have fewer resources than Earth, justice would demand that we transfer goods to those aliens. This is absurd, the argument goes, because it makes our duties of distributive justice endless and subject to the vagaries of nature. So global luck egalitarianism cannot be sustained.
To rebut this argument, Tan does not need to invoke the less plausible strong institutional account of luck egalitarianism. The weak version will suffice. The objection assumes that even in the absence of interplanetary institutions inequalities obtaining between earthlings and aliens traceable to circumstance are unjust. The objection, then, takes luck egalitarianism to condemn any inequalities that arise from luck and not just those that result from the way institutions treat luck. But the weak institutional view, as we have seen, condemns only those inequalities that arise from the institutional treatment of luck. It differs from the strong view in that it does not care whether the luck itself is caused by institutions or ‘the cosmos’. So, the weak view does not require earthlings to compensate less well off aliens. It would require them to do so, however, if there were, for instance, trade between earth and the alien planet. For then, even the cosmic bad luck of being born on a resource-poor planet, would generate a claim for compensation as long trade agreements permitted that bad luck to perpetuate distributive inequality between earthlings and aliens. On the strong institutional view, by contrast, earthlings owe the aliens compensation only in the case where the aliens suffer the bad luck of being subject to inequality-generating trade agreements.
Justice, Institutions and Luck represents an original, nuanced and comprehensive theory of egalitarian distributive justice. It is an enjoyable book to read; ambitious yet restrained, careful yet not tedious. Tan makes a significant contribution to the current literature and his arguments will no doubt generate much discussion and debate.
