that affect the attribution of an achievement (or lack thereof) to someone, as
in the cases we have just mentioned, are problematic from the point of view of
desert-based justice. We could call this sort of luck ‘‘performance-disrupting
luck.’’ 3
It might be objected to this conclusion that in many cases we will not be
able to tell whether someone really deserves what accrues to her as a result of
her actions, since we do not know whether and to what extent performance-
disrupting luck has affected that result. Unlike with the race example, where
the advent of luck is vivid and public, most cases in which luck disrupts desert
are difficult, if not impossible, to identify. As a result, we simply do not know
whether we should revise our desert judgments in line with counterfactual
judgments about what individuals would have achieved in the absence of
intervening unforeseen influences. This objection, however, does not under-
mine the claim that what someone deserves does not depend on luck that
disrupts performance. Rather, it only highlights that, on many occasions, we
may not be able to make precise desert judgments.
While the conventional view holds that desert requires responsibility, it
also insists that, in order to retain the notion of desert, we must recognize
that responsible agents necessarily act in circumstances not of their own
choosing, and that some background or underlying luck legitimately affects
what they deserve (rather than our judgments about what they deserve). The
conventional view thus adopts a different stance towards the impact of what
we can term ‘‘background luck’’ than it does towards performance-disrupting
luck. Background luck affects the conditions in which people undertake their
performances (rather than disrupting those performances), and includes
both the luck of being born with certain talents and traits—what is referred
to as ‘‘constitutive luck’’ (Williams 1981 ; Nagel 1979 )—and the luck of being
faced with certain situations or being placed in certain circumstances—what
is referred to as ‘‘situational or circumstantial luck’’ (Nagel 1979 ; Zimmerman
1987 ; Miller 1999 ). For example, the bad luck of not having the opportunity,
because of unchosen social circumstances, to develop or put to use one’s skills
and abilities, is a case of background luck.
3 Miller calls this ‘‘integral luck,’’ and contrasts it with ‘‘circumstantial luck’’ (Miller 1999 , 143 – 4 ). It
seems preferable to talk of ‘‘performance-disrupting luck’’ and contrast it to ‘‘background luck,’’
respectively, as these terms make clearer that what is crucial, on the conventional view as characterized
here, is whether the events beyond a person’s control disrupt the attribution of the (desert-grounding)
performance to a person.
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