Abstract
According to luck egalitarianism, inequalities should be deemed fair as long as they follow from individuals’ deliberate and fully informed choices (i.e., option luck) while inequalities should be deemed unfair if they follow from choices over which the individual has no control (i.e., brute luck). This study investigates if individuals’ fairness preferences correspond with the luck egalitarian fairness position. More specifically, in a laboratory experiment we test how individuals choose to redistribute gains and losses that stem from option luck compared to brute luck. A two-stage experimental design with real incentives was employed. We show that individuals (n = 226) change their action associated with re-allocation depending on the underlying conception of luck. Subjects in the brute luck treatment equalized outcomes to larger extent (p = 0.0069). Thus, subjects redistributed a larger amount to unlucky losers and a smaller amount to lucky winners compared to equivalent choices made in the option luck treatment. The effect is less pronounced when conducting the experiment with third-party dictators, indicating that there is some self-serving bias at play. We conclude that people have fairness preference not just for outcomes, but also for how those outcomes are reached. Our findings are potentially important for understanding the role citizens assign individual responsibility for life outcomes, i.e., health and wealth.
Highlights
How to deal fairly with the burdens and benefits that follow from individuals’ fortune and misfortune has long been a prominent topic in philosophy (Nagel, 1979; Williams, 1981; Levy, 2011). This discussion is closely linked with policy issues such as; when should individuals be held financially responsible for their own ill health? to what extent should society level out the inequalities in financial wealth? This paper seeks to investigate how different types of luck influence social preferences in a behavioral experiment
On average subjects in the brute luck treatment gave more to unlucky losers than to lucky winners
Which inequalities among individuals should be considered unjust and equalized? The doctrine of luck egalitarianism proposes that when individuals are worse off than others because of bad brute luck, they should have a claim to compensation, whereas if their disadvantage can be traced back to specific choices they made deliberately, the inequality appears justified
Summary
How to deal fairly with the burdens and benefits that follow from individuals’ fortune and misfortune has long been a prominent topic in philosophy (Nagel, 1979; Williams, 1981; Levy, 2011). This discussion is closely linked with policy issues such as; when should individuals be held financially responsible for their own ill health? The social environment that we are born into heavily influences our future wealth, etc Such outcomes can be ascribed to brute luck, i.e., how risks fall out that are not in the sense deliberate choices. To our knowledge, no experiment has investigated the extent to which individuals’ fairness preferences about inequalities change due to different types of luck
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