Unequal opportunities and distributive justice

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment and can then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We compare situations in which randomly chosen people get access to performance enhancing education with situations in which either only luck or only performance determines outcome. We find that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable to the situation when luck alone determines the allocation. However, people with unequal access to education are more likely to disagree about the appropriate distribution.