My aim in this book is to take a fresh look at two widely accepted ideas, and in so doing to shed new light on some old questions of distributive justice.

The ideas I have in mind – that all persons have equal claims to whatever benefits their society provides and that each person's choices should play a central role in shaping his own life – have both been accommodated, in one way or another, by every theory of justice of which I know. However, the theory that has addressed them most explicitly is the one that has become known as luck egalitarianism. In its simplest form, luck egalitarianism asserts that inequalities are just if and only if they are not due to luck. Put a bit more precisely and decomposed into conjuncts, it asserts, first, that all inequalities that cannot be traced to the parties’ own choices are unjust, and so should be evened out, but, second, that any inequalities that are due to differences in the parties’ choices are indeed just (or at least consistent with justice) as long as the options among which the parties chose were themselves sufficiently equal.