Luck varies from person to person, for two reasons. First, for something to occur as a matter of luck is for it to occur beyond the control of someone, and what is beyond one person's control may not be beyond another's. Second, luck may be either good or bad (or neutral — but in that case it is not very interesting), and what is good luck for one person may be bad luck for another.

Moral philosophers have paid a good deal of attention to luck in an effort to determine its relevance to moral judgments of various sorts. We may distinguish three broad classes of such judgments: aretaic judgments, having to do with moral virtue and vice; deontic judgments, having to do with moral Obligation; and what I will call hypological judgments, having to do with moral responsibility. In the wake of Harry Frankfurt's ground-breaking discussion of the claim that moral responsibility requires control, most of the attention that has been devoted in recent years to moral luck has concerned hypological judgments in particular; deontic judgments and aretaic judgments have been given relatively short shrift.

The possibility that individuals might have expensive tastes is the basis of arguments for and against various theories of how social resources should be allocated. Expensive tastes play a role, for example, in Dworkin's advocacy of equality of resources rather than welfare, in Rawls's account of primary goods, in Scanlon's argument for an objective criterion of well-being, and in Arneson's favoring of equality of opportunity for welfare rather than equality of welfare.

Much of the argument about whether expensive tastes should be treated distinctively concerns whether or not individuals choose to have such tastes. If individuals are simply born with different tastes, or perhaps if they develop them through socialization when young, it is suggested, individuals should not be seen as responsible for their expensive tastes. However, it is argued that individuals should not be com pensated for expensive tastes that they have freely chosen — or would hypothetically have chosen — to cultivate.

Whatever its implications for the other features of human agency at its best — for moral responsibility, reasons-responsiveness, self-realization, flourishing, and so on—addiction is universally recognized as impairing autonomy. But philosophers have frequently misunderstood the nature of addiction, and therefore have not adequately explained the manner in which it impairs autonomy. Once we recognize that addiction is not incompatible with choice or volition, it becomes clear that none of the Standard accounts of autonomy can satisfactorily explain the way in which it undermines fully autonomous agency. In order to understand to what extent and in what ways the addicted are autonomy-impaired, we need to understand autonomy as consisting, essentially, in the exercise of the capacity for extended agency. It is because addiction undermines extended agency, so that addicts are not able to integrate their lives and pursue a Single conception of the good, that it impairs autonomy.