Luck Shouldn’t Determine Our Fates

When the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero died in the 1890s, he supposedly “ended his days in madness, obsessed with the idea that he might be consuming more than his fair share of sunshine.”

That probably apocryphal story vividly illustrates how the egalitarian left might look from an unsympathetic perspective. In this picture, leftists are obsessed with leveling for the sake of leveling. Why, after all, is it so bad for some people to have a bit more than others?

In truth, the Left’s best thinkers have thought hard about the question of inequality. Most socialists believe that a certain amount of inequality is inevitable. The questions are how much inequality is tolerable, and what kind of inequality the best form of society would allow.

Some left-wing philosophers are unconcerned with inequality, per se. These thinkers, so-called “sufficientarians” like Harry Frankfurt, argue that as long as everyone has a sufficient minimum, then other people getting more — even a lot more — doesn’t really matter.

But for most of us, if we’re being honest, there really is something morally troubling about inequality, even when everyone starts from a reasonable minimum. To put it in concrete terms, it is a problem that, under capitalism, even those workers at Amazon who have decent jobs have to carefully plan and save for vacations while their boss was recently in a position to casually send his fiancée on a private space flight. Even if we were able to solve for the fact that capitalism keeps part of the population in a position of abject poverty, sleeping under bridges or on park benches, this egregious gap in privilege and resources would still be a moral violation.

Nevertheless, we recognize that not everyone in a highly complex society will have exactly the same resources. So where do we draw the line? There is perhaps no better guide to this topic than the late Marxist analytic philosopher G. A. Cohen. He developed his views in a rigorous academic way in papers like “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” and in a more accessible way in his short book Why Not Socialism?

For Cohen, the kind of inequality that’s ultimately objectionable is not inequality of advantage, per se, but inequality of access to advantage.

Let’s imagine a future world where we’ve collectivized production, eliminating the profit-motivated exploitation that organizes work under capitalism. Now imagine that one person, of their own free will, works long and intensive hours while another, also of their own free will, does the bare minimum. Assume that both have a perfectly reasonable standard of life overall. They both live in pleasant and comfortable houses. It shouldn’t offend our egalitarian sensibilities if the first person has extra income to build a deck outside their house and the second person does not.

In this scenario, both workers have equal access to advantage. They just choose to tap into that access differently. Perhaps the second worker is opting for more family time over building a deck. The difference in their outcomes is not disturbing to us at all. Even if the second person is making much more dubious choices than that, there’s no great injustice here if it’s truly a matter of their own free choice.

Cohen calls his view “luck-egalitarianism.” He thinks inequalities are objectionable when they’re outside of the control of whoever gets the short end of the stick. The ideal society would eliminate inequalities that you can’t do anything to change.

Interestingly, conservatives seem to agree with this view to some extent, or else they wouldn’t spend so much time justifying capitalism’s inequalities with talk of hard work being rewarded. But what about all the instances in which capitalist property relations generate inequalities that have nothing to do with hard work?

Under capitalism, a son can inherit his father’s business (or enough of his father’s money to start a new business) like a king inheriting his throne. Someone born into worse circumstances might be able to claw their way up the class structure to become a business owner themselves, but it will be far harder for them than for someone with a large inheritance. It’s true that the second person isn’t as disadvantaged as a serf or a slave who has no possible social mobility. But they and the child of the capitalist certainly don’t have equal access to that advantage.

Even if we do take for granted that social mobility for the children of the working class is always possible — which, frankly, we shouldn’t — there’s still the question of which people rise up through the ranks. Many of the most promising ladders leading out of the working class are linked to higher education and credentialing. But academic abilities, like physical abilities, are unevenly distributed throughout the population.

A society where the only way to achieve a middle-class lifestyle was to win a place in a warrior caste through trial by combat would be unfair to people who are physically smaller or weaker through no fault of their own. Similarly, it’s unjust if the few escape routes out of the working class tend to be tied to unevenly distributed academic aptitudes.

All else being equal, we should be trying to root out inequalities that are a matter of luck — whether luck in which family you’re born into or luck in which innate talents you start out with.

The point isn’t that we can achieve perfect luck-egalitarian justice. Trade-offs between competing values are real. But we can take luck-egalitarianism as our North Star as we struggle for a more equal society. And once we’ve oriented ourselves in that direction, we should be able to see how abysmal our starting point is under capitalism.

Any time we accept inequalities that the worse-off can do nothing about, we’ve therefore accepted a degree of injustice. That should always leave a bad taste in our mouths, whatever the trade-off with other values. And the towering inequalities built into capitalism are far beyond the realm of painful trade-offs. This is a society where people who work long shifts in meatpacking plants panic when their cars break down because they don’t know how they’ll be able to afford a new one and, meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg has a 390-foot superyacht named Launchpad that takes $30 million a year to maintain and comes with a separate “support yacht” named Wingman.

Whether or not we make it all the way to our North Star, we sure don’t need to put up with this.