> According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well-off people are should be wholly determined by the responsible choices people make and not by differences in their unchosen circumstances. Luck egalitarianism expresses that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.

When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.

Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.

This is a great question. One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that some people don't know that the choices they're making are going to hurt them.

There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.

What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.