Is"Luck"a Personal Desert?

The "theory of luck" mainly comes from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and its proposition is closely connect with the conversion of the theme of political philosophy. Since the enlightenment, the most important three values are presented by the French Revolution in the western society, which are "liberty, equality and universal love""Universal love" is a kind of individual value, so there are two main basic political value "liberty and equality" pursued by the western political thinkers. That is to say, the aim of all theories and social changes in western society is to realize the two values for hundred of years. However, when we recall the history of political philosophy, we can find that the most important thing of the western thinkers before Rawls is freedom. From Locke to Mill, although there are many great achievements in liberalism, they just solve the problem of freedom actually. It does not mean that liberalism only focuses on freedom without the concern for equality, and it is not to say there are political thinkers who only pay attention to equality. It is well known that Rousseau and Tocqueville are the representatives who care about equality in the age of Enlightenment, and although they are not the mainstream and they have no constructive theory about equality. The main reason why the thinkers in Enlightenment have not solved the quality problem is the limitation of the age. On the one hand, freedom is a more urgent problem, so it has the priority of the specific time. On the other hand, the development degree of the social civilization is allowed to solver the freedom problem.Rawls takes justice as the theme of the political philosophy, and believes that justice means equality. Since then, the theme of political philosophy turns freedom to equality. Rawls does not deny the priority value of freedom, and freedom and equality both are the most important political values. The problem of freedom is just easier to be solved, and the modern western developed countries have solved the freedom basically, so equality needs to be taken seriously now. In Rawls’s opinion, free and equal can not be separated completely, it is only a free of form without equality. The reason why they did not solve the problem of quality is that they did not find out the original cause of the inequality, which is social system in Rawls’s view. Under the effects of the social system, the standard of personal desert makes the differences among people become the luck, and people will have various lives by holding the different luck, resulting great inequality between people. But people can not choose luck freely, and luck is not deserved by everyone, so we need correct for these accidental factors which lead to inequality. It is the so-called "luck theory", which is a series of attitude, method and strategies that Rawls treat the accidental factors such as luck. The main content of this paper is to explore the rationality and limitations of "luck theory".The paper is divided into three parts. The first part is to make a thoroughly inquiry to the connotation and theoretical original of Rawls’s "luck theory", the reason why Rawls put forward "luck theory" is mainly to solve the social problems in American reality. The main source of its theory is Aristotle’s moral theories and other theories since Enlightenment, including Social Contract Theory, Hume’s Justice View and Kant’s Ethnics. The second part is to discuss the rationality of Rawls’s "luck theory". The argument focuses on three perspectives, which are the truth of social cognition, the rationality of moral appeals and the legitimacy of political appeals. The third part is to state the limitations of Rawls’s "luck theory", including the abstraction of theoretical basis, the one-sidedness of theoretical argument and the Utopian of theory pursuing.