Kok-Chor Tan, “Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality” (Oxford UP, 2012)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 1, 2012 · 1h 16m

Justice requires that each person gets what he or she deserves. Luck is a matter of good or bad things simply befalling people; hence luck distributes to people things they do not deserve. Justice must then be in the business of morally correcting the impact of luck on individuals’ lives. This is an extremely simplified articulation of a popular–and in certain philosophical circles infamous–conception of justice called luck egalitarianism. As a kind of egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism holds that justice requires something to be distributed equally, and various versions of the doctrine…