ABSTRACT
Consider Alice and Ben who start off with equivalent capability sets with regard to education and health. While Alice squanders them and ends up with a life of bad functionings, Ben makes use of them responsibly thus leading to an outcome of a much better off life. Should society in the name of justice make good Alice’s ensuing position relative to Ben? Normally we tend to think that Alice should be made to bear the consequences of her choices. Consider again Alice and Ben, but now in a somewhat different scenario. If it were the case that Alice’s relatively worse off position is not the result of her prodigal behaviour but due to circumstances and factors beyond her control, what should society do? Our appraisal here would most probably be in the opposite direction. We do seem to think that society has some obligations not only to restore Alice to a baseline of education and health as far as possible, but also to design the basic structures of society so that recurrence of such cases can be prevented in the first place or their impact can be minimized.
