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Books

Leaving Nothing to Chance by Carl Knight

Alistair Duff asks if people should be compensated for bad luck.

Leaving Nothing to Chance (2025) by Carl Knight, is an informed, proficient and lucid defence of luck egalitarianism. This is the idea that people should be socially compensated for their bad luck (for instance, being born poor). This book is radical and innovative, articulating the case for what the writer calls ‘all-luck’ egalitarianism. Dr Knight, a professor at the University of Glasgow, argues for the neutralization by state intervention not just of ‘unchosen’ bad luck – for example, the state taking measures to equalise the lives of those born of diminutive stature (that’s my example; I often think about their plight) – but also of ‘chosen’ bad luck – for example losing at gambling (Knight’s example). Incidentally, the unchosen/chosen luck distinction is often called ‘brute luck’ and ‘option luck’ in the literature. I hasten to add that Knight is not saying that gambling one’s resources away is fine. Rather, he argues that one should not be penalised for the luck element in a bad gamble, only for the choice element. That is to say, one should never be punished for bad luck, only for bad decisions. Thus, Knight’s brand of egalitarianism takes account of personal responsibility. This advantage enables him to see off many rival philosophies, such as ‘relational’ egalitarianism.

Roulette wheel © Ralf Roletschek 2013 Creative Commons 3

Instead of setting aside the metaphysical issues which lie in the background of political philosophy, Knight bravely faces the perennial questions of free will vs determinism, the nature of personal identity, and the like. This is most welcome, recalling the great nineteenth-century British idealists such as T.H. Green, who believed that moral and political philosophy could not and should not evade metaphysics. But unlike Green, Knight does not claim to have solved such riddles. He is content to flag up their implications for the political philosophy of luck-neutralization.

After reading Leaving Nothing to Chance I remain, however, a Rawlsian about questions of social justice. Knight himself notes that a point of departure for the whole school of luck egalitarianism was John Rawls’ looseness over the ‘natural lottery’, in his book A Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that if Bob had the luck to be born rich and Alice unluckily was born poor then Alice should be given an ample minimum to live on. However, that Bob was born smart and good-looking and Alice neither, could not, Rawls said, be directly a matter for state attention.

Dr Knight and the luck egalitarians are right to explode this dubious ethical distinction between the social lottery and the natural one. However, their goal of extirpating all luck has some troubling aspects. It seems a utopian project – not in Rawls’ sense of a ‘realistic utopia’, but in Thomas More’s original sense of a place which can exist nowhere (‘utopia’ means ‘nowhere’) – without, at any rate, a Procrustean dictatorship cutting us down to size. Moreover, a world without the risks of luck is probably not a world most of us would really relish. A woman came up to me in London recently and asked where the nearest ‘slots’ were. Slots, she explained, are arcades where you can play slot machines. Several showed up in the vicinity on my Google Maps. That was her idea of a fun Friday night; her ‘idea of the good’. Who was I to seek to dissuade her? A world without ‘option’ luck would be a drab place indeed – a society deprived of a very human kind of hope.

There’s a good line in Rawls’ Theory that says that “in justice as fairness men [sic] agree to share one another’s fate.” For some reason, the great thinker removed this adage from the second edition. For me, though, it expresses the essence of his doctrine of social justice. But while putting down major social and economic unfairness, Rawls’ cathedral-like conceptual architecture left some space for the rich tapestry of happenstance. His philosophy expressly sought and consummately achieved the elusive balance between equality and social welfare.

Dr Knight is actually well aware of all this, entertaining various ‘pluralistic’ permutations which combine luck (in fact, anti-luck) egalitarianism with ‘sufficientarian’ or ‘prioritarian’ elements. Indeed, he leaves no stone unturned, probing his own position from every angle. So my Rawlsian misgivings should not be read as suggesting that Dr Knight has not produced a philosophical work of high calibre. Indeed, it is surely the strongest case so far made for a thoroughgoing luck egalitarianism.

Alistair Duff is a Visiting Affiliate Professor at the University of Glasgow, and an Emeritus Professor of Edinburgh Napier University.

• Leaving Nothing to Chance: Equality as Luck Neutralization , Carl Knight, Oxford University Press, 2025, 230 pages, £77 hardback.