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The Luck of the Draw
The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
Peter Stone
240 pages
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235x156mm
978-0-19-975610-0
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Hardback
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05 May 2011
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- Applies unique systematic, analytical treatment to the subject of lotteries
- Establishes groundbreaking views on the role of impartiality and reason in decision making
- Skillful exploration of fundamental aspects of political and legal philosophy
A prominent scholar once noted that lotteries in politics and society—to break vote ties, assign students to schools, draft people into the military, select juries—are "at first thought absurd, and at second thought obvious." Lotteries have been part of politics since the Greek and Roman times, and they are used frequently in American politics today. When there is a two-to-two vote tie for prospective school board members, officials will often resort to flipping a coin (as happened recently in California). And in military drafts, the conventional wisdom is that random selection is far more just than non-lottery drafts. Northerners
rioted against the perceived injustice of the non-random draft during the Civil War, and Americans by and large believed that student deferments subverted the justice of the draft during the Vietnam War.
Over the years, people who study and practice politics have devoted considerable effort to thinking about the legitimacy of lotteries and whether they are just or not under certain circumstances. Yet they have really only focused on lotteries on a case-by-case basis, and no one has ever developed a substantial and comprehensive political theory of lotteries. In The Luck of the Draw, Peter Stone does just that. Examining the wide range of arguments for and against lotteries, Stone comes to the startling conclusion that lotteries have only one crucial effect
relevant to decision-making: they have the "sanitizing effect" of preventing decisions from being made on the basis of reasons. Stone readily admits that this rationale might sound absurd to us, but contends that in many instances it is vital for people to make decisions without any reasoned rationale to compel them. Sometimes, justice can only be carried out through random selection—a fundamental principle of the practice of lottery that Stone comes to call "The Just Lottery Rule." By developing innovative ways for interpreting this pervasive form of political practice, Stone provides us with a foundation for understanding how to best make use of lottery when making political decisions both large and small.Readership:
Students and scholars of decision theory, political theory, law, and justice.
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Peter Stone, Faculty Fellow, Center for Ethics and Public Affairs, Tulane University Peter Stone is Faculty Fellow in the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University. He has been researching the theory and practice of random selection for over a decade, and his work on the subject has been published in such journals as the Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Theory, and Social Theory and Practice. He also works on broader issues relating to justice, democracy, and rationality.
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Part I: The Logic of Random Selection
1: Why Lotteries?
1. The School Board Tosses a Coin
2. Lotteries, Lotteries Everywhere
3. Absurd yet Obvious
4. The Story So Far
5. The Argument to Come
2: What Do Lotteries Do?
1. What Is a Lottery?
2. Fundamental Features of Decision-Making
3. Decision-Making by Lottery
4. The Lottery Principle
5. Indeterminacy without Lotteries
6. Lotteries and Divination
Part II: Lotteries and Justice
3: Allocative Justice
1. The Relationship between Lotteries and Justice
2. The Just Lottery Rule
3. Consent, Opportunities, Expectations
4: Impartiality
1. What Does Allocative Justice Require?
2. Allocative Justice and Outcomes
3. Allocative Justice and Actions
4. Impartiality and Indeterminacy
5. The Right and the Good
5: The Implications of Impartiality
1. The Nature of the Impartiality Principle
2. Theories of Justice
3. Alternatives to Random Selection
Part III: Lotteries beyond Justice
6: The Idea of Sortition
1. Sortition in Practice
2. Sortition and Justice
3. Incentive Alignment
4. Descriptive Representation
5. Random Selection in Other
7: Conclusion
Bibliography
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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