Tan's Defence Of Luck Egalitarianism

Tan contends that inequalities are problematic only insofar as they are originated in social institutions. He draws on Rawls, who writes that “natural facts in themselves are neither just nor unjust; what is just or unjust is “the way the basic structure of society makes use of these natural differences and permits them to affect the social fortune of citizens, their opportunities in life, and the actual terms of cooperation between them.”” (Tan, 2008, 671) As such, social justice is concerned with the basic structure of society, which is to say its political and social institutions. Consequently, Tan draws the analogy with luck egalitarianism and argues that it should not aim at mitigating all natural contingencies that people face that are
One’s natural endowments can turn out to be an advantage or disadvantage depending on social arrangements and on whether it is valued in this particular society. Hence, inequalities are problematic only insofar as they have their origins in social institutions. Iris Marion Young has made a similar argument by contending that inequalities are due to structural inequalities. She gives the example of group based patterns, whereby one group is worse off than another. She gives structural explanations for these differences to argue that the basic structural inequalities are unjust. What we refer to by group differentiations of gender, race, class, age, and so on are structural social relations that tend to benefit some more than others. If you have a position in a social structure, it conditions your choices. And luck egalitarians would agree that if you are being dominated as such, you experience a restriction of your self-determination. (Young, 2001) Hence, it is not that luck egalitarians argue that being black is simply bad luck by nature, yet it is because social institutions discriminate against people that are black or in favour of everyone else. Anderson
In as far as luck egalitarianism is also concerned with the basic institutions of society and its norms, it will have something to say about race, gender, and ethnicity in situations where the institutions of society discriminate against or in favour of members of particular racial or ethnic groups or gender in the distribution of social and economic goods. As such, luck egalitarianism can have something to say about such arbitrary advantaging or disadvantaging of persons on account of their race, gender, or ethnicity through institutional arrangements. In as far as oppressive social relationships are supported by norms of the basic structure of society, which distribute goods and resources on the basis of arbitrary factors, luck egalitarians can criticize such oppressive relationships. Luck egalitarians focus on distributive equality because social equality has an inherent distributive dimension, as explained earlier. As such, luck egalitarians can agree with critics like Anderson that equality matters to us is because we believe that there is