Fairness and Chance in Diachronic Lotteries: A Response to Vong

Abstract

In this paper, I show that Gerard Vong’s account of diachronic lotteries is vulnerable to John Broome’s objection that lottery winners have a justified complaint if their winning is ignored in a subsequent lottery for a specific benefit. Against Broome, Vong maintains that lottery winners do not have a justified complaint if their winning is ignored in a subsequent lottery. However, Vong’s argument is unconvincing because the counterexample at its core ignores crucial differences between various reasons to complain. An agent can have legitimate claim-based reasons to complain, yet not actually complain because those claim-based reasons are outweighed by other kinds of reasons. This means that to remain plausible, accounts of diachronic lotteries must take Broome’s objection more seriously than Vong does. I conclude by proposing a modification to Vong’s Dual Structure account of lotteries that can accommodate the intuition animating Broome’s objection, while remaining diachronic.