The previous seven chapters have sought to show that individual responsibility and social equality are not opposed. Both tort law and criminal justice can be understood as expressions of a particular understanding of equality. The law serves to protect people equally from each other, and can do so only if the minimal normative conditions of responsible agency are satisfied. The underlying conception of responsibility is political rather than moral, inasmuch as it looks to external relations between people rather than the quality of either their character or their wills. It is also political because it is concerned with the legitimate basis for coercion.

This chapter considers issues of responsibility from the perspective of what offers itself as a more thoroughgoing conception of equality. A world of individual responsibility is a world in which people have ends of their own, and may or may not take any interest in each other. The law's failure to protect ultrasensitive plaintiffs provides an illustration of this; the absence of a legal duty to rescue provides another. The ways in which a regime of individual responsibility does not require caring relations between people has led some to reject it as an ideal. The egalitarian who rejects ideas of responsibility shares the view held by the libertarian of Chapter 2, according to which equality and responsibility are incompatible, but unlike the libertarian, chooses to discard responsibility in the face of this perceived conflict.