Introduction

One main argument in support of socialist-inclined policy is the alleged unfairness of outcomes that result from nonsocialist policies. Under capitalism, some will have more—indeed, some will have much more—than others, and the disparities will result, at least in part, from morally arbitrary reasons. This does not refer to theft or fraud, which are not allowed under capitalism, but rather to material factors affecting people’s relative levels of success in life that none of the relevant people can claim to have deserved. Some people just get unlucky in the circumstances of their birth, for example. As Thomas Nagel asks, “How could it not be an evil that some people’s life prospects at birth are radically inferior to others?” (1995: 28). John Rawls identifies three species of luck that substantially affect everyone’s lives, in good and bad ways, but that he asserts cannot give rise to claims of moral desert because they were not chosen by the individual: “family and class origins,” “natural endowments,” and “fortune and luck” (1975: 95). The assumed premise is that one cannot claim to deserve something unless one freely chose to act in a way that created, generated, or contributed to it. This seems plausible: I cannot claim any moral credit (or blame) for my genes, for example, or for the education others provided for me. To the extent, then, that decentralized capitalist-political economy allows inequalities to result from these morally arbitrary factors, those inequalities are suspect.