Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Books

Leaving Nothing to Chance by Carl Knight

Alistair Duff asks if people should be compensated for bad luck.

Leaving Nothing to Chance (2025) by Carl Knight, is an informed, proficient and lucid defence of luck egalitarianism. This is the idea that people should be socially compensated for their bad luck (for instance, being born poor). This book is radical and innovative, articulating the case for what the writer calls ‘all-luck’ egalitarianism. Dr Knight, a professor at the University of Glasgow, argues for the neutralization by state intervention not just of ‘unchosen’ bad luck – for example, the state taking measures to equalise the lives of those born of diminutive stature (that’s my example; I often think about their plight) – but also of ‘chosen’ bad luck – for example losing at gambling (Knight’s example). Incidentally, the unchosen/chosen luck distinction is often called ‘brute luck’ and ‘option luck’ in the literature.

…