Luck & Social Justice

Maybe you’ve gone to a Black Lives Matter rally. Maybe you’re an ally of the LGBTQ community. Maybe you simply believe in a world that values social justice.

Here is how luck is already an important part of your world view:

Our modern interpretation of social justice and the myriad policy implications that it impacts from discrimination of classes, to drug & prison reform, to tax policy, can trace their ideological roots to John Rawls’s magisterial work, A Theory on Justice.

In it, Rawls takes what he calls the original position; a foundational assumption of how one would create a society.

Rawls writes:

…no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

In other words, if you didn’t know whether you’d be born to parents who were doctors versus clerks, you’d want that society to afford a similar set of opportunities regardless of your station or societal status.

This is, in fact, how all humans are brought into this world. Rawls’s work on social justice has been propagated so far and wide as to be part of our daily lexicon.

Luck, in other words, is foundational to social justice — and thus compassion — at the civilization level.

The economist Robert H. Frank from Cornell University writes further about our perceptions of luck in his book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. In an adapted essay by the author he posits:

Little wonder that when talented, hard-working people in developed countries strike it rich, they tend to ascribe their success to talent and hard work above all else. Most of them are vividly aware of how hard they’ve worked and how talented they are. They’ve been working hard and solving difficult problems every day for many years! In some abstract sense, they probably do know that they might not have performed as well in some other environment. Yet their day-to-day experience provides few reminders of how fortunate they were not to have been born in, say, war-torn Zimbabwe.

If you acknowledge that there is some sort of privilege that you or others enjoy, be it ethnicity, gender, height, beauty, or otherwise, then you already understand the role luck plays in success.

And make no mistake: the birth lottery is perhaps the single biggest luck factor in all of our lives.

Similar to the acknowledgement of, say, white privilege, the attribute of being white does not negate the diligence, talent, and suffering of any particular caucasian individual. It is, however, important that there is acknowledgement of the existence of the privilege — which is tied to luck.

So, why does this matter?

It matters because believing in luck isn’t just a party conversation starter: it can be an indicator to a moral-ethical belief system that affects issues ranging from business and bioethics to immigration and international aid.

These belief systems, whether implicit or explicit, dramatically impact not just individuals, but generations.