Mich "Equal chances versus equal outcomes: When are lotteries fair and justified?"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Michael Otsuka (Rutgers University)

It strikes many as intuitive that we should satisfy people’s equal claims to a scarce and indivisible good (e.g., a life-saving drug) by giving each the highest equal lottery chance of receiving the good. This seems a fair and reasonable means of treating people as equals. In a challenge to such a case for the distribution by lot, some have argued that the chance of receiving the good at issue is lacking in value or otherwise insignificant or irrelevant in comparison with actually receiving this good. It has been suggested, for example, that chances are irrelevant since their contribution to a person’s well-being pales in significance in comparison with the actual receipt of the good that is distributed by lot. In the first two parts of this talk, I answer the above, and related, challenges to the relevance and significance of chances. As I argue in the first part, the far greater significance of receiving all of an undivided good needn’t undermine the case for equal lottery chances of the whole good, as compared with an outcome involving equally divided portions of this good. I argue in the second part that it mislocates the value of lottery chances to assume that they must contribute, in themselves, to a person’s well-being. Rather their significance primarily resides in their expected instrumental value in delivering goods of independent value. In the third and final part of this talk, I provide an account of when distribution by lot is perfectly fair in spite of the inevitability of an unequal outcome among equal claimants.