Anderson, for example, does remark that luck egalitarians ‘‘have been
most responsive to criticisms of equality based on ideals of desert, responsi-
bility and markets’’ (Anderson 1999 , 291 ), but provides little diagnosis of
the appeal of their view. Her claim about desert is unsupported, and there
seems no reason to believe desert plays a larger role in defending luck
egalitarianism than its egalitarian predecessors, including justice as fairness.
Admittedly, her claims about responsibility and markets are more relevant,
particularly in relation to resourcist forms of luck egalitarianism, but
Anderson omits to note that those considerations are salient to luck egalitar-
ians because they endorse a particularly expansive conception of economic
liberty that empowers individuals to jeopardize their own access to minimum
levels of certain essential goods. Moreover, she fails to recognize that there is a
price to be paid for maintaining individuals’ access to those goods since doing
so requires a more restrictive conception of economic liberty or a less
restrictive conception of our liability to bear the costs of others’ exercising
their liberty.
9 Conclusion
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According to Will Kymlicka’s inXuential history of the recent debate over
egalitarian justice, later egalitarians have extended Rawls’s argument that
welfare inequalities are a matter of personal responsibility because individuals
can avoid relative frustration by exercising an ability to revise their ends
(Kymlicka 2002 , ch. 2 ; Rawls 1999 b, 369 – 70 ). There are good reasons to doubt
Kymlicka’s interpretive suggestion, which have been pressed by Samuel Sche-
Zer (ScheZer 2003 a). There are also good reasons to doubt that much would
be lost by abandoning Rawls’s argument, given the availability of persuasive
objections to welfare egalitarian principles that eschew appeal to contested
assumptions about what is avoidable. For example, anti-welfarists might fall
back on Rawls’s own worries about the informational demands of welfarist
principles, or argue those principles are objectionable because they either
pander to individuals with voluntarily-acquired expensive tastes or penalize
those with involuntarily-acquired inexpensive tastes (Dworkin 2000 , 48 – 59 ;
Williams 2002 , 379 – 80 ).
liberty, equality, and property 503