Power, Luck and Freedom: Collected Essays by Keith Dowding

Author:Keith Dowding [Dowding, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, History & Theory, Comparative Politics, Political Science, Social, Political
ISBN: 9781526104571
Google: Pm65DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30216450
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Personal identity luck

I set aside personal identity luck as a form of brute luck. If luck is measured as some form of relationship between expected outcomes and actual outcomes, then lowly returns from a lowly position in life can hardly be called bad luck. After all, if one is in a lower class, with uneducated parents, poor upbringing, and so on, then the poor outcomes one receives can hardly be unexpected. If we measure luck along the lines suggested on pages 140–1, then two people on their deathbeds may have had identical luck, but one lived a life of relative poverty in relation to the other. Of course, the point at which we measure brute luck at birth is not from one’s circumstances at birth, but from some imagined original position behind a veil of ignorance. And what we are measuring with personal identity luck at birth is the social structure as measured by expected rewards of birth into different social classes.

Seen in this manner, personal identity luck is a measurement of social class and caste; and a measure of expected lifestyle for people with different capabilities (such as ‘natural talents’ or disabilities).11 To that extent, we can best hope to measure the differences in personal identity luck by looking at the outcomes of difference classes or what John Roemer (1998) calls ‘types’ of people using his Equality of Opportunity (EoP) measure. Roemer believes his measure captures the effects of brute luck. I think that is too broad a claim. Rather, it captures the average effects of personal identity luck across type.

We can see why Roemer’s approach does not capture responsibility from his response to one of the early criticisms of his EoP measure (Roemer 1998: 21–2). Roemer’s measure is designed to capture autonomous effort – or responsibility. He does this by selecting his types by a vector of characteristics outside of the control of people (personal identity luck), with each member of a type sharing similar characteristics. The assumption is that each type faces similar opportunity sets, and how well they do through their choice of elements within the sets is a measure of their responsibility. So we can look at the average salary of each centile in two types (men and women) and the differences across the types will show the difference in opportunity to earn money between the two types.

Now an underlying assumption of such statistical analysis is that the residual we are trying to capture (and other error terms) are equally normally distributed across types. That is, any factor which affects the selection of variables within opportunity sets not contained in the data, affects each type in precisely the same manner. For that reason choice of types is important.12 Brian Barry constructed an example of two types: an academic and an Asian type, who, as it happens, have identical educational results.13 However, the Asian group’s success derives from sheer hard work, impelled by their cultural milieu, whereas the academic type breezed through with little effort. If

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