basis of their achievements or the quality of their performances. For example,
justice requires that people be rewarded for the contribution they make to
society, or for the outcome of their efforts. On this view, whether luck is
incompatible with justice depends on whether it blocks the attribution of the
relevant achievement or performance to persons: only luck that blocks such
attributions is in tension with justice. By contrast, luck that affects the quality
of a person’s achievement, but which does not block the attribution of that
achievement to that person, is not incompatible with justice. So, for example,
if athletic prowess is what grounds the desert of the runner, the lucky athlete
who wins a running race thanks to a fluke—suppose his more able competi-
tor is seized by a sudden cramp a few meters away from the finish line—does
not deserve to win. Although this lucky athlete has reached the finish line
first, the achievement of ‘‘being the most able runner’’ is not attributable to
him, and his (putative) deserts are ‘‘disrupted’’ by luck. By contrast, the bad
luck of an aspiring top class athlete who puts in mediocre performances
because of her lack of talents, does not, on the conventional view, raise any
concerns of justice. Since the mediocre achievement of the aspiring athlete is
clearly attributable to her, the judgment that she does not deserve to win the
race is appropriate. On the conventional view, it might be desirable to
neutralize or discount for luck in the first case so as to be able to make the
right judgments of desert, but justice does not recommend neutralizing or
discounting for luck in the second case.
The conventional view of desert-based justice can be criticized from
two opposite fronts. On the one hand, it might be said that desert does not
necessarily require any luck neutralization at all; on the other, it might be
argued that the conventional view allows for too great, rather than too little, a
role for luck. After considering the conventional view a little more fully, this
chapter examines each of these two challenges leveled against it, with the aim
of ascertaining what the adoption of the principle of desert implies for the
relation between justice and luck. 1 A conclusion defended here is that while
the conventional view is right in insisting that not all luck is compatible with
1 Many of the points concerning the impact of luck on desert-based justice are discussed in the
context of debates about the problem ofmoral luck, which concerns the way in which factors beyond
people’s control seem to aVect our moral appraisal of those people. For example, a reckless driver who
kills a pedestrian is thought be blameworthy for manslaughter, while an equally reckless driver
who does not kill anyone is deemed to be guilty only of negligence, despite the fact that the only
diVerence between them is due to luck: in theWrst but not in the second case a pedestrian happened to
be crossing the street while the reckless driver was speeding through a red light. For classic discussions
see Williams ( 1981 ) and Nagel ( 1979 ).
justice, luck, and desert 437