The Problematic Ethics of Feeling Compassion or Pity for Disabled People: Bad Luck and Good Luck, Identity, Responsibility, and the Ambivalence of 'Loss' in Theories of Justice and Social Relations

'Intrinsic luck' results from the consequences of simply having a particular condition. Whereas, 'extrinsic luck' is the indirect result of having a particular condition - that is, located in the way particular societies view and react to the condition. I argue that intrinsic 'bad luck' can often be transformed into either 'good luck' (all things considered) and/or extrinsic 'bad luck' depending upon the rational perspective and response of the person who experiences it. Therefore, although making judgements concerning what is 'bad luck' and responding to it through instituting appropriate re-distributive principles, is a proper part of what justice entails, these principles must also centrally but paradoxically include the possibility of an individual agent-based response to misfortune that transforms adverse contingencies, such that the initial 'bad luck' becomes a positive part of the 'sufferer's' identity. This neo-Kantian accommodation within liberal egalitarian theories of justice, also I argue signifies a 'deep' egalitarian empathic and sympathetic connectedness between persons, based on an equal respect for persons as agents (and not merely as passive victims of misfortune). Moreover, it is an accommodation that can promote equality as 'an end in itself' - rather than as simply a means to the end of enhancing a teleological conception of 'well-being' and 'human flourishing' - and can underpin a more robust Rawlsian conception of 'justice as reciprocity' than is usually allowed.