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  • Equality, Luck, and Pragmatism
  • David Rondel

The concept of luck has played a fairly divisive role in modern moral philosophy. Indeed, one plausible way to characterize the chasm between the two most dominant ethical doctrines of the last century—Kantian or deontological theories on the one hand and utilitarianism or other teleological theories on the other—is to observe the approximately inverted moral significance that each assigns to the concept of luck.

In using the term "luck" this way I have in mind the idea that Thomas Nagel alludes to:

Whether we succeed or fail in what we try to do nearly always depends to some extent on factors beyond our control. This is true of murder, altruism, revolution, the sacrifice of certain interests for the sake of others—almost any morally important act . . . there is a morally significant difference between reckless driving and manslaughter. But whether a reckless driver hits a pedestrian depends on the presence of the pedestrian at the point where he recklessly passes a red light.

(Nagel 1979, 25, emphasis added)

For Kant, of course, luck as it is characterized here could have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. To be a moral agent, after all, is to act in accordance with the unconditioned dictates of the moral law. The seemingly infinite abyss of contingencies that can determine whether actions so undertaken are successful, or turn out as one hoped or intended they would, cannot be, Kant has it, the subject of morality properly understood. The Kantian view is one for which "there cannot be moral risk" as Nagel aptly put it (1979, 24). On this view, someone could not be judged morally culpable if an action originating from a good will happened (unluckily we might say) to turn out badly because of some unforeseen (or unforeseeable) turn of events. And conversely: an action born from a bad or evil will cannot be morally vindicated if a certain lucky turn of events happened to bring about a state of affairs that was in the end desirable. The idea, in short, is that the success or failure of an action, whether it accomplishes or fails to accomplish its intended aims (which will nearly always depend on luck) [End Page 115] is irrelevant to the moral character of that action.1 Kant would have quite literally and wholeheartedly endorsed the old slogan "It's the thought that counts."

Not surprisingly, utilitarianism and similar doctrines tend to see the moral significance of luck in roughly the opposite way. After all, any moral theory that appraises actions on the basis of their consequences, whatever sorts of consequences the particular theory happens to encourage, will inexorably make both good and bad luck of crucial moral import. Contrary to the Kantian view, every action for the utilitarian involves a form of calculated moral risk.

I offer this brief preamble about the problem of moral luck so as to bring the aims of the present essay into sharper focus. It will be my burden here to show that Kant's idea about morality's imperviousness to luck has been imported, virtually intact, into the heart of contemporary egalitarian theory. For reasons that I will try to make clear in the pages that follow, I see this as an unfortunate development. But more constructively, I will argue that certain themes in John Dewey's philosophy point to an understanding of equality and its political value that is far superior, for reasons I will adumbrate, to that Kant-inspired picture of equality which has become, since Rawls, so widespread among egalitarian philosophers.

Rawls and the Natural Lottery

John Rawls's work on justice and equality gives Kant's idea about the impossibility of moral luck an interesting political twist. It can be brought into focus by examining what Rawls calls "the natural lottery," an idea that provides an apt metaphor, he thinks, for "the arbitrariness found in nature" (1971, 102).

The image of a lottery is instructive. It suggests that the distribution of natural assets and (initial) social circumstances is guided by nothing beyond the luck of nature's draw. This strikes me as a very powerful idea. Who could deny, after all, that my...

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