chapter 24
...................................................................................................................................................JUSTICE, LUCK,
AND DESERT
...................................................................................................................................................serena olsaretti
What is the relation between justice and luck? Suppose one child is born to
caring parents and another to parents who neglect her, or suppose that
lightning strikes one man instead of another, walking only a few yards behind
him on the pavement. Such differences in luck, or at least society’s failure to
correct for them, may seem unjust. Other kinds of luck seem different: one
person wins big on the blackjack table, while the person beside him loses all
his money; someone born with good looks attracts a string of potential lovers,
while someone born ugly struggles to find any. What the gambler and the
lover walk away with (or without) does not seem so unjust. It appears that
some but not all luck is incompatible with justice. Is this so, and what, if
anything, could justify the difference between various types of luck and their
relevance for justice?
One familiar answer to these questions is given by the principle of desert.
On what we can refer to as the ‘‘conventional view’’ of desert-based justice,
justice requires giving people what they deserve, and people deserve on the
- This chapter draws on material treated at greater length in S. Olsaretti,Liberty, Desert and the
Market(Cambridge University Press, 2004 ). I am grateful to Paul Bou-Habib and Anne Phillips for
comments on a previous version.