Lotteries, Justice and Probability

Peter Stone
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Peter Stone: Political Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044, USA, peter.stone@stanford.edu

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2009, vol. 21, issue 3, 395-409

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: efficiency; fairness; justice; lotteries; probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:21:y:2009:i:3:p:395-409

DOI: 10.1177/0951629809103971

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