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My Personality, Whose Responsibility? Equal opportunity for integrity : what the metaphysics of the person can teach luck-egalitarians about responsibility 10.17863/CAM.15917 Gill, Rupert Contemporary egalitarianism has been defined by its attempt to render the distribution of resources 'responsibility-sensitive'. The core intuition is that if someone is responsible for the fact that he is worse off than others then the inequality ought not to raise the concerns of justice. Perhaps the central challenge facing this approach is to establish the 'cut' between what people can rightly be held responsible for, and what not. The basic principle adopted has been that ascriptions of responsibility ought to track the distinction between chance and choice. People ought not to be held responsible if they are worse off than others on account of bad luck, but should bear responsibility for their situation if it results from their choices. What is surprising, though, is how little work has been done to establish where luck ends, and responsibility begins - whether the preferences that someone has instilled in him through upbringing, for example, are his responsibility, or simply a matter of luck. Philosophers have posited that the cut should be based on metaphysics - on whether a preference has been 'genuinely', freely, chosen; or that because as a matter of course in our everyday ethical lives we hold people responsible for their personality as a whole, we should do so at the level of distributional justice, too. But they have not examined in any depth whether these controversial bases are coherent or fully justify the distribution sought. This thesis remedies that shortfall. It examines in detail the distinction between responsibility and luck, and the reason it might be desirable as the basis for the distribution of resources. My conclusion is that whilst responsibility for the costs of one's life requires a more stable basis than is offered by everyday ethical practice, it cannot plausibly be provided by 'genuine', free, choice. Instead, ascriptions of responsibility ought to be guided by an agent's identification with a preference, understood in terms of the broadly metaphysical matter of the role and place of the preference in the structure of the person. Where an agent identifies with a preference, I argue, there ought to be a presumption that he is not responsible for its cost. This presumption is justified by two key claims: people standardly do not choose the preferences with which they identify, rendering it a matter of luck whether the preferences they identify with happen to be expensive or cheap; and identification with a preference gives that preference a significance to its bearer that makes it appealing to provide him with an equal opportunity to fulfil it. To protect people from having to unduly subsidise the life plans of others, though, the cost of those preferences that are not identified with ought, standardly, to be the responsibility of their bearer. I call this novel position, which arms people with an equal opportunity to fulfil the preferences that are most integral to their person, equal opportunity for integrity. University of Cambridge 2012-10-09 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/246768 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/250a10aa-b5d8-495b-baa2-ab4eca1c3351/download 835269bda140c10400fe0606a14c3d21 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5c569d63-3ac3-4390-8dfc-3553dc8a1e0a/download 381323572e1a298eaa21066a74a34f5d https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b0ea858e-4f70-4f18-88b2-9e41e66064d6/download 8203662f36d5fa3953ebd3bef49309a3 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8887dbe0-eb30-4ee9-8cda-0dd639a6d5c9/download 8a75e4f2d25675174f3e73b7fdbef606 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/648ccc73-7cdb-49d4-b914-c3242c5f0984/download 03ed961b5b3f88ca5017a463b9d8c64e https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/86050319-1ebc-42e2-bd2b-ec95345be1fd/download e576c762c3dbcf14a73a71bf0c58ec63 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5f6036ff-af78-4a34-8e88-e3a716beec3e/download a2b66bc9d90a319d1c50767d3cbd509f https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2491deda-048d-4018-ba7f-f2b92f4ba42c/download 01292296be345e0a07c38df6399ab853 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/098023de-ca27-48b2-8bbb-e44bf2e707b0/download b9ada61cd159805aaf0b20bcc9ad4d11 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/632bd315-3e68-4f9c-bbcf-a7c1ac26d877/download 6f717b641a98fa5bde66cd1e2e2930cc https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/1c6adbed-f9ee-4851-84d1-e1f7a76e0347/download 94ba75e677890b10901be1c6d98036f4 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/97ad159d-b0a5-4134-bb01-55ce44c6d518/download 5b033b85223e6e2f52319a27e2bf9546 https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/