Luck, Responsibility and Interpersonal Comparisons

A much-discussed question in political philosophy concerns the selection of a metric for interpersonal comparisons. Person's respective social positions can be construed in terms of their welfare, resources, opportunities, or some other distributive share. Much of this debate has been governed by considerations relating to responsibility and luck. This paper explores some of the problems surrounding responsibility. It is argued that objections thought to count against the relevance of responsibility to justice count in favour of dealing with responsibility's significance outside of the scope of the metric question, rather than against the relevance of the concept itself.