Life, Chance & Life Chances Author(s): Lorraine Daston Source: Daedalus, Vol. 137, No. 1, On Life (Winter, 2008), pp. 5-14 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20028160 Accessed: 15-04-2019 09:14 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20028160?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Daedalus This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Lorraine Daston Life, chance & life chances Like all men in Babylon, I have been pro ly situated and no one is able to design consul ; like all, I have been a slave. I have principles to favor his particular condi known omnipotence, ignominy, impris tion, the principles of justice are the re onment .... I owe that almost monstrous sult of a fair agreement or bargain. variety to an institution - the Lottery - which is unknown in other nations, or at - John Rawls, A Theory of Justice work in them imperfectly or secretly. JLhese two social fantasies, the Borgesi -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Baby lon" an lottery and the Rawlsian veil of igno rance, seem to be poles apart: the one seeks to maximize the role of chance in The principles of justice are chosen be hind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that social arrangements, the other to mini no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in mize it. The people of Babylon are sub the choice of principles by the outcome ject to the most dizzying reversals of of natural chance or the contingency of fortune ; the only regularity in their lives social circumstances. Since all are similar is the ordained drawing of lots that will once again reshuffle their fates, for bet ter or worse. "If the Lottery is an inten Lorraine Daston, a Fellow of the American sification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not Academy since 1993, is director at the Max appropriate that chance intervene in ev Planck Institute for the History of Science in ery aspect of the drawing, not just one ? "x Berlin. Her many publications include uClassi cal Probability and the Enlightenment" (1988), No society could contrast more starkly "Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 - 1750 " with Borgest Babylon than Rawls's poli ty of fairness, in which differences in cit (with Katharine Park, 1998), "Things that Talk: izens' "initial chances in life" are brand Object Lessons from Art and Science" (2004), ed as "especially deep inequalities," and "Objectivity" (with Peter Galison, 2007). which justice must alleviate.2 She has also coedited "Biographies of Scientific Objects" (2000), "The Moral Authority of Na i Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," ture" (2003), and "Thinking with Animals : New Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism" (2005). York : Penguin, 1998), 104. ? 2008 by the American Academy of Arts 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, & Sciences Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1971), 7. D dalus Winter 2008 5 This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Yet like all polar opposites, Borges's reincarnation, or divine providence. The lottery and Rawls's veil of ignorance are life of Oedipus was foretold, as was that plotted along the same conceptual axis. of Jesus. Lesser lives, though not digni Both envision life in terms of chances - fied by oracles or prophecies, were also and moreover, chances that are symmet thought to unfurl according to some rically distributed. The Borgesian Baby global plan. These lives are hardly fair - lon may be nightmarishly chaotic, but why should Oedipus, much less all of the lottery that rules it is fair. Everyone Thebes, be punished for crimes he com has been proconsul; everyone has been mitted unwittingly? - but they are just, a slave. Fairness - not prosperity, not according to an ideal of justice that is happiness, not achievement - is also the cosmic rather than individual. No doubt fundamental intuition that undergirds fairness is as ancient and universal a hu Rawls's imagined social contract. Our man value as justice, but the notion that society may be poor or rich, barbaric or they coincide is historically and cultural highly cultivated, light-hearted or mel ly rare, and perhaps distinctively mod ancholy, but whatever its resources and ern. aspirations, we are all in it together. Ide This is not to say that the role of ally, you and I should have the same chance in human affairs has not been prospects, the same number of tickets in recognized and thematized in many cul the lottery, the same life chances. If not tures besides our own. The wheel of for everyone becomes proconsul, not every tune is a very old motif, carved into the one a slave, it is only because Rawls has stonework of medieval cathedrals and qualified his distribution of life chances flamboyantly rendered in Renaissance as "initial" rather than lifelong. At least paintings. With each spin of the wheel, at the beginning of life, every infant in kings and beggars trade places. In some a Rawlsian society should have an equal traditions, including ancient Judaism chance of becoming (to update the pos and early medieval Christianity, chance sibilities) president or street person. It mechanisms like the cast of dice or the is, of course, Rawls's hope and claim drawing of lots were used for divination ; that precisely this symmetry of possibili in others, such as Hinduism, the gods ties - not benevolence or charity - will themselves gamble. motivate all members of society to ame But chance per se is never normative liorate the condition of the worst off: in these examples. Fortuna is a power this could happen to you, or to your chil ful goddess, but it is Justitia who com dren. mands the moral high ground. Philoso There is nothing self-evident about phy consoled the much-tried Roman conceiving of life as a kind of many scholar and statesman Boethius by re sided fair die, rolled at every birth or at vealing that true wisdom lay in spiritual intervals almost as regular as the draw indifference to the caprices of fortune ings of the Babylonian lottery (e.g., the (in his case, imprisonment and impend neighborhood one happens to grow up ing execution on a trumped-up charge in, the schools one attends, the well- or of treason) : in Boethius's allegory, Dame ill-starred marriage, the healthy or ail Philosophy bests Fortuna, wheel and all. ing children). On the contrary, most so The use of dice, lots, and other aleatory cieties have imagined lives as ordered devices to plumb God's will when a con from birth (or perhaps even before), sequential decision loomed (see, for ex whether by inexorable fate, the cycle of ample, Numbers 33:54 or Proverbs 16133) D dalus Winter 2008 This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms was frowned upon by theologians at Like all statistical regularities, life least since Augustine, precisely because chances apply in the first instance to such expedients forced God to rush in in populations, not individuals. The para order to contravene chance : a "tempta digmatic way of assessing life chances is tion of God." And the gambling Hindu the table of mortality, which plots many gods routinely cheated, the stakes being deaths as a function of some other vari too high to leave the game's outcome to able : age, sex, profession, lifestyle, or chance. In all cases, chance is invoked any number of other factors thought to only to be overcome - by philosophical influence longevity. The table of mortal transcendence, divine intervention, or ity serves as the basis for estimating the plain old stacking the deck. Life is full of most fundamental of all life chances - contingencies, fortune and misfortune. life expectancy. Thanks to the World But life itself is not, should not be, con Health Organization, we are accustomed ceived as a chance, a life chance in a co to reading about life expectancy as a lossal lottery. As the narrator of Borges's function of nationality - for example, short story about the Babylonian lottery 73.0 years for a newborn in Sweden ver observes : "I have known that thing the sus 25.9 years for one in Sierra Leone. Greeks knew not - uncertainty."3 But nationality is only one of many pos How did the metaphor of life chances sible groupings into which life chances come to be so irresistible, at least for may be parsed. Epidemiologists may modern societies like our own? And prefer grids that divide the world up in what does the symmetric distribution to city and country dwellers or the thin of such chances have to do with justice ? and the fat; sociologists draw the lines The first question is historical, the sec according to income level, sex, race, or ond philosophical.