What is luck and how does it relate to fairness?
Talent and hard work have a big influence on people's success.
But two other factors are at play, over which people have no control.
One is who they are, and in what circumstances they grow up. Do they have the luck of being born into a rich, well-connected family, or a poor, marginalised one? Do they benefit or suffer from social and structural biases and injustices linked to their race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability or other factors? What impact does the place where they live have on their life chances?
The second is how lucky they are during their lifetime in terms of random events that happen to them. Do they launch their business just before a boom or a depression? Do they sail through life in perfect health or develop a rare form of cancer in middle age?
Both aspects of good or bad luck are outside people's control.
Most people would agree that, while people bear personal responsibility for those things that are within their control, they are not responsible for the circumstances into which they are born, or for bad or good things that happen to them during their life over which they have no control.
People who end up at the bottom of society - for example, the homeless – may have suffered the effects of both forms of bad luck, being born into disadvantage and then suffering a catastrophic life event that they lack the resilience to cope with.
And yet society generally does very little to help people to recover from these shocks and to reverse the vicious circle that often results from them.
Are there different types of luck?
A branch of philosophy called luck egalitarianism argues that inequalities that reflect ‘brute luck’, over which people have no control, are unjust, and that society should act to correct or prevent those inequalities, while inequalities that arise from choices that make, such as how hard to work or whether to gamble, are just and should not be corrected or prevented.
These choices can sometimes be described as ‘option luck’, when people choose to take on particular risks or opportunities. Most luck egalitarians believe that the natural talents with which a person is born are as much a matter of ‘brute luck’ as whether that person is born into wealth or poverty, and should therefore be corrected for.
However, notwithstanding critiques of luck egalitarianism from proponents of ‘relational egalitarianism’ on the grounds that society should not abandon those who make bad choices and that it could lead to the demeaning treatment of those who suffer the bad luck of being ‘untalented’, the distinction between ‘brute luck’ and ‘option luck’ is problematic.
What about the alcoholic who suffers later in life from chronic liver disease? Is collapsing into drug addiction the result of bad luck or of bad choices? In many cases both are in play and feed off each other. It should not be (and could not be) the role of the state to judge the extent to which a particular individual’s situation is the result of ‘option’ or ‘brute’ luck (good or bad).
We can choose as a society to recognise that there is both a moral and a socio-economic case for helping people who have suffered bad luck, even if some or most of that luck has come about due to bad decisions.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines luck as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions”. In this broader sense, luck refers to factors outside someone’s control, which would include the circumstances into which someone is born, but there is a narrower definition which focuses on random chance events that occur in life.
Different thinkers have proposed many different types of luck, but the three key examples are:
- Resultant luck, which is luck in the way things turn out through random chance (such as being hit by a bus, or winning the lottery)
- Circumstantial luck, which is luck in terms of circumstances (such as growing up in a dictatorship, or living through a war or a pandemic)
- Constitutional luck, which is luck in terms of who someone is (including their genetic inheritance and whether they are born into a rich or poor family or country)
Preliminary evidence from our polling suggests that most people think about the first, and to some extent the second, of these types of luck when they think about good and bad luck - a ‘naturalistic’ interpretation. They tend to think less of constitutional luck as luck, preferring to think of it as governed by ‘hidden forces’ or being to some extent within someone’s control.
This is hugely important, because there is a general view that people should not be held responsible for factors that are outside their control, and should be shielded from them as far as possible (either through prevention or compensation). Whether or not ‘random chance’ is involved is irrelevant.
Do we need a broader definition of success and what a ‘good life’ looks like?
Amartya Sen argues that we should strive for 'equality of capability’, in which "the ability and means to choose our life course should be spread as equally as possible across society", giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop up to his or her potential, rather than to maximise their wealth or status.
Michael Sandel suggests that we must rethink our attitudes towards success and failure to be more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility, more affirming of the dignity of work and more hospitable to a politics of the common good.
There is a role for society and the state in building and maintaining a level playing field and correcting for or preventing ‘brute’ bad luck, to allow individuals to make the most of their talents; then it is down to individuals to do that, and to earn rewards in proportion to their efforts.
But, as Michael Sandel suggests in The Tyranny of Merit, we must stop thinking that those who are successful are only there because of their talent and hard work, regardless of their personal circumstances and the role of luck, while those with less material success have somehow failed. We also need to ensure that everyone has a decent quality of life, including dignity and control as well as the meeting of basic human needs.
Should we aim to reduce the role of luck in life?
Unless we do more to try to compensate people who have suffered excessive amounts of bad luck, we cannot reasonably claim that the system by which people are rewarded for their talent and effort is operating fairly and proportionately.
We already have a popular national system to help people who suffer the bad luck of becoming ill – the National Health Service. The NHS treats people without asking whether they have fallen ill due to bad choices or due to circumstances beyond their control, and we should recognise that circumstances can often constrain or otherwise affect people’s choices, so it is hard to draw a clean distinction between ‘brute’ luck and ‘option’ luck. We also have a social security system to help people who need support because, for example, they cannot work, or lose their job, or do not have parents who can raise them. Neither are perfect; both are necessary and reflect a widely held belief that we need collective systems in place to protect people from the consequences of bad luck in life. But both are collapsing under the weight of reduced funding and ever-increasing demand.
We should not aim to restrict our support to people whose bad luck has clearly arisen due to circumstances beyond their control. The case for taking action, rather than letting nature take its course, has several dimensions.
- There is a strong moral argument for helping people who have fallen on hard times, regardless of the circumstances that led them there.
- But there is also an economic argument, since allowing people to fall into destitution creates a whole set of undesirable social problems – crime, homelessness, ill health – that impose economic costs on society and are expensive to fix.
- And we know that living in poverty or being unemployed or suffering from ill health have real impacts on the choices that people are able to make, so it is it impossible to neatly separate out factors that are within or outside people’s control.
What about talent?
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the relative importance of talent versus hard work in contributing to ‘merit’ (or to the belief in meritocracy).
A recent study compared how elites in the UK and Denmark talk about merit as a way of justifying their positions in society, to tease this out. The results are fascinating:
In the UK, elites tend to be ‘talent meritocrats’ who foreground their unique capacity for ideational creativity or risk taking, innately good judgment, and ‘natural’ aptitude, intelligence, or academic ability. In contrast, in Denmark, elites are more likely to be ‘hard work meritocrats’ who emphasise their unusual work ethic, extensive experience (as a signal of accumulated hard work), and contributions outside of work, particularly in civil society.
The authors speculate that private schools in the UK encourage people to think that they are uniquely talented, whereas elite employers in Denmark “socialise the connection between hard work and success”.
Most luck egalitarians believe that, since circumstances of birth and levels of natural talent are equally arbitrary (i.e due to luck), it makes sense for society to correct both equally.
The preferred mechanism for achieving this is to redistribute income (or wealth) so that those who are born into more disadvantaged circumstances and/or with less natural talent end up with a comparable standard of living to their more fortunate peers, with the only legitimate source of inequality being the amount of hard work that a person chooses to do.
John Rawls argued that genetic variation is neither fair nor unfair, but that we can we respond to it in a just or unjust way.
Kathryn Paige Harden argues in The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality that our refusal to recognise the impact of the genetic lottery on our lives (driven largely by an anxiety about the legacy of eugenics) perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.
If we ignore the impact of genes, we can’t talk about how to recognise it and compensate for its impact on people’s lives. And we should reflect on whether it is right that we value and reward people who are genetically endowed with high levels of cognitive intelligence more than people with other talents that might be just as socially (and economically) valuable. This isn’t about ‘levelling out’ the impact of talent so that everyone has the same outcomes, regardless of their genetic inheritance. It is about enabling everyone to live their own best life, and ensuring that economic inequalities do not spill over into equalities of health, wellbeing, political participation and influence, social status and respect.