In a celebrated article of 1989, G. A. Cohen declared that ‘[Ronald] Dworkin has, in effect, performed for egalitarianism the considerable service of incorporating within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.’ The general view inspired by Dworkin's accomplishment has become known as ‘responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism’, ‘equality of fortune’, or more commonly, ‘luck egalitarianism’. While it is widely accepted that luck egalitarianism seeks to combine the traditionally radical idea of distributive equality with the traditionally conservative concern for holding people responsible for their actions, there is much disagreement about (1) the specific nature of its objective, (2) the most appropriate way of realizing the objective, and (3) the desirability, from various perspectives, of the objective and its particular realizations. In this work I hope to shed some light on all three of these issues.

(1) receives the briefest treatment. The version of the luck- egalitarian objective that I will focus on is the view that variations in the levels of advantage held by different persons are justified if, and only if, those persons are responsible for those levels. This is, it seems to me, the purest form of luck egalitarianism. One might say that there is a presumption in favour of equality, because inequalities have to be justified. And the only available grounds for justification are grounds of responsibility.