J Value Inquiry (2010) 44:553–556

DOI 10.1007/s10790-010-9231-3

BOOK REVIEW

Barbara Goodwin, Justice by Lottery

Exeter, England: Imprint Academic, 2005, 269 pp. (indexed),
ISBN 978-1845400255, $34.90 (Pb)

Ben Saunders

Published online: 19 May 2010

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

The use of lotteries goes back at least to the ancient Greeks and Biblical times,
although their justification is uncertain. Nowadays the idea that drawing lots could
be a way of divining God’s will, if that is what the ancients thought, is likely to meet
with skepticism – indeed, Goodwin shows that this practice was already
controversial as early as Thomas Gataker’s 1619 treatise Of the Nature and Use
of Lots (pp. 167–168). Nonetheless, random procedures have been used to allocate
everything from life-saving medical treatment and military service to Green Cards
and tickets for the Oscars. Sometimes the use of lotteries has been widely accepted
as an appropriate way of making difficult decisions, while in other instances – as in
the 2008 case of allocating school places in Brighton & Hove, England – it has
resulted in public outcry.
Surprisingly, despite their widespread use and popular currency, there has been
little sustained attention devoted to lotteries by philosophers and political theorists,
with Barbara Goodwin’s book, first published in 1992, and Jon Elster’s Solomonic
Judgements (Cambridge University Press, 1989) still the leading contributions in the
field, although supplemented more recently by Neil Duxbury’s Random Justice
(Oxford University Press, 1999). Whereas Elster and Duxbury focus in particular on
the limits of reason and the rationality of using lotteries in decision-making,
Goodwin – as her title suggests – is primarily concerned with lotteries as an
instrument of justice, although she also briefly considers their potential for
democracy (pp. 181–192).
The book begins with a fragment of fictional history, inspired by Borges’ ‘The
Lottery in Babylon.’ Goodwin describes a society called Aleatoria, in which almost
everything is governed by a Total Social Lottery. While this includes jobs, income
and housing, it is perhaps significant that sexual partners are not allocated randomly
(pp. 21–22). In any case, the following chapters go on to explore the justice of such

B. Saunders (&)
Department of Philosophy, Corpus Christi College, Merton Street, Oxford OX1 4JF, UK
e-mail: ben.saunders@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

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radical proposals, arguing that random distributions enjoy the same primitive status
as equality. While many would, of course, challenge any presumption of equality, it
has been argued by Amartya Sen that all substantive theories of justice rest upon
some fundamental formal equality, whether it be equal concern and respect, equal
basic rights, equal consideration of equal utilities, or whatever. Goodwin harnesses
this insight in favor of the lottery; pointing out that any objection to equality must
rest on some controversial theory of justice and is bound to appear arbitrary to those
who reject the criterion in question (p. 58).
It is far from obvious that a presumption of equality is any less controversial than
one of inequality, but one merit of Goodwin’s book is her recognition that, even if
citizens are in some fundamental sense equals, they may not want – or be able – to
enforce strict equality of outcomes (e.g. pp. 19, 47, 109). Firstly, where goods are
naturally scarce, we may not have enough for everyone, in which case we face a
choice between leveling down or distribution by lottery. Secondly, even if the
normal case is that we can produce more goods as needed, it does not follow that we
would choose absolute equality since variety, as they say, is the spice of life.
Goodwin’s solution is the Total Social Lottery, which allocates jobs and incomes
randomly, ensuring that everyone gets the chance to enjoy high income but also that
everyone faces the risk of ending up badly off.
Since everyone runs the risk of being in the worst off position, this encourages all
to ensure that even the worst possible outcome is minimally satisfactory, thereby
fulfilling a similar role to Rawls’ famous original position (pp. 124–136), yet
without giving absolute priority to the worst off. The justification of the lottery need
not, therefore, rest on an absolute separation of production and distribution or
unavoidable scarcity. Rather, knowledge that limited resources are to be allocated
randomly gives all an incentive to increase production in order to ensure that there
are sufficient resources for all (pp. 108, 122, 128–129, 211) – although Goodwin
suggests that appeal to such incentive effects is to some value other than justice
(pp. 120–121), which is understood simply as equality in the distribution of what
there is (p. 107).
Of course, even if there is not enough of certain goods for all, an obvious
alternative to random allocation is for each to have a turn. Goodwin suggests that,
where people are more equal than the difference between haves and have nots, the
problem is that any one-off distribution necessarily involves injustice (pp. 34, 179).
In these cases, the lottery seems to function as a mere means towards the goal of
rotation, Goodwin envisaging that goods and positions would be regularly
re-allocated by repeated iterations of the lottery, designed to ensure that each
individual has equal prospects over his or her lifetime – sometimes enjoying good
fortune, sometimes bad. This more modest proposal, the subject of Chapter Six
(pp. 147–166), is analytically distinct from the lottery and seems to relegate it to
secondary importance – merely of way of deciding whose turn should be first.
Nonetheless, although Goodwin acknowledges that rotation is sometimes preferable
to a lottery (pp. 128–129, 163), it is not always plausible, for there is actually too
great a diversity of goods and positions in society for everyone to experience each
(pp. 160–163), goods may be so scarce that an equal turn would be an insignificant
time (p. 166), and there may be merits to uncertainty over whose turn is next

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(pp. 19, 78–83). Thus, while rotation figures in what makes the lottery desirable as
an instrument of justice, it does not make randomization redundant.
Chapter Eight (pp. 217–236) is devoted to an examination of various theories of
justice, with Goodwin using the defects of any substantive theory to argue for the
necessity of procedural approaches, but it is a shame that there is not more
discussion of how lotteries relate to the considerable literature on justice. While
contractualists, such as Rawls and Scanlon, suggest that lotteries may be just if all,
from some suitable position, do or would agree to them, Goodwin goes further in
supposing the justice of lotteries somehow primitive or basic, and arguing that it is
only their legitimacy or validity that depends on consent (p. 86, c.f. p. 125). This is
in striking contrast to the position of so-called luck egalitarians, who hold that
inequalities are permissible if and only if they result from choice rather than chance.
It would seem that luck egalitarians can endorse the outcomes of lotteries as
reflecting what they call option luck where there is actual agreement but, if not all
parties agree to the procedure, then it would be necessary to level down rather than
impose a lottery.
Similarly, given Goodwin’s emphasis on the fact that the plurality of goods
undermines what she calls straightforward egalitarianism (pp. 102–104), it is
disappointing that there is not more discussion of Michael Walzer’s alternative,
complex equality (pp. 217–218, 221–227). It would be interesting to see a
discussion of whether certain goods are more amenable than others to distribution
by lottery; after all, in practice lotteries are often only part of a wider distributive
system. We do not, for example, give everyone an equal chance of receiving scarce
medical resources but only employ lotteries, if at all, to adjudicate between those
who have some claim – grounded in some property such as need – to the good in
question. This suggests that the relation between lotteries and potential criteria of
distribution, such as need or desert, is more complex than Goodwin at times allows
(pp. 221–227) in her defense of procedural equality of opportunity (pp. 233–236).
Nonetheless, since Rawls first published A Theory of Justice, a voluminous
literature has appeared on distributive issues and it would plainly be unreasonable to
expect any single work to engage with all of it. Goodwin’s merit lies not in a
sustained examination of rival theories of justice but in a rehabilitation of lotteries
as a part of that discussion. The book is well researched, with numerous examples
drawn both from history and fiction, for instance, along with Borges, Thomas
More’s Utopia, Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, and Philip K. Dick’s The Solar
Lottery. Moreover, this second edition includes a new Chapter Ten, ‘The Lottery
Revisited’ (pp. 243–258), which discusses a number of more recent proposals that
have appeared since the book was first published and offers further examples of
lotteries in practice.
One particularly interesting area in which the use of lotteries has recently been
advocated is as part of a democratic political system. Sortition, or random selection,
was how Athenian democracy appointed citizens to most offices and this has
inspired a number of blueprints for modern democratic reform. The first edition of
Goodwin’s book focused primarily on the democratization of society in the broader
sense of encouraging an egalitarian social ethos (pp. 111–114), rather than more
narrowly on the mechanisms of political equality, although there were also

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comments on rotation of office (pp. 151–160) and the use of lotteries to appoint
rulers or representatives (pp. 181–192). These remarks are expanded upon in the
additional chapter, which describes political applications of lotteries (pp. 243–247),
including Keith Sutherland’s proposal to replace the UK’s lower chamber with a
randomly-selected body, to reduce party faction, and James Fishkin’s work on
deliberative citizens’ juries. Of course, this is an ever-growing area of research, with
this updated reissue forming part of a new series of books on Sortition and Public
Policy from Imprint Academic. Nonetheless, it is a shame that it is not up to date
enough to discuss the particularly interesting proposal for random constituencies in
Andrew Rehfeld’s The Concept of Constituency (Cambridge University Press,
2005).
Despite these cavils, it is largely thanks to Goodwin that lotteries enjoy the
prominence that they do in recent discussions of democracy and justice. Justice by
Lottery, replete as it is with history and examples, as well as theory, remains
essential reading for anyone interested in lotteries and this new and updated edition
only makes it all the more useful.

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