Egalitarianism, Free Will, and Ultimate Injustice

Saul Smilansky
Egalitarianism is a major contemporary position on issues of distributive justice and related public policy. Its major strand can be called luck-egalitarianism or, as I prefer to call it, choice-egalitarianism, broadly, the claim that inequality can be morally justified only when it follows from peoples choices.1 I claim that the choice-egalitarians have failed to recognize a deep sense of injustice, which I call Ultimate Injustice. This form of injustice follows from the implications of the free will problem. Part 1 of this paper explains what Ultimate Injustice is, explicates egalitarian aims and assumptions, and notes why free will can be particularly relevant for egalitarians. Part 2 briefly presents the choice-egalitarian position, in a way that emphasizes its free will-related aspects. Part 3 makes a quick survey of the free will problem and of the major alternatives on it, emphasizing the relation to distributive justice. Part 4 presents my arguments for the claim that the choice-egalitarian social order is deeply unjust in terms of Ultimate Injustice. Part 5 briefly reflects upon some theoretical and practical implications that may follow if I am right.

1. Preliminaries

What is Ultimate Injustice? Our understanding of this notion will deepen as we go on to understand the free will problem, from which it flows. But in a basic way it can be defined as follows: Ultimate Injustice is a form of injustice that follows because, in the light of the implications of the free will problem, ultimately no condition that a person is in can be justified as resulting from his or her free choice. Since we are concerned here with distributive justice, and particularly with its egalitarian interpretations, we shall think about Ultimate Injustice in the egalitarian distributive context, whereby unequal conditions among people require justification. It is difficult to capture what makes a conception egalitarian, and this can be the topic of a complex investigation in itself. For our purposes we can put things as follows: A conception of distributive justice is egalitarian if (a) it applies to the central aspects determining a persons economic condition; (b) within that sphere of application, any

inequality among persons needs to be morally justified; (c) such moral justification ought not to be based upon factors that are morally arbitrary.

Non-egalitarian positions, by contrast, will not follow such requirements: for instance, they will apply criteria of equality narrowly, in terms of equality before the law but not concerning central economic aspects; or not hold to the very thought of a normative egalitarian baseline divergence from which requires justification; or think that inequality can be easily justified (say, by pragmatic considerations). The choice-egalitarians meet criteria (a) and (b), and attempt to meet (c). Their failure in the latter task lies at the core of my argument. For the sake of this discussion we shall assume the broadly egalitarian ethical viewpoint, as above. In other words, we shall assume that the general egalitarian project of trying to formulate an egalitarian conception of distributive justice is worthwhile. One could begin with strong anti-egalitarian assumptions about justice that would preclude debate about most of the issues of the present paper, but arguing on this basic matter (e.g., against Nozick) would take us beyond the scope of present discussion. Because egalitarians work from a firm baseline of equality - divergence from which requires certain stringent forms of justification - the issue of what a non-arbitrary form of moral justification would be, and whether such justification can exist, is of central concern for them. Here the idea of free choice looms large and, as we shall see, involves egalitarianism in Ultimate Injustice.

2. How the Choice-Egalitarians Have Dealt With the Free Will Problem

Given a baseline of equality, the inequality needs to be justified (on the way the notion of the baseline operates here, see Smilansky 1996a; 1996b). Otherwise it is morally arbitrary. As G.A. Cohen writes "a large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the influence of brute luck on distribution" (1989: 931). Such justification can be found with peoples free choices: inequalities can be justified so that, for instance, those who decide to work harder can justly be compensated for their efforts and contributions. As Cohen says, "since effects of genuine choices contrast with brute luck, genuine choice excuses otherwise unacceptable

inequalities" (1989: 931). If, and only if, there are "genuine choices" then, according to Cohen, can inequalities be justified. There is a question how we are to interpret the choice-egalitarian notion of "free choices" or "genuine choices". I think that it is necessary to understand choice-egalitarianism as compatibilist (the terminology will be clarified shortly). As I have argued before (Smilansky 1997: 154-5), only this interpretation can make sense of the confident way in which Cohen talks about choice, namely, claiming that it is a matter of degree and that its existence is obvious. Moreover, the other alternative, metaphysical or libertarian free will, is highly contentious and, as many believe even incoherent (see bellow). To pin the hopes of egalitarianism on libertarian free will would be suicidal. Conceptually, then, choice-egalitarians can remain agnostic as to whether there is free will of the type that would enable the justification of inequality. If that sort of free will is absent, then inequality cannot be morally justified. Instead of calling it choice-egalitarianism we might then call it no-choice egalitarianism. That result would pose a problem insofar as this position seeks to be an alternative to, e.g., Rawls in the effort to justify unequal social practices but, again, would not be a conceptual problem for the position. In any case, if the point of the previous paragraph is accepted, any choice-egalitarian justification of inequality needs to be compatibilist. My present argument against choice-egalitarianism is that, even if that compatibilist sort of justification can be defended, this still leaves the choice-egalitarian wide open to the charge of not taking seriously what I call Ultimate Injustice.

3. The Basics of the Free Will Problem

The free will problem lies at the heart of my analysis of the difficulty with egalitarian views of justice, but this means that we shall have to go over the outline of the problem. Hence I ask the reader for his or her patience: all the free will-related work will emerge in the end as relevant for the discussion of egalitarianism and Ultimate Injustice. In compact form, the free will problem can be presented as the conjunction of two questions: a. Is there libertarian free will? (Here would be included as sub-questions the issue of determinism, the question whether libertarian free will is at all coherent, and so on.) Libertarians

of course think that that there is libertarian free will, compatibilists (typically) and hard determinists disagree. This first question is metaphysical or ontological, or perhaps logical. b. If libertarian free will does not exist, do we still have moral responsibility and the related notions (such as desert)? This is, of course, the familiar compatibility question: is moral responsibility compatible with determinism or, better, is it compatible with the absence of libertarian free will irrespective of determinism? Compatibilism and hard determinism are opponents on the compatibility question. This question, in my opinion, is mostly ethical. We shall assume here that the answer to the first question is "no", namely, that there is no libertarian free will. The reason why libertarian free will is impossible, in a nutshell, is that the conditions required by an ethically satisfying sense of libertarian free will, which would give us anything beyond sophisticated formulations of compatibilism, are self-contradictory and hence cannot be met. This is true irrespective of determinism or causality. Attributing moral worth to a person for her decision or action requires that it follow in a substantive way from what she is, morally. The decision or action cannot be produced by a random occurrence and count morally, for then she would be judged on something arbitrary, that was beyond her control. We might think that two different decisions or actions can follow from a person, but the same question then merely repeats itself, for which of them does, for instance, in the case of a decision to steal or not to steal, again cannot be random but needs to follow from what she is, morally. But what a person is, morally, cannot be under her control. We might think that such control is possible if she creates herself, but then it is the early self that creates a later self, leading to vicious infinite regress. One cannot transcend oneself in the robust, libertarian sense. Either we end up with compatibilist free will mixed with some arbitrary indeterminism, which does not give us much, or if a robust libertarianism is attempted, then it must fail. The libertarian project was a worthwhile attempt: it was supposed to allow a deep moral connection between a given act and the person, and yet not fall into being merely an unfolding of the arbitrarily given, whether determined or random. But it is not possible to find any way in which this can be done.2 Hence we need to move on to the second, Compatibility Question, which asks about the implications of the absence of libertarian free will. In other words, we need to choose among the compatibilist and hard determinist interpretations of the ensuing situation. The free will problem, then, is about control: it issues from the core normative intuition that we must take human agency, control and its absence very seriously. This I call the Core

Conception. It turns out, however, that, if we do not have libertarian free will, the pertinent forms of control are fundamentally dualistic. That is why any adequate reply to the compatibility question will be complex. On the one hand, we need to consider distinctions in local compatibilist control, if we are to respect persons. Questions about the existence of control, as well as about degrees of control, make sense and are morally and personally central. On the compatibilist level we take the person as a given, and ask about his or her control in pedestrian ways: did he willingly do X? Was he coerced? Was he under some uncontrollable psychological compulsion? Most people most of the time do have compatibilist control over their actions, even if there is no libertarian free will (if, let us say, determinism applies to all human actions). The kleptomaniac or alcoholic are not in control of their pertinent actions in the way that, respectively, the common thief or occasional mild drinker are in control, irrespective of determinism. There are complex formulations of compatibilist control in the philosophical literature, and various borderline or problematic cases, but we need not enter into such matters here. On our level of discussion, which concerns the compatibilist perspective in itself, matters are sufficiently clear. But we can ask the question about control also on the ultimate level. Given that there is no libertarian free will, then asking about ultimate control lands us with the hard determinist conclusion, where ultimately there can be no control. Any person who we could agree was free on the compatibilist level (for example, one who could reflect on her options, decide to do what she wanted, and was not coerced) would be seen in a new light: under the ultimate perspective, the sources of her character and motivation would also be queried. And if we have no libertarian free will, then in the end we are just given, with our desires and beliefs, and any change in them is down to our earlier selves, which we ultimately cannot control. We are what we are, and from the ultimate perspective, with all our compatibilist choosing and doing, we operate as we were molded. In my view, we have to take account of both valid perspectives on control, the compatibilist and the ultimate hard determinist, for each is part of the complex truth on the free will problem. Hence I propose a Fundamental Dualism encompassing both perspectives (Smilansky 2000: Ch.6; for a dualistic perspective on free will and respect for persons Smilansky 2005, and on fairness Smilansky 2008). My claim is that the debate has been plagued by a too simplistic Assumption of Monism, according to which we must be either compatibilists or hard

determinists. I argue that we need to take a dualistic approach concerning the implications of determinism: we have to be partly compatibilists and partly hard determinists, and to try to integrate their insights while avoiding their inadequacies. We need to form a Community of Responsibility based upon distinctions made in terms of local compatibilist control: this is at once both morally imperative, and deeply unfair. Philosophically, respect for persons requires both the establishment and maintenance of a basically-compatibilist moral order, and the acknowledgement that this order is morally problematic, so that attempts must be made to mitigate its harshness. To be blind to any one of these two perspectives is to fail to understand the case on free will. For instance, a decision not to go to college because one does not like studying would at once be seen as free on the compatibilist level (one does what one wants), and as ultimately beyond ones control (for in a deterministic world the sources of ones motivation, which lie behind ones compatibilistically-free decision, are not ultimately within ones control). One must be allowed to live with the consequences of ones decisions, when those decisions are free on the compatibilist level (i.e. when ones decision is not coerced or grossly misinformed). But if those consequences are particularly grim, such as if they lead to poverty, the importance of ultimate hard determinist injustice would gain in importance. We need to try and limit injustice, but a great deal of Ultimate Injustice will follow from justified (compatibilist) social practice.

4. The Choice-Egalitarians and Ultimate Injustice

The choice-egalitarians justify inequality, so that under their view a significant measure of inequality is not unjust. It is the very existence of free choice that (and only that) makes the inequality not unjust. However, they fail to recognize Ultimate Injustice. Ultimate Injustice is the sort of injustice that, I claim, may follow when we do not take account of the absence of ultimate control. Given the egalitarian premise of the discussion, namely the assumption of an egalitarian baseline divergence from which requires justification, then such injustice occurs whenever there is substantive inequality, for ultimately such inequality lacks control-based justification. Inequality can be non-substantive: Alma chooses to work 8 hours a day and get full pay, Alex decides to work half-time for half pay, and both are equally well-off. In other words, substantively there is no inequality here. Substantive inequality exists whenever people are unequally well-off, some being less well-off than others (what it means to be well-off, and to be

equally well-off, and how we determine how well-off people are, are of course difficult questions, but they are not our questions here). The choice-egalitarians permit substantive inequality: the justification is, obviously, choice-based. It might seem as though there could not be substantive inequality for the latter, since why would anyone choose to be worse off? This, however, is a misunderstanding. Alma and Alex, we may assume, can choose at any time to be in each others situation: were Alma suddenly to prefer greater leisure, she could move to work 4 hours at half pay, and, similarly, if only Alex wanted he could double his working hours (and reduce his leisure) for Almas paybundle. Each simply gets the pay-plus-leisure mixture that he or she prefers. However, most choices permitted by the choice-egalitarians will not be similarly harmless. Choice-egalitarians permit one to decide not to acquire a profession, to invest ones money in the stock market, and, indeed, to risk it in gambling. Such practices inevitably generate substantive inequalities. The person who invested wisely will have more money than the person who invested foolishly, while the person who simply kept his money not invested will lie between those two. So, such egalitarian positions permit substantive inequalities. Why is this problematic? In the deal moral order according to choice-egalitarianism every substantively unequal situation among people follows from free choice, and, on the compatibilist level, free choice defeats moral arbitrariness. However, even choice-egalitarians are defeated by Ultimate Injustice: in their (compatibilistically-adequate) ideal social order a large measure of ultimate arbitrariness will prevail. Peoples lives will follow in large measure from their compatibilistically free choices, but the content of these choices are not ultimately up to them. It might seem as though this ultimate sense is irrelevant: not only is it dubious (because after all we cannot have the libertarian-requiring sort of ultimate control), but why do we need it in the first place?3 In order to see the significance of Ultimate Injustice we need only turn to an example from criminal injustice. The choice-egalitarian who would deny the importance of Ultimate Injustice within distributive justice is like her parallel in criminal justice. True, it matters, and matters deeply, that the people in prison be there as a result of their free choices (i.e. justly on the compatibilist level), and not because they are, say, framed by the police for racist reasons. The latter case is (compatibilistically) unjust in a way in which the former is not. Nevertheless, this is not all we should want to say about criminal justice, once we become aware of the full import of the free will problem. The compatibilistically-guilty are in a deep sense also

victims, whose punishment even if it ought to occur is deeply unjust. For, they choose as they are, and what they are is ultimately beyond their control. Hence if they chose a life of crime, then compatibilistically they ought to be punished, but this does not mean that all is well. They have not ultimately chosen to be such people who would (compatibilistically-freely) choose a life of crime. They are, in an important sense, victims of the constitutive forces that have made them what they are. While people in general ought to be treated according to the way they behave, the sources of their motivation to behave as they behave are ultimately beyond their control. Similarly for distributive justice: in the choice-egalitarians just social order there will be large substantive inequalities that follow from peoples choices. We need to establish such a choice-tracking moral order. However, although those choices are morally significant on the compatibilist level this does not sum up all that is to be said on such cases. For, again, people choose as they are, and what they are is ultimately beyond their control. (For a free will-based comparison of distributive and retributive justice, see Smilansky 2006.) Put differently, my claim is that the choice-egalitarians are morally shallow: if interpreted positively, namely as saying that inequality can indeed be justified (due to the existence of compatibilist freedom), they fail to take account of the hard determinist implications of the absence of libertarian free will. Since they explicitly see their view of distributive justice as based on free choice, rather than bypassing it, their limitation is all the more striking. Given that they recognize that control is crucial for justice, one might expect greater concern with the ultimate absence of control. In any case, they do not adequately recognize the ultimate arbitrariness and its import for the issue of justice. (For an elaboration of the charge of shallowness towards compatibilism, see Smilansky 2003.)

5. Some Theoretical and Practical Implications

We have concluded that the dominant strand of contemporary egalitarianism, the choiceegalitarian, is gravely deficient in not recognizing Ultimate Injustice. What is the significance of this? First, we need to realize that even under ideal conditions, injustice is unavoidable. In the light of the prevalence of Ultimate Injustice, which follows from our best practices and with which we must live, I claim that we cannot deny that life is full of Unavoidable Injustice,

which is just one of the ways in which the free will problem implies that life is grossly unjust and inherently tragic. Quite simply, since we need to follow a large measure of Compatibilist Justice in social life, Ultimate Injustice will be unavoidable. This creates Unavoidable Injustice. It is not as though we can get out of this by opting for the ultimate side, abandoning any inequalities based upon compatibilistically-free choice, for then we shall fall into greater Compatibilist Injustice. As the choice-egalitarians have repeatedly argued, having other people pay for the costs of ones free actions, in taking risks or acquiring expensive tastes, is also unfair, and avoiding to take seriously (compatibilist) choice will not lead to justice. As Will Kymlicka put it: "It is unjust if people are disadvantaged by inequalities in their circumstances, but it is equally unjust for me to demand that someone else pay for the costs of my choices" (1990: 75). Both the compatibilist and the ultimate hard determinist insights are crucial. Hence injustice is structural (see Smilansky 2000: sec. 11.1), part of the way things simply are. The choice-egalitarians are shown to be optimistic and indeed complacent, thinking that if only we follow their guidelines, we shall have distributive justice. This is not so: we shall have Ultimate Injustice, leading to structural Unavoidable Injustice. This of course does not mean that anything goes, that we should not try to do the best we can. Certainly matters can be better or worse even in terms of free will-related justice: suffice to think of the many societies where there is great inequality and distributive arrangements are based on corrupt political rule which has nothing to do with choice, effort or contribution. Compatibilist Justice matters greatly although we cannot avoid Ultimate Injustice, and so does the effort to mitigate the effects of Ultimate Injustice. Nevertheless it is important not to fall into the false optimism that the choice-egalitarians seem to posses, whereby if only their egalitarian plans are pursued, distributive justice will prevail. Secondly, in a more constructive spirit, our conclusions imply that Ultimate Injustice needs to be recognized in our practical deliberations. Free will-related distributive justice is a balance between (compatibilist) choice-based just arrangements, namely a social order providing Compatibilist Justice, and the need to mitigate the results that will occur in terms of Ultimate Injustice. We need to establish and maintain a Community of Responsibility that follows compatibilist distinctions, but acknowledge that because of the ultimate perspective much injustice will result, and would need to be mitigated and compensated for. A corresponding distributive order could operate within a market economy, but with particular sorts of emphasis

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within it and with correcting mechanisms added. A distributive order trying to accommodate the dualistic implications of the free will problem would hence allow a large measure of opportunity for people to become deserving according to their actions, permit them to benefit unequally as a result of their exercise of free choice, but also be sympathetic and provide a safety net if they failed. It would be broadly egalitarian in various ways: in emphasizing factors that are within peoples (compatibilist) control as the basis for justified inequality, in seeking to broaden access to opportunities for active agency and desert, and in the sense that however justified are the resulting free choice-based inequalities, they are also on one level unjust, so that people might merit compensation, because of the partial validity of the ultimate hard determinist perspective. Thirdly, our conclusions cast serious doubts about the possibility for the widespread acceptance of these positions. Choice-egalitarianism is not on the brink of taking over the minds and practices of Western democracies, but we can see how such a position can grow in attractiveness and come to be more influential.4 However, once it is recognized that it doesnt quite deliver on the promise of justice, and that indeed it is blind to Ultimate Injustice, such potential attractiveness may well decrease.5

6. Conclusion

Justice theory, and in particular egalitarian justice theory, cannot be done without confronting the dreaded free will problem. The dominant contemporary moderate-egalitarian position, the choiceegalitarian, is willy-nilly involved up to its neck in this issue. The choice-egalitarians, if they are understood as saying that inequality can sometimes be justified, posit a free will-based view, and can be best understood as compatibilists. But they fail to note Ultimate Injustice, the injustice that follows from the best egalitarian practices because of the partial validity of the ultimate hard determinist interpretation. In one sense the choice-egalitarians do capture some of egalitarian justice, for if every inequality needs to be justified by free choice, then already much of the moral arbitrariness involved in peoples unequal states is prevented. Nevertheless, the sense of free choice the choice-egalitarians use (when seeking to justify inequality) is shallow. This shallow level is significant, it is part of the truth on free will, but it hardly sums up what egalitarians should want

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to say. Every free choice on the local compatibilist level that generates substantive inequality is also deeply unjust on the ultimate hard determinist level. The dominant version of moderate egalitarianism, then, in practice permits a large measure of personal freedom and social inequality and seems to be able to live with a market economy, while capturing significant senses of egalitarian justice. However, it does not live up to the promise of delivering justice. It does not take proper account of the free will problem and of its implications; it does not recognize Ultimate Injustice. There is no libertarian free will, either because the world is deterministic, or because even indeterminism cannot help us, the very idea of a worthwhile notion of libertarian free will being incoherent. What does this mean for justice? The implications are importantly dualistic; hence I have called it Fundamental Dualism. The Fundamental Dualism means that we must take account of both compatibilist and of ultimate hard determinist perspectives. On the one hand, we need to create a Community of Responsibility that tracks compatibilist distinctions in terms of control and its absence: for instance, we can make sense of the distinction between the lazy and the hard working, and need to follow this distinction. We also need to care about the further distinction between what is up to people in some sense (e.g. making an effort) and what is in any case beyond their control (e.g. their race). We need to emphasize, for instance, the difference between getting less pay because one chooses to work fewer hours as compared to getting less pay because of factors beyond ones control. The former may be acceptable, for working fewer hours is up to one in various significant ways. If, by contrast, the factor causing the inequality is not within ones control, this is pro tanto problematic. Hence even in compatibilist terms the latter sort of inequality is not fair, in the way that getting less pay if one decides to work less may be. Not to work with these distinctions would be not to respect persons. Here the (compatibilistically-interpreted) choice-egalitarians have it right. On the other hand, given that the sort of transcendence that libertarian free will is supposed to give us cannot exist, everything that people do, including their compatibilisticallyfree actions, is ultimately an unfolding of the given. Hence, for all the moral importance of following Compatibilist Justice, we cannot avoid the ultimate perspective that means that doing so is, in a crucial sense, unjust. This is Ultimate Injustice. Choice-based Compatibilist Justice seem to capture all of justice, in the free will context, only when we remain on a shallow level, and do not pursue the concern for control up to the ultimate level, where we end up with

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constitutive arbitrariness. And arbitrariness, we recall, is just what the choice-egalitarians are out to eradicate. Hence my criticism that, by not acknowledging Ultimate Injustice, they do not meet their own criteria of adequacy for conceptions of justice. People who are poorer than others justly, according to choice-egalitarian compatibilist lights, are nevertheless in an important moral sense victims of arbitrary forces beyond their control, and their fate is in one deep sense an injustice. It seems to me that by and large we need to follow Compatibilist Justice, and mitigate it when we can. But in a world such as ours, i.e. one without libertarian free will, even the best social orders will be deeply and inevitably unjust. This has various complex implications, which we have briefly noted but that need to be further discussed. In any case, if we are to do justice to an egalitarian conception of distributive justice, we need to go beyond the choice-egalitarians.

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Notes
1. I prefer the label "choice-egalitarian", since it emphasizes the role of choice in the egalitarian theory. Many broadly choice-egalitarian positions have been proposed. I will focus upon G.A. Cohens formulation (Cohen 1989). Other treatments that would seem to be similar for our purposes would be, e.g, Arneson (1989); Rakowski (1991); Roemer (1993); Temkin (2003). Yet other discussions (e.g. Dworkin, Sen) are more distant, and yet are likely to be affected by our claims. It is possible to doubt that the choice-egalitarians are indeed egalitarians, but I will not enter into the debate on this point.

2. For a more detailed presentation of this argument, see Strawson (2002); and, in a moralized version of Strawson's argument, Smilansky 2000: ch.4.

3. If, as I claim, libertarian free will is incoherent, how then can the absence of ultimate control be important? This argument has recently been made against my position concerning Ultimate Injustice by James Lenman (2002). It is a version of the familiar How can the incoherent be worth wanting? move, and attempts to rule out any ultimate worries because of the very incoherence of libertarian free will, an incoherence that is transferred to those ultimate-level concerns (Lenman 2002: 68ff). I cannot take up here this issue in detail (see Smilansky 2000: 4850), but do not think that it is disturbing. If libertarian free will is incoherent, then indeed in one sense we do not have a positive model of what libertarian-based justice would look like. But since my worry is negative, i.e., it is concerned with injustice, all I need is to point out the limitations of the compatibilist view about free will-related justice. For instance, given that we shall continue to put people in prisons, the absence of libertarian free will means that this practice will have much shallower grounding, hence be much more unjust, than it would have been if justification based on the ultimately guilty self were possible. The same is true for the distributive injustice that follows from inequality, given strong egalitarian assumptions. The severe shallowness of desert and value, and the grave injustice, that exist in a world without libertarian free will, are ethically and existentially momentous. Lenman also argues more directly against the idea of Ultimate Injustice (that is used in the present paper in the context of distributive justice). But as I show (Smilansky 2003), his argument is dependent on only one,

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broadly contractual, sense of justice, and this sense is not the one that we care about when we care (as we should) about the free will problem.

4. Choice-egalitarianism seems to be a strong improvement over Rawls (1972) insofar as it avoids the liberal-egalitarian neglect of responsibility, which, as Samuel Scheffler has argued, has been socially and politically harmful for liberal-egalitarianism (Scheffler 1992). My argument in this paper for the need to recognize Ultimate Injustice has been philosophical, and I have not inquired after the practical effects of the recognition of this view. I have general worries about the possible effect of a thorough public awareness of the truth on the free will problem (see Smilansky 2000: Part II).

5. This in turn leads to serious doubts about the idea of increasing knowledge about the free will problem. Choice-egalitarians, when they think that inequality can be justified in a fully satisfactory way, are free will optimists. However, once we see that this optimism is implausible, and that the picture is more complex and much darker, this casts a shadow on the advisability of public awareness of the implications of the free will problem. I have developed this line of argument in detail elsewhere (Smilansky 2000: Part II), and will not elaborate.

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