Two Models of Equality and Responsibility

Much recent political philosophy has focused on the role of responsibility within liberal-egalitarian theories of justice. John Rawls's theory, in particular, has come in for criticism in virtue of its account of responsibility, which Rawls takes to be tied to his account of primary goods. Primary goods themselves have been rejected as the appropriate ‘currency’ (or metric) of distributive justice, while Rawls's treatment of responsibility has been criticized as implausible or even inconsistent. These criticisms have given rise to much of the constructive work political philosophy has done after Rawls's Theory — one may think of the work of Richard Arneson, G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, and John Roemer, for whom a major concern is to make more room for a suitable notion of responsibility. Their efforts are shaped by a distinction between ‘choice’ and ‘circumstance’: individuals should possess distributive shares in accordance with their choices (for which they are responsible) and be compensated for disadvantages they have because of their circumstances (for which they are not).