Justice by Lottery by Barbara Goodwin
Author:Barbara Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Randomness, lottery, chance, theories of justice, society, morality, moral equality, social justice
ISBN: 9781845407360
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00
The officers selected by lot in Ancient Athens referred to themselves as being chosen by chance. Their concept of chance may seem vitiated, however, because there were elements of planning behind their selection. The fact that they took part in the draw at all was not a chance matter, but was due to their having been marked out as eligible by preexisting, socially determined criteria - for example, by being a free man, not a slave or a woman; by being a citizen, not an alien. The chance which operates via the lottery is thus, to some extent, a caused chance, but this does not vitiate the randomness of selection within a given lottery any more than a compatibilist theory concerning free will and determinism vitiates the notion of free will.
Readers of Rhinehart’s The Dice Man will remember that the first time Luke determines his actions by a throw of the dice, he thinks ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene … if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed … a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed.’ [16] Later, he listed six options for each throw, but however sophisticated his use of the dice became, there was always the constraining factor that the alternative actions had to be specified by Luke himself out of some larger group of feasible actions. Luke’s limited view of the possible actions meant that actions inconceivable to him were never included in the options, so his actions were not entirely random. Even when he asked other people to list a number of courses of action, then narrowed them down by throwing dice, then finally used the dice to choose between them (double and treble sortition), the result was not pure chance. In the same way, the allocations made by any distributive social lottery will be limited by the designations of the choices available and by cultural and social factors which make some options conceivable, others not. (Even the Roman Saturnalia succeeded only in reversing the normal order of things and turning the world upside down for a brief time.) The Total Social Lottery could not, therefore, be said to embody a totally unconstrained random process, but it would certainly free people from many significant social rigidities and cultural givens. And of course, it remains true that within any given lottery with a given set of options, the outcome would be random.
The connection between randomness and equality is complex. There is equality in the structure of the lottery process itself, although the outcome of any draw is unequal. In an ordinary prize lottery, if participants have only one ticket, the randomness of the draw gives everyone an equal chance of winning, although only one person will win, and participation gives everyone an equal claim to the prize. In many distributive contexts, the randomness and arbitrariness of a once-and-for-all draw would not prima facie commend a lottery above any rival mechanism of distribution from the perspective of the pursuit of equality, but it
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