In response: A society could satisfy the democratic equality ideal (sustaining equal opportunity for all to be participants in democratic society) even though some portion of its members ends up with meager provision and meager material opportunities and squalid unfulfilling lives. Some might hold that distributive justice principles should register such a condition as injustice. Also, while a reasonable conception of fair shares might require more than initial equal opportunity, and might require that individuals who start to make a mess of their lives be given second, third, or fourth chances, that does not gainsay the responsibility of individuals to use the opportunities they have judiciously and the imperative of integrating a sensible norm of personal responsibility into sensible norms of distributive justice. (See the entries on  egalitarianism and on  distributive justice.)