The recent past has brought impressive developments in the understanding of moral responsibility and distributive justice. S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively discussion into contact. Contemporary debates on distributive justice have shaped egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility. In this perspective, the goal of equality is to respect the differences between the positions for which people are responsible, while neutralizing the differences that are a matter of luck.

However, this approach, argues Hurley, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility limits the roles it can truly play within distributive justice. Her book uses a new formulation of responsibility to explain these limitations. While responsibility can help determine what should be distributed, it cannot tell us how to distribute it. Thus, Hurley argues that responsibility cannot lead us to distribute in an egalitarian manner. However, it can play other important roles in a theory of justice, related to behavior, motivation, and well-being.

Hurley's book proposes a new approach to distributive justice that neutralizes biases and places responsibility in these less problematic roles.