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about by the brute facts of birth and situation? Every post-facto justice measure would be climbing uphill against the steep grade of chance. And are we perhaps overstepping the bounds of legitimate intervention if we try to advance such measures? Perhaps there are simply some things that remain misfortunes rather than injustices? But every conceivable distinction between misfortune and injustice is open to criticism. Is the New Orleans flood, say, merely an act of god (misfortune) or a matter of heinously bad infrastructure (injustice)? When does inept government count more than the simple bad luck of living in a drowned parish? To answer these thorny questions, many people follow the lead of John Rawls’s foundational work on justice, and have adopted versions of an ‘original position.’ This is an imagined choice scenario in which the specific circumstances of birth are excluded by a ‘veil of ignorance,’ thus freeing choosers to settle on schemes of justification and basic social structure that are fair to all.4 Note that, when we imagine what rules of the social game we might choose if we didn’t know who our parents are, the basic lottery is assumed. The uneven natural distribution of favors is what makes justice an issue in the first place. Some critics have balked at the idea of such ignorance-based choice as the basis of legitimate social policy, but consider for a moment the core insight. If I don’t know who, in particular, I am, then I really do have a basic rational stake in upholding practices of fairness in distributing goods and life chances. A simple analogy captures the point. Suppose I am asked by my mother to cut the remaining portion of a pie into two sections, one for me and one for my brother. The catch is that, while I cut first, he gets to choose first. The only rational action on my part is to opt for equal shares of the remaining pie. Any other course is self-defeating, given an assumption of basic rationality on the part of my brother (i.e., he will choose the larger piece, given the chance). The original position in effect models a complex version of this scenario: we all can do the cutting, but nobody knows who’s going to get to do the choosing. But here I want to postulate yet another order of risk. It brings together the luck of the lottery with the original-choice model’s notion of consenting participants, but with a new twist. This ‘Order-Three Risk’ concerns the relative levels of aversion and tolerance regarding risk itself, qualities which might themselves be distributed unevenly within a population. Indeed, all evidence shows that the distribution of tolerance to risk is wildly uneven. Some people are simply more inclined to take chances—to shoulder risk—than others. Moreover, they consider this risky behavior rational.
1 See, for example, the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon, beginning with a landmark article called “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases,” International Security 19, no. 1 (1994): 5–40. This was later followed by both a general-audience overview in The Atlantic and a book, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton University Press, 2001). 2 An excellent philosophical discussion of the nuances here can be found in Neil Levy, “Autonomy and Addiction,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 3 (2006), 427–47, especially 432 and 431. 3 Andy Borowitz, “Trump Economic Plan Calls for Every American to Inherit Millions From Father,” New Yorker (August 8, 2016); www.newyorker.com/humor/ borowitz-report/trump-economicplan-calls-for-every-american-toinherit-millions-from-father (accessed September 16, 2016). 4 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1970). My characterization is crude but I hope not inaccurate. For further reflections on the basics of the theory and its relation to chance, see Mark Kingwell, “Throwing Dice: Luck of the Draw and the Democratic Ideal,” PhaenEx 7, no. 1 (2012): 66–100; reprinted in Mark Kingwell, Unruly Voices (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2012).