Further Reading: Chapter 39

Foundational Philosophy

Nagel, Thomas. "Moral Luck." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 50 (1976): 137–151. The foundational text. Dense but accessible for a philosophical paper. Read it alongside Williams's companion essay — the two were published together and respond to each other. Nagel's typology (resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, causal) has defined the subsequent debate.

Williams, Bernard. "Moral Luck." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 50 (1976): 115–135. Williams's complementary piece, focused on integrity and the Gauguin example. Better written than most philosophy and more personally engaged. Williams was one of the finest prose stylists in twentieth-century philosophy, and it shows.

Nagel, Thomas, and Bernard Williams. Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1976. The book version, collecting both essays with additional material. If you can find it, read the original papers together rather than separately — the dialogue between them is what makes them most instructive.

Statman, Daniel, ed. Moral Luck. SUNY Press, 1993. A useful anthology collecting the most important essays in the subsequent debate, including responses from Judith Andre, Michael Moore, and others. Good for seeing how the field developed.

Luck Egalitarianism

Dworkin, Ronald. "What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources." Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (1981): 283–345. Long and dense, but essential for understanding the brute luck/option luck distinction in its full philosophical context. Dworkin is precise and clear. The key section for this chapter is his discussion of what it means to hold people responsible for their choices while compensating for their unchosen circumstances.

Cohen, G.A. "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice." Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 906–944. Cohen's critique of Dworkin and his argument for welfare/advantage as the currency of justice. Substantial philosophical difficulty but repays careful reading. Cohen is sharper on the political implications of luck egalitarianism than Dworkin.

Anderson, Elizabeth S. "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–337. Perhaps the best single essay in the entire luck egalitarianism debate. Anderson's democratic egalitarianism critique — that the point of equality is to create social relationships of non-domination, not to eliminate the influence of luck per se — is more practically actionable and more philosophically elegant than any of the positions it critiques. Highly recommended.

Meritocracy: History, Defense, and Critique

Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy. Thames and Hudson, 1958. The original satirical novel that coined the word. Short, readable, and disturbingly prophetic. Young lived to see his warning misread as an endorsement, and wrote a 2001 Guardian piece expressing his horror at how "meritocracy" had become an ideal. Read it as the dark comedy it was intended to be.

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. The most accessible and important recent treatment of meritocracy's costs. Sandel traces how meritocracy produces not just inequality but a particular kind of contempt — both of the successful toward those who struggle, and of the struggling toward themselves. Engagingly written; appropriate for all levels.

Markovits, Daniel. The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. Penguin Press, 2019. A somewhat counterintuitive argument: the meritocratic elite is also trapped, locked into brutal competition and anxious productivity that makes their lives genuinely worse even as they win. Useful for complicating the simple critique.

McNamee, Stephen J., and Robert K. Miller Jr. The Meritocracy Myth, 4th ed. Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. Accessible and comprehensive survey of the social science on merit and outcomes. The best single volume for readers who want the empirical case against pure meritocracy without heavy philosophical machinery.

Chetty, Raj, et al. "Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility." NBER Working Paper 23618, 2017. The landmark study of elite university attendance, family income, and intergenerational mobility. Free to access via Opportunity Insights (opportunityinsights.org). The data visualizations are particularly illuminating.

Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013. The foundational resume-audit study. Carefully controlled and clearly written. This is what a well-designed field experiment looks like.

Quillian, Lincoln, et al. "Meta-analysis of Field Experiments Shows No Change in Racial Discrimination in Hiring over Time." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 41 (2017): 10870–10875. The meta-analysis of 24 hiring audit studies from 1989 to 2015. Sobering. Open access.

Castilla, Emilio J., and Stephen Benard. "The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations." Administrative Science Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2010): 543–576. The study showing that meritocracy labeling increases rather than decreases gender bias in bonus allocation. Essential for anyone designing organizational DEI or performance evaluation systems.

Corak, Miles. "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility." Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2013): 79–102. The paper that describes the "Great Gatsby Curve" — the relationship between inequality and mobility across countries. Clearly written for a general academic audience. Free access via Miles Corak's website.

Oreopoulos, Philip, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz. "The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4, no. 1 (2012): 1–29. The graduation timing study — entering the market during a recession has persistent negative earnings effects for nearly a decade. Demonstrates the magnitude of macroeconomic timing luck.

Philanthropic Ethics and Luck-Based Giving

Scott, MacKenzie. Various public essays and letters, 2020–present. Collected at mackenzie-scott.medium.com and through the Yield Giving organization. Read in sequence, they constitute a sustained public philosophical argument about luck, wealth, and obligation. Unusual for combining genuine philosophical engagement with concrete action at scale.

Reich, Rob. Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. Princeton University Press, 2018. The most rigorous academic treatment of the structural critique of philanthropy. Reich argues that large-scale philanthropy lacks democratic accountability and may actively distort public priorities. Essential for understanding the "structural vs. individual" critique of Scott's approach.

Giridharadas, Anand. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Knopf, 2018. A sharp, journalistic critique of elite philanthropy as a substitute for structural change — and as a means by which the wealthy maintain their position while appearing to address the problems their position creates. Provocative and important, though critics argue it paints with too broad a brush.

Payton, Robert L., and Michael P. Moody. Understanding Philanthropy: Its Meaning and Mission. Indiana University Press, 2008. A more sympathetic academic account of philanthropy as a moral tradition. Provides balance against the structural critique.

Individual and Structural Responses to Luck Inequality

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawls's "veil of ignorance" thought experiment — designing a fair society without knowing your own place in it — is the foundational philosophical argument for institutional response to structural luck. Demanding but repays careful reading. The relevant section is Part I, particularly the "difference principle."

Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Harvard University Press, 2009. A more flexible and practical alternative to Rawls's framework, focused on capabilities — what people are actually able to do and be — rather than on formal equality. More attentive to the diversity of human needs and the complexity of real-world justice problems.

Putnam, Robert. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Simon and Schuster, 2015. A vivid, empirically grounded account of growing opportunity inequality in the United States, structured through comparative life stories of people who grew up in the same towns as Putnam but decades apart. Excellent for making the structural luck argument concrete and human.

Accessible Starting Points

For readers new to the ethics of luck, start here:

Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit — most accessible; directly relevant to the chapter's themes
Anderson's "What Is the Point of Equality?" — available free online; the best single essay for understanding the luck egalitarianism debate at its most practical
Scott's public essays — short, directly relevant, philosophically serious
McNamee and Miller, The Meritocracy Myth — best comprehensive empirical survey

Then read: 5. Nagel and Williams (the original essays) — the foundational philosophical texts 6. Chetty et al. on college mobility — the essential data