A Defense of Luck Egalitarianism

Tan looks at two classes of objections that stand out in luck egalitarianism. One line of objection is that luck egalitarianism has morally absurd implications. Three types of cases are commonly forwarded to support this claim. One such cases is that luck egalitarianism has to treat all natural misfortunes as matters of justice and so matters for which persons should be socially compensated, which is absurd. The other class of criticism is that luck egalitarians have a mistakenly individualistic understanding of equality. In taking the central goal of distributive equality to be that of mitigating the effects of luck on people's life options, luck egalitarians, unlike democratic egalitarians, fail to appreciate the social dimensions of equality and that the point of distributive equality is to ensure that persons are able to relate to each other as social equals.