On the face of it, the idea of luck egalitarianism is very appealing. For people who have lived lives disastrously affected by misfortune, it is immensely appealing to desire a world where our freedoms and our chances were not harmed by anything that we did not have any control over. We may bristle against the damages and losses we suffer for being born in bad families or because we have endured difficult circumstances like abuse and prejudice. Additionally, it may be tempting to desire a society that repaid people for the wrongs that they had suffered through no fault of their own. For those who value personal freedom, the idea of strict egalitarianism, however, with its state coercion to try to remove the results of unequal choices (with differing moral outcomes), is rather abhorrent. We are continually forced to deal with tradeoffs between our desire for government or authority of some kind (whether civil or religious, human or divine) to step in and make life fair for us, while also leaving us free to develop and pursue our own gifts and abilities. Indeed, there is a further tension that a state that is powerful enough to enforce a certain level of equality that we might appreciate for our own purposes would itself be a sufficient lure for corruption to make it worthwhile for people to expend large amounts of treasure in search of that power for themselves and their corrupt allies. This is the sort of problem we face in our societal and institutional politics, in that our search for a powerful enough government to protect our interests makes such institutions powerful enough to corrupt.

In order to determine the proper relationship between luck, equality, and freedom, we have to ask ourselves what is the just place of each in a proper world [1]. If we do not conceive of this world as all there is, we are more willing to accept temporary inequality due to misfortune in the expectation of some sort of justice that would repay several times over for that misfortune. Likewise, a belief in the equality of all human beings (rich and poor, male and female, old and young) before God also constrains us in certain ways to act with respect towards others, protecting their dignity so that we do not dishonor the God who made us in His image. Our desire for luck equality is dealt with by the provision of a divine system of justice that rewards people based on circumstance, so that there is an equal reward for equally good choices but unequal rewards based on unequal achievements [2]. Seeing, therefore, that whether our fortune is good or bad that we will be judged for our choices, but judged with mercy and not with harshness, we can better rely on justice in a world to come than in such a world as we now inhabit. To expect human beings to be perfectly just, in light of our interests, our blindness of how our behavior falls short of our ideals (even in those occasions where our ideals are noble), and in light of our frailty and weakness seems to be overly optimistic in the face of the tragic and melancholy course of human history, or even of our own lives. If there is to be justice, we must seek it in another world.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/argumentative-reflection-justice/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/argumentative-reflection-do-we-need-a-state/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/a-comparative-analysis-of-the-parable-of-the-talents-and-the-parable-of-the-minas/