Lotteries, Justice and Probability

Bibliographic Data

ID6299690
AuthorsPeter Stone (0000-0003-1546-752X, Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume21
Issue3
Pages395-409
Publication date2009-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Theoretical Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0951-6298 • E-ISSN: 1460-3667
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0951629809103971
OpenAlexW2140788317
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited12

Intuition suggests that a fair lottery is the appropriate way to allocate a scarce good when two or more people have equally strong claims to it. This article lays out three conditions that any conception of justice compatible with this intuition must satisfy — efficiency of outcomes, fairness of outcomes, and fairness of treatment. The third, unlike the first two, manifests itself only in the intentions of the allocative agent, not in the final allocation itself. For this reason, while justice generally requires publicity — requires, that is, that the justice of public practices be as visible as possible — for fairness of treatment publicity is indispensable. This fact has implications for defining a fair lottery. On most accounts, fair lotteries must be equiprobable. But while some theories of probability facilitate the connection between the equiprobability of fair lotteries and the contribution they can make to justice, others do not

Allocative efficiency · Distributive justice · Economic Justice · Economics · Intuition · Law and economics · Lottery · Microeconomics · Political science · Public economics · Publicity · Free Will and Agency · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology

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