For four episodes now, the work has been dismantling. One by one, the answers you arrived with have been taken apart.
The first was the ordinary one — I earned this; it is mine — and it turned out to have nothing underneath it: no one, we found, earns the talents, or the drive, or even the capacity for effort they were born with. The second was the one people retreat to when the first collapses — it is all luck; no one deserves anything — and it consumed itself, dissolving the very self that was supposed to be doing the choosing, and it still could not say what anyone is owed. The third was the comfortable middle position — that the truth lies somewhere between the two — and that turned out to be no position at all. So we arrive tonight with all of it cleared away, holding a single question, the one that was underneath the whole series: if no one simply deserves what they have, what do we owe each other — and on what ground, now that "who deserves what" can no longer be the answer?
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fifth of eight episodes.
Tonight, three serious attempts to answer that question. Not mine: the answers of some of the best political philosophers of the last hundred years. I am going to put three of them in front of you, each at full strength. They do not agree; they spent their careers unable to agree. By the end of the hour you will be standing in the middle of the hardest argument in modern political philosophy, and none of them, I think, can be waved away.
One thing about the first, before he speaks. He does not treat the conclusion that undid the earlier positions — that no one earned the hand they were dealt — as a defeat to be mourned. He treats it as his starting point. He takes the very sentence that dissolved everything three episodes ago and makes it the foundation of a theory of fairness.
Here is the first answer.
The first of the three is John Rawls, an American philosopher who, in 1971, published A Theory of Justice — the book that everyone who argues about fairness has either built on or argued against ever since. He goes first for a specific reason: he does not ask you to take back anything you concluded over the last four episodes. He requires that you have concluded it. His whole argument rests on it.
For three episodes you established one thing: that no one deserves the hand they were dealt — not the talents, not the drive, not even the capacity to try. Rawls says this. The way our gifts and our starting positions are handed out, he writes, is, in his phrase, "arbitrary from a moral point of view." It is a lottery, and no one earned their number. But where the earlier position treated that as a loss, Rawls treats it as a premise. If no one earned their place in the lottery, he reasons, then a fair society is not one that tries to pay people what they deserve — because, as we found, there is no such amount to pay. So the question is not "who deserves what"; that question has no answer. The question is: what rules would we set up for living together, if we were honest that the lottery is a lottery?
Here is how he proposes we answer it, and it is one of the most influential arguments in modern philosophy. Imagine, he says, that you have to choose the rules of your society — who gets what, how rewards and burdens are shared — but that you must choose them without knowing who, in that society, you are going to be. You do not know whether you will be born quick or slow, rich or poor, healthy or sick, into a good school or a poor one, with a temperament suited to steady work or one that cannot settle to it. You know all the general facts about how societies function. You simply do not know your own place in it. Rawls calls this choosing from behind "a veil of ignorance." Now: choose.
Follow it through. From behind that veil, what rules do you write? Not "the winner takes everything" — because you might not be the winner; you might be the person whose redundancy email came this morning, and you are not going to stake your one life on drawing the good ticket. You write rules you could accept from the worst position in the society, because the worst position might turn out to be yours. You would permit some people to have more than others — but only where allowing them more actually improves the position of the person at the bottom. A surgeon may earn more than a clerk if paying surgeons well is what secures good surgeons, so that the clerk, when she is ill, is treated by one. That is the rule Rawls says you would choose behind the veil, and he calls it the difference principle: inequality is permitted precisely as far as it improves the position of the least advantaged, and no further. Not equality for its own sake, but a rising floor under the worst-off.
See what has just happened to the position you may have arrived at last episode — that it is all luck. Rawls does not tell you the thought was wrong. He tells you it was a beginning, not an end. You took "no one deserves their luck" to be the sentence that dissolved everything. Rawls takes the same sentence and makes it the basis of a theory of fairness — arguably the most powerful one the last century produced. Take the luck seriously, he says, all the way down, and you do not end where the earlier episode left you, in the position where nothing counts. You end behind the veil, writing rules that protect the person you might have been.
There is one further step, and I will state it carefully, because it is the part the next two philosophers attack hardest. Once you see that no one earned their talents, Rawls argues, you can no longer regard your gifts as simply and privately yours, to sell for whatever the market happens to pay. The distribution of natural talent across a society — who received the quick mind, who the strong back — is, in his words, a "common asset": a shared circumstance a society may decide together how to use, so that those who drew badly in the natural lottery are not simply left with nothing. Hold on to that phrase — talents as a common asset — because within the hour a third philosopher will take it, state it plainly, and argue that it means the rest of us own a portion of you: your hands, your hours, your mind. He will call it the most dangerous claim in the room.
But that is later. For now, register what stands. The first answer is the most powerful form anyone has given to the instinct behind the word "fair": take the luck seriously all the way down, choose the rules from behind the veil, and raise the floor. It is neither a trick nor a soft option. The veil does seem to capture what we mean when we call something unfair — that we would not have agreed to this arrangement if we had not already known we would come out ahead. Many careful readers have finished Rawls and concluded: that is the answer; we can stop here.
We are not going to stop. The second philosopher thinks Rawls did not take the luck far enough. The third thinks the whole enterprise is a gentle form of tyranny. Here is the second.
The second answer is really the work of three philosophers writing in response to one another across the 1980s — Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, and Richard Arneson — and what they share is a single complaint about Rawls. They say he stopped too soon. He took the luck seriously enough to build a floor, but he left the picture blurred: he grouped everyone at the bottom together and said, raise them. But the people at the bottom, they argue, are not all there for the same reason, and a fair society has to tell the difference. Their position is known as luck egalitarianism, and it is worth taking seriously, because it is the strongest, most disciplined form of the very sentence you reached for last episode — it is all luck — the one I set aside then and promised would get its full hearing. This is that hearing.
The distinction they draw is a clean one. Take everything that befalls a person and sort it into two kinds. The first kind is what simply happens to someone, unchosen and unchooseable: their genes, their household, their country, their body, whether their parents read to them, whether they were born into war or peace. Call that brute luck. The second kind is what follows from gambles a person actually takes, with open eyes, knowing the odds: the bet placed, the risk run, the thing they could have declined and did not. Call that option luck. And here is the principle in a single line: a just society compensates people for their brute luck and holds them to their option luck. Level what was unchosen; leave the chosen alone.
Set this against what troubled you last episode, and see how directly it answers. The worry then was that "it is all luck" dissolves the self along with everything else — that if no effort counts, then you do not count, because there is no one inside making the choices. The luck egalitarian replies: we never said the choosing does not count. We said the starting line does not count — the hand you were dealt — which is exactly the part you already agreed was unearned. But what you do with the hand, the gamble you take with your eyes open, is yours, and we hold you to it, win or lose. So they take the luck entirely seriously — as seriously as the argument that came at you from both sides three episodes ago — and they still return to you a self that chooses and answers for its choices. That is not the position where nothing counts. It is the same seriousness about luck, made rigorous, with the chooser kept intact. Compensate the brute luck; respect the option luck. It is, I think, the most rigorous form anyone has given to the principle "level the unchosen" — and if you came to this series on the political left, it is very likely the arrangement your own instincts have been sketching all along, now drawn precisely.
So there are two answers before us, and they look like members of one family. But the sharpest objection to the second does not come from the right. It comes from someone on the same side — the egalitarian philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who, in a 1999 essay titled "What Is the Point of Equality?", looks at the distinction between brute luck and option luck and asks: do you understand what you have to do to people to operate this?
Run it in practice, she says. To compensate brute luck and not option luck, someone has to decide, case by case, which kind a given misfortune is. So the person in need has to come to the state and make a case, and the case is: it was not my fault; I did not choose this; I am not one of the reckless ones who gambled and lost; I am a genuine victim — see how helpless I was. You have built a system, Anderson says, that requires the worst-off people in the society to go about proving they are pitiable in order to be fed. It sorts citizens into the deserving unlucky and the undeserving reckless, and to the second group — the people who took a chance and lost — it says: you chose it, so you must bear it alone. That, she argues, is not equality. Whatever equality is, it cannot be a system whose daily working is the powerful sitting in judgment on the powerless, ranking them by how blameless their misfortune was.
And her deeper point goes further back. What were you trying to achieve, she asks, when you said you wanted people to be equal? Not to balance a ledger of compensated luck. You were trying to build a society in which people stand to one another as equals — in which no one has to grovel, no one is anyone's inferior, no one has to perform their helplessness to a clerk to get their children fed. Equality, she argues, is about the relations between people — how they regard one another, whether anyone has to bow — not about an official matching each person's bad luck with a payment. The distinction between brute and option luck, however careful and however kindly meant, ends up as one more way of looking down on people and grading them.
Now, I do not want to leave you thinking Anderson has won. She has not. She has landed a real objection, and the second answer is still standing, because the difference between brute and option luck is not so easily disposed of. There really is a difference — you can feel it yourself — between a person born without the use of their legs and a person who staked everything on a horse; and a fairness that refuses to see any difference between them looks less like dignity than like pretending not to notice something true. Anderson has an objection; she does not have a refutation. And there is a second difficulty she did not even need to raise: that clean line between the two kinds is extremely hard to draw in practice. Was a given gamble really freely chosen — or was the person the kind who takes such gambles because of a brute-luck childhood that formed them that way? Test the line between brute and option and it begins to blur, because the chooser who does the choosing was himself dealt a hand. You can hear, underneath all of this, the same difficulty from three episodes ago beginning to resurface. Keep it in view; we are not finished with it.
So now there are two egalitarian answers before us, and an egalitarian standing between them arguing that both degrade the very people they mean to help — and none of the three has been knocked down. And it is at this point that a fourth figure arrives, and he does not offer a better arrangement. He offers a reason to reject the whole enterprise.
The fourth figure — the third answer — is Robert Nozick, who in 1974, three years after Rawls, published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the book that has been the standing objection to egalitarian theories ever since. He is the one a listener on the left is most tempted to wave away — the libertarian; we know what he is going to say — which is why his argument has to land. If you leave tonight having dismissed Nozick, you have not done the work. He is neither a fool nor an apologist. He identified the one thing all the other answers have in common, and he attacked it.
What he noticed is this. Every answer we have set out tonight — Rawls's, the luck egalitarian's, strict equality, any of them — shares a single shape. Each one says: here is the pattern a just society should match. This much to the worst-off; this much compensation for brute luck; this distribution is the fair one. On every one of these views, justice is a pattern — a picture of how things ought to be distributed, which you then arrange society to reach and hold. And that, Nozick says, is the mistake. Justice is not a pattern at all. Justice is historical. It is not a matter of whether a distribution matches some picture drawn in advance; it is a matter of whether each person came by what they have in the right way — whether they made it, or were freely given it, through a sequence of legitimate steps. If every step was legitimate, the result is just, whatever shape it happens to take. And to show you, he offers an example: a basketball game.
Begin, he says, with any distribution you consider perfectly fair. Use Rawls's, if you like; use strict equality, in which everyone has exactly the same. Whatever your idea of the perfect pattern, start there — I grant it to you. Now, into this perfectly just arrangement comes a man — Nozick's example is Wilt Chamberlain, the great basketball player of his day, so substitute whoever fills a stadium now — and a million people would each gladly pay a small sum, the price of a ticket, simply to watch him play. So they do, freely. No one is deceived, no one is robbed; each decides, individually, that watching this man is worth more than the coin in their pocket, and hands it over gladly. By the end of the season the man is rich — far richer than everyone around him. The pattern you began with is gone, undone by nothing but a million free choices.
Here is the decisive step. Was an injustice done? Point to it. Point to the person who was wronged. You cannot — every transfer was willing. So if you still want to call the new, lopsided distribution unjust, and to reach in and correct it back to your pattern, then look hard at what you are committing yourself to. You are saying that a million people may not spend their own money on the thing they enjoy. You are saying that, to preserve your pattern, you will have to intervene, again and again, indefinitely, every time free people make an exchange that disturbs it — and they will, constantly, because that is what living people do. Liberty, Nozick says, upsets patterns — any pattern. And the only way to hold a pattern in place is continuous interference in the lives of people who are doing nothing but living them. The arrangement is not something you set up once; it is a standing licence to keep overriding people's free exchanges, permanently, to undo what they chose.
And now he turns to the phrase I asked you to hold. Talents as a common asset. Listen, he says, to what that actually claims. If my talents — my hands, my voice, my mind, the hours of my one life — are a common asset, a shared resource that society may deploy for the good of the worst-off, then, stated plainly, other people own a portion of me; my labour is partly theirs by right. Nozick does not shrink from naming it: taxation of earnings from labour, he writes, is on a par with forced labour. The egalitarian view, however warmly it is presented, treats persons as a pool of resources for society's projects, and in doing so forgets the fact that everything else ought to be built on: that we are separate people. Not cells in a single organism whose total welfare can be added up and maximised. Separate. You have your one life and I have mine, and mine is not a means to the smoothing-out of yours. This is what he calls the separateness of persons, and he argues that every patterned theory, in the end, overrides it — subordinating the actual, particular, bounded individual to a distribution.
If your instinct is to recoil from this, the recoil is worth examining, because the Chamberlain example does work. It is true that you cannot hold any pattern in place without overriding free adults, repeatedly. And "we will treat your talents as ours to allocate" really does sound, stated without softening, like a claim on a person. The egalitarian wants to answer: but the floor, the worst-off, the person struggling at the next desk — and that want is not wrong. But Nozick has shown that satisfying it has a price, paid in liberty, in a thousand small prohibitions on what free people may do with their own; and you are not entitled to pretend the price is nothing.
So has the third answer won? It has not — and here I will press Nozick as hard as I pressed the others. Push on his argument and two things give way. First, the whole structure rests on the phrase "acquired justly" — a holding is legitimate if the first person to acquire it did so cleanly. But trace the chain of any actual holding back far enough and you do not find a clean first acquisition. You find conquest: land taken, the people driven off it, labour stolen, the records falsified — force and fraud, and then centuries of supposedly free transfers built on top of that. Nozick knew this, and admitted it. He said his theory would need a principle of rectification — a way of correcting the old thefts before present holdings could count as just — and then he left that principle barely sketched, a debt he never paid, because the history is too tangled and too bloody to unwind, and he did not unwind it. So the basketball example is clean, but the actual world it is meant to justify is not, and Nozick left that problem unresolved by his own hand. And second — more quietly, a point I will only mark, because it will matter most after tonight — his whole structure rests on two words: self-ownership. You own yourself, therefore you own your talents, therefore their fruit is yours. And he treats those two words as the most obvious thing in the world — bedrock, with nothing beneath them to examine. Do not argue with him about it tonight. Simply mark the place. Of everything set out tonight — Rawls's floor, the luck egalitarian's distinction, Nozick's basketball — that phrase at the very bottom of Nozick's argument is the one thing no one stopped to examine. We will come back to it.
Three philosophers. Three answers. Not one of them defeated by the other two.
Stand back, then, and look at where we have arrived, because it is a strange result. You came expecting a single answer. You have three, with a fourth figure standing between them, and the question is more crowded and less settled than when it was bare.
Let me set them out plainly, because you have to be able to hold all of them at once, and none is a straw man to be waved off. Rawls stands, and the veil still holds: you cannot honestly say you would write winner-takes-all rules from behind it, not knowing your own position; the rising floor is the most disciplined form the fairness instinct has taken, and even Nozick never showed it was wrong to want it — only that it has a cost. The luck egalitarian stands, and the distinction between brute and option luck still holds: the difference between the unlucky and the reckless is still real — you felt it earlier — and a fairness that will not see it is pretending. Anderson stands, and she is not answered either: the system really does make the poorest line up and prove their misfortune in order to eat, and equality was supposed to be about whether anyone has to bow. And Nozick stands, and no one has answered his objection: the basketball example shows you cannot hold any pattern without permanently overriding what free people choose to do with what is theirs. Four of them, and not one defeated. I am not apologising for the untidiness of this. It is the actual state of the field — genuinely where the best people working on the question stand today, not because they are foolish but because the question is hard.
And here is the exit — the one we always reach for when we are surrounded by intelligent people who will not agree. We want to say: well, they are each a little right, surely; the mature answer is some combination — a measure of Rawls's floor, a little of Nozick's liberty, some of the brute/option distinction, in whatever proportion suits. And that exit has to be refused tonight, harder than the others, because it is the same mistake we caught two episodes ago, now in a more respectable form. You can only combine two positions if they are compatible. These do not combine, because they contradict one another at the root. Rawls says your talents are partly a common asset. Nozick says that very sentence means other people own a portion of you. Those are not two positions to be added together; one is the denial of the other. "Somewhere in the middle" is not a position here. It is a refusal to stand anywhere, presented as maturity. The deadlock is real, and being reasonable about it does not dissolve it.
And if that deadlock feels familiar — if some part of you has stood in this exact place before — you have. Earlier in this series, in the arc called How to Be Good, we found something unsettling: that our moral arguments do not end; they circle, growing more sophisticated but never resolving. And we suggested this might be because we go on using words like fair and deserve and owe as though we still shared the ground those words grew in, when in fact we no longer do. Here is that same endlessness again, in the most charged instance of it — Rawls against Nozick, decades on, still unsettled. That is not an accident. Hold on to the thought.
Before we get there, though, run the argument once yourself, on something real.
I am making the case concrete on purpose, because it is easy to nod along to the veil and the basketball in the abstract and never once feel them bite. So choose something real and near: a genuinely scarce and genuinely wanted good in your own city — a place at the one good school, a spot on the transplant list, the help that runs out before the queue does. Some real good there is not enough of, where someone has to decide who receives it. Now run the three answers on it, honestly, aloud if it helps. Run Rawls: design the rule from behind the veil, not knowing whether you are the family at the front of the queue or the one at the back — what would you write? Run the luck egalitarian: sort the people in that queue into those whose need is brute bad luck and those who gambled and lost — and then notice how badly you do not want to be the one doing the sorting, just as Anderson said you would not. Run Nozick: ask by what right anyone reaches in to assign the scarce good at all, rather than letting it go to whoever can freely obtain it — and notice how cold that sounds, and then notice that you cannot quite show it to be wrong. Run all three on your one real case. And here is the test, the only one that matters: you cannot make the answer your politics dislikes simply disappear. It keeps having a point. Three answers, one real case, and no clean way to dismiss any of them — that is not you failing the exercise. That deadlock is the actual state of the argument; you are simply standing inside it now, on your own street. Do not resolve it tonight; let it stay open.
And here is what I will leave with you. You came expecting to be handed back the ground you lost. You have not been. You have been handed a genuine dispute, between serious answers, that you can no longer walk away from by choosing the side that flatters you. That is the gain. But notice the one thing I did not do tonight. I never asked you to examine the ground all four of them are standing on. We spent the whole hour on the answers themselves — the floor, the distinction, the basketball — and never once looked at what lies underneath them. Because I think the reason this argument can run for fifty years and never end is that all four of these people, who agree on almost nothing, are quietly standing on the same single assumption — one so far down beneath the dispute that, to all four of them, it simply looks like solid ground. I am not going to tell you tonight what it is. I will only say that an argument this good, which still will not end, is very often the sign of a shared assumption that none of the disputants ever examined. So next time we examine the ground itself. Do not reach for the answer yet. We are only now finding out where the ground actually is.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.