The principle that people should be held personally responsible for the consequences of their choices is a fundamental moral ideal in Western societies. We report from a large-scale experimental study of how far-reaching this principle is for inequality acceptance. We show that third-party spectators violate minimal conditions for a morally relevant choice when making redistributive decisions for two workers. They accept more inequality when the workers have made nominal and forced choices than when brute luck is the source of inequality. We argue that our findings shed light on important current political debates about personal responsibility and redistributive policies.

This paper investigates fairness perceptions of extreme income inequality generated in winner-take-all competitions. Two large-scale experiments with more than 7,000 participants from the general population of the U.S. show that extreme earnings inequality is widely accepted, even when the winner only slightly outperforms the runner-up. The effect of the winning margin on inequality acceptance is modest compared to the effect of shifting the source of inequality from luck to winning by the smallest possible margin. The experimental choices are systematically associated with broader fairness attitudes and policy preferences, including support for higher taxation of top earners and redistributive economic policy.