Peter Vallentyne

Brute Luck, Option Luck, and Equalityof Initial Opportunities*

In the old days, material egalitarians tended to favor equality of outcome advantage, on some suitable conception of advantage (happiness, resources, etc.). Under the influence of Dworkin’s seminal articles on equality, contemporary material egalitarians have tended to favor equality of brute luck advantage—on the grounds that this permits people to be held appropriately accountable for the benefits and burdens of their choices. I shall argue, however, that a plausible conception of egalitarian justice requires neither that brute luck advantage always be equalized nor that people always bear the full cost of their voluntary choices. Instead, justice requires that initial opportunities for advantage be equalized—roughly along the lines suggested by Arneson and Cohen. Brute luck egalitarianism and initial opportunity egalitarianism are fairly similar in motivation, and as a result they have not been adequately distinguished. Once the two views are more clearly con-

Self-Ownership and Equality: Brute Luck, Gifts, Universal Dominance, and Leximin

During the last twenty years or so, egalitarian political theorists have been reexamining the role of freedom and responsibility in their theories. Increasingly, they are endorsing the view that at a fundamental moral level autonomous agents are (initially, at least) self-owning in the sense of having moral authority to decide how to live their lives (within the constraints of the rights of others). As will be explained below, this leaves open whether agents are entitled to the full benefits of their choices and of their natural personal endowments (e.g., intelligence, strength, or agility) and whether or how they own parts of the natural world (e.g., land). Important aspects of this issue have been developed by Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, Hillel Steiner, Amartya Sen, John Roemer, Richard Arneson, Eric Rakowski, Will Kymlicka, various economists working on envy-free allocations of wealth (e.g., Hal Varian, Marc Fleurbaey, and Christian Arnsperger, to mention but a few), and others.

Book ReviewsPartha Dasgupta, .Human Well‐Being and the Natural Environment.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 305.

Partha Dasgupta has been writing on population policy, poverty, and environmental issues for over thirty years. This book brings together and extends his work in these areas. He develops a practical measure of social well-being at a time, a criterion for social investment for the future, and a criterion for optimal population size. The book uses some mathematical formulae, but these are always explained intuitively, and there are no technical proofs, except in the appendix. On the issue of individual well-being, Dasgupta assumes a pluralist conception (e.g., consisting of health, happiness, freedom, etc.). Without specifying carefully what the exact constituents of well-being are, he proceeds to develop a practical measure of well-being in terms of the resources available. More specifically, his measure of well-being is based on levels of private consumption, life expectancy, literacy, civil liberties, and political liberties. Philosophically, of course, it’s difficult to assess the practical adequacy of the measure without knowing exactly what welfare is. Still, for practical purposes, some measure of these resources may well be a rough proxy for welfare. Moreover, given that Dasgupta’s focus is on social well-being, these rough measures are more likely to be adequate than they would be as measures of individual well-being. Social well-being is an aggregate of individual well-being, and Dasgupta holds that the aggregation should be positively sensitive to the average levels, the number of individuals (and hence to the total), and the equality of the distribution. If I’m not mistaken, however, most of his analyses are (perhaps for simplicity) based on the assumption that social well-being is average well-being (e.g., average private consumption, average life expectancy, etc.). Dasgupta, then, measures social well-being (at a time) by private consumption per capita, average life expectancy at birth, average literacy, civil liberties, and political liberties. How one measures the last two items is, of course, a major issue. Dasgupta provides some discussion, but not enough to satisfy philosophers. Another crucial issue concerns how the five measures are combined into a single measure of social welfare. For purposes of analysis, Dasgupta uses the Borda rule: in ranking countries for a given dimension (e.g., literacy), a rank order is given (e.g., 1 for best, 2 for second, etc.). For each country, the five rank orders are summed, and then the countries are ranked overall on the basis of these sums. Dasgupta makes clear that he is using the Borda rule only for illustration. Still, its usefulness in this context is far from clear. First, it ignores the cardinal information about each dimension. If there are three countries with literacy rates of 90, 80, and 40 percent, respectively, it treats the difference between the first two as of equal significance in measuring social welfare as the difference between the second two. Second, it treats each of the five dimensions as equally important, and this is not clearly appropriate.