2
To understand how the concept of autonomy operates for luck egalitarians, consider the
following case of a gardener and a tennis-player.
3
Imagine that a gardener and a tennis-player have
identical talents and identical social backgrounds and that they initially are allocated the same amount
of money. With their equal allocations of money, the gardener and the tennis-player each acquire their
desired land and start to do their preferred activity, respectively: to garden and to play tennis. While
the gardener earns a large income by working hard at his gardening, the tennis-player does not obtain
any substantial income since he does no work and just plays tennis. Although the gardener and the
tennis-player started out with an equal amount of money, the two now have unequal incomes. If the
luck egalitarians were to observe this situation, they would contend that such an inequality in income
between the gardener and the tennis-player does not contradict a fundamental egalitarian assumption.
They would argue that, as long as the gardener and the tennis-player have different preferences and
make autonomous choices based on their preferences, an adequate equality theory requires that the two
individuals of the story be held responsible for the resulting costs of their choices led by their own
preferences.
4
The luck egalitarians would maintain that the state should not subsidize the tennis-player
by redistributing money to him from the gardener: the tennis-player deserves to be poor.
According to the luck egalitarians, since treating people as equals mandates that individuals be
held personally responsible for costs incurred from choices they make employing their own
preferences, this combats the charge that egalitarianism has failed to respect the autonomy of people
and thereby ignored the choices people make as to how they will live their lives and the personal
liberty indeed constitutes his equality theory. Dworkin, however, is careful to emphasize that he is not concerned
with liberty in general but only with the “special character of liberty.” He then specifies that the “special
character of liberty” arises from the process of choice that lies at the core of his equality of resources, see Ronald
Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), chap 3. It appears to me that
Dworkin’s notion of freedom in his equality theory is narrowly focused. That is, it is in fact closer to the idea of
autonomy than to the broad metaphysical notion of freedom. While I admit that autonomy and freedom are
closely related concepts, there are subtle differences between them; I will not examine these differences in my
discussion. For the difference between autonomy and freedom, see Nancy Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty:
Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 35-39.
3
Although I have changed some of the details, this example is originally provided by Will Kymlicka in order to
address the basic intuition of liberal equality theory concerning people’s choices, see Will Kymlicka,
Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 73-77.
4
I will examine closely how the luck egalitarians conceptualize “autonomous” choices later in this paper.
Convention