Ethics Discussion: David O’Brien – Can Luck Egalitarians Handle Self-Sacrifice?

PEA Soup is pleased to introduce October’s Ethics discussion, featuring David O’Brien (University of Wisconsin-Madison) paper “Can Luck Egalitarians Handle Self-Sacrifice?” with a précis by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (Aarhus University).

The discussion is now open.

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Précis: Can Luck Egalitarians Handle Self-Sacrifice?

By David O’Brien

In his brilliant article in Ethics, David presents a challenge to luck egalitarianism concerning morally required self-sacrifice. The force of this challenge has so far been underappreciated, but thanks to David’s article, it is likely to receive the attention it deserves. Here, I reconstruct what I take to be the central structure of his challenge. In the interest of presenting it as clearly as possible, and given space constraints, I leave aside many of David’s interesting subsidiary arguments. I conclude with some reflections on how we should understand luck egalitarianism.

According to luck egalitarianism in its canonical form,

“it is unfair if some are off than others through no fault or choice of their own” (10).

In a wide range of cases, this claim has intuitive appeal. It seems unfair that some people are worse off than others simply because they were unlucky enough to be raised in poverty, while others are better off because they were raised in affluence. As Rawls might have put it, it is unfair that some are worse off than others simply because of their bad luck in the “social lottery.”

However, the canonical luck egalitarian claim becomes less intuitive when we consider cases in which some people are worse off than others because they choose to sacrifice their own well-being for the benefit of others, as they are morally required to do. Consider the following case:

Rescue I. Aodh and Brigid, passing by a river, see Conor in the river about to suffer significant harm. Either passerby could, as they each know, rescue Conor from significant harm—Aodh at only a minuscule cost to himself, Brigid at modest cost to herself. Assume that Aodh is morally required to perform the rescue but unconditionally refuses to do so. Assume further that Brigid is then morally required to perform the rescue and that, being morally motivated, she does so. She thereby produces an inequality between herself and Aodh; having incurred a modest cost in the course of the rescue, she is now somewhat worse off than Aodh is (12-13).

Brigid is worse off than Aodh. Yet it seems that she is not worse off through no “fault or choice of [her] own.” After all, she is worse off because she freely chose to rescue Conor, and she could easily—and perhaps at no cost to herself—have refrained from doing so. Hence, luck egalitarianism, as stated above, does not condemn the resulting inequality as unfair. Intuitively, however, it is unfair that Brigid is now worse off than Aodh.

Luck egalitarianism, as David formulates it above, offers only a sufficient condition for unfair inequality. Its proponents might therefore respond: “Sure, it is unfair that Brigid is now worse off than Aodh, but it is unfair for reasons unrelated to luck egalitarianism. It is unfair that Aodh places Brigid under a moral duty that she would not have been placed under, had Aodh done what he was morally obligated to do.” However, luck egalitarians generally take their theory to provide a complete account of distributive unfairness. Arguably, therefore, the canonical formulation is best understood as offering a necessary as well as a sufficient condition:

It is unfair if, and only if, some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own.

If luck egalitarianism is understood in this way, its proponents face the following trilemma:

1. It is unfair that Brigid is worse off than Aodh.
2. Brigid is not worse off than Aodh through no choice or fault of her own.
3. It is unfair if, and only if, some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own.

As David effectively argues, this trilemma presents a serious problem for luck egalitarians. Since they cannot reject (3)—at least not without abandoning luck egalitarianism as formulated here—they must reject either (1) or (2).

At first glance, the most appealing option is to reject (2). Specifically, luck egalitarians might adopt a moral-requirement-sensitive understanding of what it means to be worse off through a choice or fault of one’s own, according to which:

If X is worse off than Y because X chose to act in a way that X was morally required to act, then X is, in the relevant sense, worse off than Y through no choice or fault of X’s own.

Unfortunately, this proposal generates a circularity problem. We want to know whether an agent is required to perform a particular action involving them sacrificing their own well-being for the benefit of others. What one is morally required to do depends, at least in part, on whether one’s action increases the extent to which some people are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. Indeed, luck egalitarians seem committed to treating this as one determinant of moral requirements. But, according to the proposed specification of what it means to be worse off through no choice or fault of one’s own, determining whether an action has this property requires us first to establish whether the action is morally required. That is precisely the question we started with: we wanted to know whether the action is morally required, and to answer it, we need to know whether it increases the extent to which some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. Thus, avoiding the trilemma by adopting a moral-requirement-sensitive understanding of what it means to be worse off through a choice or fault of one’s own leads to a vicious circle.

Could luck egalitarians instead reject (1)? They could, but David argues that doing so creates a problem of objectionable arbitrariness. Suppose we adopt a prudentialist account of reasonable avoidability, according to which:

If X is worse off than Y because X chose to act in a way that was prudentially suboptimal for X, then X is, in the relevant sense, worse off than Y through a choice or fault of X’s own.

Given this account, we can reject (1). After all, rescuing Conor was prudentially suboptimal for Brigid, yet she chose to rescue him, presumably because she was motivated by a sense of moral obligation.

Unfortunately, luck egalitarianism based on this prudentialist account of reasonable avoidability faces the problem of objectionable arbitrariness. To see why, consider the following case:

Rescue IV. With near certainty, Iseult is about to suffer a significant harm (say, a trapdoor beneath her is nearly certain to swing open, causing her to fall into a river). Hugh has the options of either pressing a certain button or not doing so. If Hugh presses his button and the trapdoor beneath Iseult swings open (which is very likely), a safety net would be deployed that would prevent her from falling and thereby rescue her from the significant harm. But if Hugh presses the button and the trapdoor beneath Iseult stays shut (which is very unlikely), Hugh himself would suffer a mild shock and thereby incur a modest cost. Iseult faces a corresponding set of options concerning a trapdoor that is below Hugh…  Suppose now that you know those facts, suppose further that you know that Hugh and Iseult have each resolved to attempt their respective rescues, and suppose still further that you know that, as it happens, the trapdoor below Iseult will swing open but the trapdoor below Hugh will not… Finally, suppose that… [b]y switching around the buttons’ wiring, you can make it the case that Iseult, when she presses her button, will in fact have attempted to rescue herself (not Hugh) and that Hugh, in pressing his button, will in fact have attempted to rescue himself (not Iseult). (22-23).

According to luck egalitarianism based on a prudentialist account of reasonable avoidability, your decision whether to rewire the buttons makes a moral difference to the unfairness of the resulting inequality between Hugh and Iseult. If you do not rewire them, the inequality will reflect their reasonably avoidable, prudentially suboptimal choices and will therefore not be unfair. If you do rewire them, it will not reflect such choices, and the resulting inequality will be unfair. Yet it seems objectionably arbitrary that the unfairness of the inequality between Hugh and Iseult should depend on whether you decide to rewire the buttons, unbeknownst to them.

In sum, neither rejecting (2) nor rejecting (1) offers an easy way out of the trilemma. Of course, there is a third option: rejecting luck egalitarianism altogether. But David does not think this is the conclusion we should draw from his article—or at least not yet. Rather, he takes the immediate lesson of the trilemma to be that luck egalitarians need to reflect on the basis of luck egalitarianism.

In closing, I want to offer a reflection that may interest luck egalitarians who, as I think they should, regard David’s article as an invitation to reconsider their basic commitments and, in doing so, to articulate luck egalitarianism more adequately.

Perhaps luck egalitarians should adopt a pluralist view of fairness. One kind of fairness concerns how people are differentially advantaged by facts that lie beyond the reach of their agency. This is the kind of unfairness on which luck egalitarians have traditionally focused. Another kind concerns how people are differentially advantaged by facts that lie within the reach of their agency—for example, whether they face choices constrained by moral requirements. On this view, two people whose available options are equivalent from the standpoint of prudence may nevertheless face choice sets that are not equally good if one person’s choices are constrained by binding norms other than prudence, such as moral norms, while the other person’s choices are not. The former may be directed towards making prudentially suboptimal choices, whereas the latter is not.

Setting aside complications about responsibility for being in the choice situation one is in, inequalities arising because some people face a choice set that is prudentially equivalent to that of others, but are morally required not to select the prudentially best option, are unfair. They are unfair because they arise from people facing unequally good choice situations. These situations are unequally good because, although we care about our own well-being, we also care—and should care—about acting morally. In short, we should embrace a goodness-of-choice-set formulation of luck egalitarianism:

It is unfair if some are worse off than others as a result of having faced a worse choice set than those who are better off.

This view seems to avoid the circularity problem. We can assess the prudential equivalence of choice sets independently of whether we know which choices agents are morally required to make. Moreover, whether particular choices, such as self-sacrificing ones, are morally required or impermissible does not depend on whether the resulting distributive outcome arises from an agent’s own choice or fault. That concept plays no role in the goodness-of-choice-set formulation of luck egalitarianism.

Specifically, in Rescue I, the view implies that Brigid’s being worse off than Aodh is unfair because she faced a worse choice situation: doing what she was morally required to do imposed a greater cost on her than it would have imposed on Aodh.[1]

Furthermore, at least in a range of cases, we can assess the extent to which two agents are differentially morally constrained without presupposing any view about whether the resulting inequality is unfair and, consequently, whether it counts against the self-sacrificing action being morally required. This is true in cases where, regardless of whether the inequality resulting from the unequally good choice situations is unfair, that the reason to avoid the inequality is outweighed by moral considerations unrelated to fairness. For example, the inequality might be small, while the benefit produced by self-sacrifice is substantial. In such cases, David’s “circle of dependences” (p. 17) is broken.

Admittedly, this leaves cases in which the resulting inequality is, as it were, morally on a par with the benefit gained through self-sacrifice, as may be the case in David’s Rescue II (p. 15). Perhaps something like the circularity problem arises in such cases. But perhaps, given our ambivalence about what an agent is required to do in these circumstances, this is not a defect of the goodness-of-choice-set formulation. After all, the formulation need not deliver determinate verdicts in cases where the underlying moral considerations themselves fail to determine what an agent ought to do. David seems to assume that if luck egalitarianism generates a circularity problem in even one possible scenario, this constitutes a significant problem for the theory. Whether that assumption is justified is itself worth considering.

The goodness-of-choice-set formulation also avoids the problem of objectionable arbitrariness. Since it states only a sufficient condition for unfairness, it is consistent with the possibility that different forms of brute option luck are unfair (cf. pp. 25–27). It is therefore also consistent with the conclusion that rewiring the buttons in Rescue IV makes no difference to whether the resulting distributive outcome is unfair.

Perhaps embracing the goodness-of-choice-set formulation requires us to reject my modified canonical formulation of luck egalitarianism, which states both a necessary and a sufficient condition of unfairness. However, one might argue that, like David’s formulation, which states only a sufficient condition, the modified canonical formulation is merely an attempt to capture the underlying motivation of luck egalitarianism. David’s challenge may show that the choice-set formulation captures that motivation more successfully than the canonical formulation does. In short, rejecting (3) in the trilemma and replacing it with the goodness-of-choice-set formulation need not amount, in the relevant sense, to abandoning luck egalitarianism’s core commitment. Rather, it might amount to articulating it more precisely in the light of David’s forceful challenge and the spirit in which he puts it forward.

[1] An additional complication is that Aodh is responsible for her being in a choice situation she would not have been in, had Aodh done his duty. This relates to my pluralism about fairness point above.