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1 Workshop on Vulnerability Theory and the Human Condition: Celebrating a Decade of Innovation Pt. 2 1 (2018)

handle is hein.peggy/fltvthyhc0001 and id is 1 raw text is: The Matrix of Responsibility: Vulnerability, Choice and Social Justice Ronit Donyets Kedar (Paper outline for 10 Year Anniversary of Vulnerability Theory - Leeds School of Law September 20-21, 2018) The paper offers an account of the concept of responsibility. Drawing on Vulnerability Theory, it aims to ground the idea of responsibility in human vulnerability, rather than in concepts such as freedom or choice. The literature on responsibility and social justice, in line with the legal discourse on responsibility, typically analyses the issue of personal responsibility by discussing concepts such as free will, choice and control. The idea is that there is an appropriate relation between the control a person has over her situation or actions and the degree of responsibility attributable to her for them. Since, however, it is clear that not everything we do in life is a result of choice, this account of responsibility recognizes that luck should be offset: inasmuch as luck, rather than choice, is a factor in the agent's life (the family she was born into, her gender, the color of her skin), she does not have control in the appropriate sense, and, consequently, cannot be thought of as (fully) responsible for her situation. In this spirit, luck egalitarianism is a position (or a host of positions) that argues that a person should not be worse off relative to others in society with respect to advantages that are a result of brute bad luck. According to luck egalitarianism, justice demands that people's well-being should be determined only by the responsible choices they make and not by the differences in their involuntary circumstances. As G.A. Cohen puts it, the intuition here is that we should eliminate disadvantage for which the sufferer cannot be held responsible, since it does not appropriately reflect choices that he has made or is making or would make. (Cohen, 1989). Following the insights of Vulnerability Theory, the paper argues that what luck egalitarians attribute to luck is sometimes (although not always) the result of social

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