There are some priors I wish to discuss before embarking on the main argumentation in this book, which is to show that freedom comes through social and material equality. This outcome especially applies when accounting for the role of contingency in forming social inequalities in the first place, as well as for the need to account for luck in redistributive justice. Luck is intimately related to how opportunities are structured and mystified in capitalism, and how this in turn affects both well-being and relations of domination. Given this set of concerns, a good portion of the book attends to debates involving a mode of reasoning called luck egalitarianism, which is firmly grounded in both the classical egalitarian aspirations of non-subordination and orthodox liberal conceptions of self-determination.

This mode of reasoning has clear aspirations to apply moral criteria to political ideas about redistributive justice, meaning that it does not endorse systems that naturalize and institutionalize the results of contingency, which I define as knowing that beliefs are historically situated and socially conditioned. Through insisting that a fair and equal society would not leave a person to fate, luck egalitarianism seeks to create morally respectable politics. In this sense, persons share a society with others and their fates are entwined. To my mind this requires building new institutions. While there is wisdom in borrowing from the old, it is not enough to try to rehabilitate our current institutions through new charters.

While I have much sympathy for luck egalitarianism and its analytical Marxian tributaries, ultimately my tack in this book is on ‘equalitypromoting approaches’ which also derive from texts like the Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx 1999). These later approaches can also attend to the role of luck in shaping capabilities and needs, as well as the history of both of these things. To my mind, Marxian equality-promoting approaches focus on the totality of the production, circulation and consumption of goods as they can be leveraged to satisfy human needs. This broader view can help in the analysis of durable and qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrable social inequalities, as well as how these inequalities are sustained institutionally and reproduced ideologically.