Dado el revuelo que ha causado mi última entrada, vamos allá con una cita del filósofo Ronald Dworkin (fragmentos extraído de Sovereign Virtue capitulo 9)

People’s fates are determined by their choices and their circumstances. Their choices reflect their personality which is itself a matter of two main ingredients: ambition and character. (…)circumstances consist of his personal and his impersonal resources. His personal resources are his physical and mental health and ability-his general fitness and capacities, including his wealth-talent, that is, his innate capacity to produce goods or services that others will pay to have. His impersonal resources are those resources that can be reassigned from one person to another-his wealth and the other property he commands and the opportunities provided him, under the reigning legal system to use that property.

The hypothetical insurance approach attempts to bracket the range of welfare programs that a reasonable persona might think required by the twin principles that peoples lives are of equal importance and that each person has a responsability to take control of his own life. (…)The effect of the hypothetical insurance is not to eliminate the consequences of brute bad luck but only to mitigate to the degree and in the way that prudent insurance normally does. The strategy aims at putting people in equal position towards risk rather than to negate risk altogether.

(…) The community treats people with equal concern when it allows them all to insure on the same terms and at the level of coverage each chosse even when the bad luck against which they insure has already secretly struck

People may be taxed on what they give or leave to other because this one form of expenditure, unlike all others, produces injustice in the next generation. But we must take care to specificy waht that injustice is why an inheritance or other form of capital transfer tax is the right remedy for it. (…) It is bad luck to be born into a realitvely poor family or a family that is selfish or pendthrift. (…) For we have been treating genetic structure as a matter of luck-the luck good of bad, that people bring into the world with them- as we must if we accept the commonsense view that handicaps of various kinds are a misfortune. Luck, for pursposes of our analysis includes what might be thought to be matters of identity as well as accidents that happen once identity is fixed and the properties and situation of one’s parents or relatives are as much a matter of luck, in that sense, as one’s own physical powers.