Luck and the Market

Following the financial crisis of 2007, ideas of responsibility and fairness found new voice in public discourse. It was said to be unfair that the self-seeking actions of a small but powerful financial elite had precipitated a crisis that affected those well-beyond the financial sector. It was thought unfair, too, that banks, the parties most often blamed for the crisis, were saved with public funds while smaller private firms and businesses were left without public help. Finally, it was claimed to be unfair that those within the financial sector continued to command exorbitant wages when without public support their jobs would in many cases have ceased to exist. But while these expressions of pre-theoretical intuition were commonplace, there was no corresponding movement within the philosophical community to seek to explain and make sense of, or challenge, these public claims. In this paper I will go some small way to filling this absence by exploring how far luck egalitarianism, a philosophical doctrine that aims to describe an ideal of fairness, succeeds in capturing our intuitions about the fairness of particular market-generated outcomes, those cases involving market risk.