In his 2018 book Why Does Inequality Matter? T. M. Scanlon discusses the question how significant differences of economic advantage can be justified. He surveys a variety of possible justifications. In Chapter 8—‘Desert’—he focuses on the idea that a desertist theory of justice might attempt to justify such differences in certain cases by claiming that those who have more in those cases deserve to have more; while those who have less deserve to have less. Scanlon rejects this sort of attempted (...) justification. Scanlon claims that desert ‘plays no role in distributive justice’. He seems to think that in order to explain how it could be just for people to receive unequal benefits, we will need to appeal to some conception of distributive justice that does not involve desert. In my 2016 book Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country I presented what I took to be a thoroughly desertist theory of distributive justice—apparently a theory of precisely the sort Scanlon means to reject. Scanlon does not mention my theory. My aim in the present paper is to explain how my desertist theory avoids Scanlon’s objections. First I explain the conception of desert that Scanlon has in mind; then I present the core of Scanlon’s objections to desertist theories of distributive justice. Finally, I show that his objections have no application to the form of desertism that I proposed. (shrink)

This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the (...) account, however, it considers whether the proportionality condition is necessary to a theory of morally justified surveillance. The article concludes that we need and should apply only a necessity condition, but notes that proportionality considerations may retain some use in in practice, as a form of coarse‐grained filter applied before assessing necessity when deliberating the permissibility of potential forms of surveillance. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism (...) is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

Ethics is of vital importance to the Swedish educational system, as in many other educational systems around the world.Yet, it is unclear how ethics should be dealt with in school, and prior research and evaluations have found serious problems regarding ethics in education.The field of moral education lacks clear and widely accepted definitions of key concepts, and these ambiguities negatively impact both research and educational practice. This thesis draws a distinction between three approaches to ethics in school – the descriptive (...) ethics approach, the value transmission approach, and the inquiry ethics approach – and studies in what way (if at all) they are prescribed by the national curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school, how they relate to students’ moral reasoning about technology choices and online behaviour, and what pedagogical merits and disadvantages they have. Hopefully, this both contributes to reducing the ambiguities of the field, and to answering the question of how ethics should be dealt with in education. The descriptive ethics approach asserts that school should teach students empirical facts about ethics, such as what views and opinions people have. The value transmission approach holds that school should mediate some set of predefined values to the students and make sure the students come to accept these values.The inquiry ethics approach is the view that school should teach students to reason and think critically about ethics and to engage in ethical inquiry. The role of ethics in the curriculum has not been studied in light of the above distinction, in prior research,and such an investigation is undertaken here.The results suggest that ethics has a prominent, but complicated, role in the Swedish national curriculum. Although no explicit distinction is drawn or acknowledged in the curriculum, all three approaches are prescribed throughout the curriculum, albeit to different degrees. In the general section of the curriculum, the value transmission and inquiry ethics approaches are more extensively prescribed than the descriptive ethics approach. It was found that most of the syllabi contained explicit references to ethics, while some only contained implicit references to ethics, and two syllabi lacked references to ethics altogether. In the syllabi, the inquiry ethics approach is the most dominant, both in the sense of being present in the most syllabi, and in the sense of being more strongly prescribed in many of the syllabi where several approaches occur.The value transmission approach has the weakest role in the syllabi. In total, the inquiry ethics approach is the approach most strongly prescribed by the curriculum. But prior research has shown that inquiry ethics is very rarely implemented in the classroom. In this thesis, it is found that the inquiry ethics and the value transmission approaches are incompatible, given certain reasonable interpretations, which makes the finding that inquiry ethics is rarely implemented less surprising, since value transmission is practiced in schools. Some possible causes, and some consequences, of this is discussed. The students, in their moral reasoning about technology choices, reasoned in accordance with several classical normative theories – including consequentialism, deontological ethics and virtue ethics – and in doing so, they expressed reasoning that in the discussion is found to be in conflict with the values of the value foundation in the curriculum. These findings complement earlier findings, for example that students in their actions contradict the value foundation, by adding that such conflicts also exist in their reasoning. The existence of these conflicts is found to be problematic for a value transmission approach. Many of the students defended very restrictive views on disclosing personal information online, and prior research as well as the present data has shown that adults typically hold views that are very similar to these, concerning how they think that young people ought to act online. On the other hand, youths’ actual online behaviour, as reported in earlier studies, differs considerably from this. In line with this, the students also seemed to endorse a form of private morals view, according to which moral choices are simply up to one’s own taste, which would yield an escape exit from the restrictive views mentioned above, and permit any behaviour. In the discussion, it is argued that this is the result of an attempt at value transmission from the grown-up community, probably including teachers, which might seem to work, since the students claim to hold certain views, but which likely instead constitutes a false security, since these values are not actually accepted, but only paid lip service to, and the adults are therefore wrong in their belief that the students are protected by a certain set of values (that they think the students are upholding), since the students in fact do not uphold, and therefore do not act based upon, these values. This situation risks making the students more vulnerable than had no value transmission attempt been taken in the first place. Hence, the attempted value transmission runs the risk of counteracting its purpose of helping the students acquire a safe online behaviour. Throughout the moral reasoning mentioned above, extensive variations in the students’ reasoning were found, both interpersonally and intrapersonally, both in the decision method and in the rightness criterion dimensions, as well as in between the dimensions.The existence of such variations is a novel finding, and while possible applications in future research are discussed, it is also noted that this existence constitutes a reason to question the successfulness of both the value transmission and the inquiry ethics endeavours of the educational system. The results and discussions described above highlight the importance of investigating the merits of the different approaches. Several arguments that arise from the material of this thesis are presented, evaluated and discussed. The ability of each approach to fulfil some alleged key aims of ethics education is scrutinised; their abilities to educate for good citizenship, to educate for quality of life of the individual, and to facilitate better educational results in other subjects are all investigated, as well as the ability of each approach to help counteract the influence from online extremist propaganda aimed at young people and to promote safe online behaviour in general. It is concluded that the inquiry ethics approach has the strongest support from the material of this thesis. Some consequences for school practice are discussed, and it is concluded that changing the role of ethics in the curriculum would be beneficial, downplaying the role of value transmission and further increasing, and making more explicit and clear, the role of inquiry ethics. It is also shown that there are strong reasons for the inclusion of a new subject in the Swedish compulsory education with special focus on ethics. 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I defend a solution to the puzzle of petitionary prayer based on some ideas of Aquinas, Gregory the Great, and contemporary desert theorists. I then address a series of objections. Along the way broader issues about the nature of desert, what is required for an action to have a point, and what is required for a puzzle to have a solution are discussed.

Like American politics, the academic debate over justice is polarized, with almost all theories of justice falling within one of two traditions: egalitarianism and libertarianism. This book provides an alternative to the partisan standoff by focusing not on equality or liberty, but on the idea that we should give people the things that they deserve. Mulligan argues that a just society is a meritocracy, in which equal opportunity prevails and social goods are distributed strictly on the basis of merit. That (...) gives citizens their just deserts. In addition to its novel conceptual approach, meritocracy is distinctive from existing work in two ways. First, it is grounded in research on how people actually think about justice. Empirical research reveals that people don't think that social goods should be distributed equally. Nor do they dismiss the idea of social justice. Across ideological and cultural lines, people want rewards to reflect merit. Second, the book discusses hot-button political issues and makes concrete policy recommendations. These issues include anti-meritocratic bias against women and racial minorities and the United States’ widening economic inequality. Justice and the Meritocratic State offers a new theory of justice and provides solutions to our most vexing social and economic problems. It will be of keen interest to philosophers, economists, and political theorists. (shrink)

According to Christopher New, prepunishment is punishment for an offence before the offence is committed. I will first analyze New’s argument, along with theepistemic conditions for practicing prepunishment. I will then deal with an important conceptual objection, according to which prepunishment is not a genuine kind of ‘punishment’. After that, I will consider retributivism and present conclusive reasons for the claim that it cannot justify prepunishment without leading to paradoxical results. I shall then seek to establish that from the utilitarian (...) point of view it is possible to provide a plausible justification of this practice. Finally, I shall attempt to defend the claim that the fact that utilitarianism can justify prepunishment in a satisfactory way is clearly a favourable characteristic of this ethical position. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a justification of punishment which can be endorsed by free will skeptics, and which can also be defended against the "using persons as mere means" objection. Free will skeptics must reject retributivism, that is, the view that punishment is just because criminals deserve to suffer based on their actions. Retributivists often claim that theirs is the only justification on which punishment is constrained by desert, and suppose that non-retributive justifications must therefore endorse (...) treating the people punished as mere means to social ends. Retributivists typically presuppose a monolithic conception of desert: they assume that action-based desert is the only kind of desert. But there are also personhood-based desert claims, that is, desert claims which depend not on facts about our actions, but instead on the more abstract fact that we are persons. Since personhood-based desert claims do not depend on facts about our actions, they do not depend on moral responsibility, so free will skeptics can appeal to them just as well as retributivists. What people deserve based on the mere fact of their personhood is to be treated as they would rationally consent to be treated if all they had in view was the mere fact of their personhood. We can work out the implications of this view for punishment by developing a hypothetical consent justification in which we select principles of punishment in the Rawlsian original position, so long as we are careful not to smuggle in the retributivist assumption that it is under our control whether we end up as criminals or as law-abiding citizens once we raise the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

Abstract:In 2003, CEOs of the 365 largest U.S. corporations were paid on average $8 million, 301 times as much as factory workers. This paper asks whether CEOs get paid too much. Appealing to widely recognized moral values, I distinguish three views of justice in wages: the agreement view, the desert view, and the utility view. I argue that, no matter which view is correct, CEOs get paid too much. I conclude by offering two ways CEO pay might be reduced.

In Chapter 17 of his magnificent Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit asks what he describes as an ‘awesome question’: ‘How many people should there ever be?’ For a utilitarian like me, the answer seems simple: there should be however many people it takes to make the world best. Unfortunately, if I answer Parfit's awesome question in this way, I may sink myself in a quagmire of axiological confusion. In this paper, I first describe certain aspects of the quagmire. Then I (...) introduce and explain some of the elements of a novel axiological view – ‘justicism’. Justicism is derived from some ideas originally suggested by Franz Brentano. It was developed in an effort to solve certain other problems confronting utilitarianism – problems explicitly about justice. I think, however, that as a sort of happy by-product, justicism also generates a plausible answer to Parfit's awesome question. This may come as a bit of surprise, since justicism is a form of totalism, and it is widely thought that no totalistic theory can provide a satisfactory answer to Parfit's question. After presenting and explaining my proposed solution, I address some objections. (shrink)

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that (...) we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics' ethical theories. (shrink)

In this paper we explore whether or not the use of risk assessment tools in criminal sentencing can be made compatible with a retributivist justification of punishment. While there has been considerable discussion of the accuracy and fairness of these tools, such discussion assumes that one’s recidivism risk is relevant to the severity of punishment that one should receive. But this assumption only holds on certain accounts of punishment, and seems to conflict with retributivist justifications of punishment. Drawing on the (...) broader desert literature, we explain the source of this conflict, and suggest that a retributivist approach on which the severity of punishment partly depends on one’s character in addition to their acts offers some hope of reconciling retributivism with the use of risk assessment tools in considerations of sentencing reduction in particular. Ultimately, however, even this limited attempt at reconciliation fails, so long as risk assessment tools fail to distinguish between risk that one is responsible for, and risk that one is not responsible for. (shrink)

The blameworthy deserve blame. So runs a platitude of commonsense morality. My aim here is to set out an understanding of this desert claim (as I call it) on which it can be seen to be a familiar and attractive aspect of moral thought. I conclude with a response to a prominent denial of the claim.

It is typically thought that a student deserves—or at least can deserve—a grade in a class. The students who perform well on assessments, who display a high degree of competence, and who complete all of the required work, deserve a good grade. Students who perform poorly on assessments, who fail to understand the course material, and who fail to complete the required work, deserve a bad grade. In this paper, I raise a challenge to this conventional view about grades. In (...) particular, I challenge the idea that grades—understood appropriately—can be objects of desert for class performance. In other words, grades are simply not the kind of thing that can be deserved. The argument is roughly as follows. In general, when some property or quality of ours is measured, where that property or quality is something that makes us deserving of something, the measurement, itself, is not the thing that is or could be deserved. Grades, however, are a measure of student performance, where performance is meant to be the basis on which students deserve their grades. Since they are mere measures of performance, grades are not and could not be deserved on the basis of performance, and so are not possible objects of desert. Rather, they serve as evidence of the desert basis (academic performance, e.g.) that grounds a student’s being deserving of other objects (praise or recognition, e.g.). In short, grades, at best, measure how deserving one is, but grades themselves are not deserved. (shrink)

When someone is prepunished, they are punished for a predicted crime they will or would commit. I argue that cases of prepunishment universally assumed to be merely hypothetical—including those in Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report”— are equivalent to some instances of the real-life punishment of attempt offenses. This conclusion puts pressure in two directions. If prepunishment is morally impermissible, as philosophers argue, then this calls for amendments to criminal justice theory and practice. At the same time, if prepunishment is (...) not imaginary, then the philosophers who reject it cannot claim that their view is supported by common sense. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti argues that desert cannot serve as a plausible principle of stakes for luck egalitarianism. In this discussion note, we defend the claim that she is too pessimistic about this by introducing a simple, but plausible, desert-based account of stakes that is immune to her argument.

The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In (...) explaining why various analyses of fittingness fail, I draw into relief certain of the relation’s constitutive features and spotlight some of its interesting and important connections to various other properties. Along the way, I highlight the relation’s relevance to a number of ongoing debates in normative and metanormative philosophy. I conclude by indicating some directions for further research. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the following question: What do women deserve, ethically speaking, when they agree to gestate a fetus on behalf of third parties? I argue for several claims. First, I argue that gestational motherhood’s moral significance has been misunderstood, an oversight I attribute to the focus in family ethics on the conditions of parenthood. Second, I use a less controversial version of James Rachels’s account of desert to argue that gestational mothers deserve a parent-like voice as well as significant (...) care and support, conclusions that have implications for commercial surrogacy. Finally, I argue that we should not make requests of others when fulfilling them will lead others to deserve goods we cannot reasonably expect them to receive, and I conclude based on this thesis, what I call the “strings attached thesis,” that pro-life arguments in support of prohibitions on abortion commit their proponents to policies which they may not be willing to support. (shrink)

One reason that many philosophers are reluctant to seriously contemplate the possibility that we lack free will seems to be the view that we must believe we have free will if we are to regard each other as persons in the morally deep sense—the sense that involves deontological notions such as human rights. In the contemporary literature, this view is often informed by P.F. Strawson's view that to treat human beings as having free will is to respond to them with (...) the reactive attitudes, and that if we suspend the reactive attitudes we can only regard human beings as objects to be manipulated in the service of social goals. This purported implication of suspending the reactive attitudes has persuaded many philosophers that we cannot truly treat human beings as persons without assuming that they have free will. I argue that this line of thinking is misguided. I think Strawson is correct to worry that the consequentialism he sees as implicit in the objective attitude undermines our ability to treat each other as persons. But I think it is a mistake to accept that we must maintain the reactive attitudes, or any other attributions of free will or moral responsibility, to avoid a depersonalizing slide into consequentialism. Kant's idea of treating people as autonomous ends in themselves, rather than as mere means to ends, provides a compelling analysis of what it means to treat humans as persons, and I argue that there are ways of interpreting Kant's idea which do not involve reactive attitudes or any other attributions of free will or moral responsibility. -/- . (shrink)

Punishing someone for a crime before they have committed it is widely considered morally abhorrent. But there is little agreement on what exactly is supposed to be wrong with it. In this paper, I critically evaluate several objections to the permissibility of prepunishment, making points along the way about the connections between time, knowledge, desert, deterrence and duty. I conclude that, although the conditions under which it could permissibly be administered are unlikely ever to arise in practice, nevertheless in principle, (...) nothing is wrong with prepunishment after all. (shrink)

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this address, I distinguish and explore three conceptions of wages. A wage is a reward, given in recognition of the performance of a valued task. It is also an incentive: a way to entice workers to take and keep jobs, and to motivate them to work hard. Finally, a wage is a price of labor, and like all prices, conveys valuable information about relative scarcity. I show that each conception of wages has its own normative logic, or appropriate justification, (...) and these logics can come apart. This explains some of the debate about wages and makes the project of justifying a wagesimpliciterdifficult. I identify which logic we should choose, since we must choose, and say what this means for how we should think about the justification of pay. (shrink)

The question of whether desert depends on institutions or institutions on desert continues to divide politicians and political theorists, particularly in disputes over the justification of the welfare state. Even though it is a significant question with direct relevance for issues of economic justice, little has been done so far to evaluate the various positions in dispute and to make explicit the concepts involved. In this paper, I first present the main senses in which the concepts of desert, dependence and (...) institution are used by different desert theorists and I argue that conflicting claims concerning desert's pre/institutional nature may turn out to be compatible and similar claims, inconsistent, when the senses of these concepts are made explicit. Secondly, I identify the senses of 'desert', 'dependence' and 'institution' which are most appropriate for the debate. Thirdly, I argue that, from the perspective of this conceptual framework, it is not possible to decide whether or not desert depends on institutions, unless the framework is supplemented by a more precise specification of the concept of institution. (shrink)

How can hard determinism deal with the need to punish, when coupled with the obligation to be just? I argue that even though hard determinists might find it morally permissible to incarcerate wrongdoers apart from lawful society, they are committed to the punishment’s taking a very different form from common practice in contemporary Western societies. Hard determinists are in fact committed to what I will call funishment, instead of punishment. But, by its nature funishment is a practical reductio of hard (...) determinism: it makes implementing hard determinism impossible to contemplate. Indeed, the social practices that hard determinism requires turn out to be morally bad even according to hard determinism itself. I conclude by briefly reflecting upon the implications. (shrink)

Punishment is punishment even if it is not (perceived by the punisher to be) deserved. But punishment which is not (perceived by the punisher to be) fitting is not punishment. This paper explores the differences between desert and fittingness, and argues that incorporating fittingness into thedefinition of punishment is not problematic, whereas incorporating desert in such definition is, in contrast, infamously problematic. The main difference between these two notions turns on the interesting differences between two types of normativity. Fittingness is (...) exclusively concerned with aesthetic normativity, whereas desert is more directly concerned with moral normativity. When something is fitting, then it is, to an extent, intrinsically good, and, to an extent, it is also beautiful. The notion of fittingness has largely been ignored in discussions of punishment, yet it helps us better to understand the phenomenon of punishment, and in particular the thorny relationship between this phenomenon and desert. Key Words: beauty • desert • fittingness • normativity • punishment • retributivism. (shrink)

The word “privilege” has become a part of our everyday conversations. However, it is not evident whether the various interlocutors in discussions on privilege are using it in the same sense. While different instances of privilege like white, male, or caste privilege have been discussed in contemporary academic discourses, we believe there is a lack of clarity regarding the notion of privilege. We critically analyse existing accounts of privilege to show that they leave some room for improvement. We offer an (...) alternative account of privilege as “entitlements that fail to track deserts” that circumvents prevalent definitional ambiguities and emphasises the inherent undeserving nature of privilege. The hitherto underexplored links between privileges, deserts, entitlements, and rights can help us formulate a more accurate grasp of privilege. (shrink)

It is better when people get what they deserve. So we need an axiology according to which the intrinsic value of a possible world is a function of both how well-off and how deserving the people in that world are. But how should these ?desert-adjusted? values of possible worlds be calculated? It is easy to come up with some qualitative ideas. But these qualitative ideas leave us with an embarrassment of riches: too many quantitative functions that implement those qualitative ideas. (...) In this paper I will select one of these quantitative functions and defend its superiority. (shrink)

We cannot conclude from the assumptions that justice is a virtue and desert is an ingredient in justice that desert claims themselves express a virtue. It could be that desert is morally neutral, or even immoral, and that there are other aspects of justice which make it all-in-all virtuous. We need, in other words, an independent moral justification of desert and desert-based emotions. In this paper I take on the challenge of articulating and defending a utilitarian justification of desert in (...) distributive justice. I argue, first, that while there may be ways of accommodating desert-concerns in liberal theory, this cannot, in the view of liberals themselves, be done without considerable cost to the ideals that are closest to their hearts. By contrast, I suggest that a deceptively simple utilitarian defence of desert can be made to work. Finally, I attempt to surmount various possible objections that might be raised against my utilitarian justification and conclude that none of them confutes it. (shrink)

It has been suggested that people who will face hardship in the future may deserve our sympathies now. Similar intuitions can be adopted regarding the deservingness of jobs and scholarships, where andidates may be deserving now based on their expected future performance. To accommodate these intuitions, some have contended that desert is sometimes forward-looking. In this paper, I argue that it is a mistake to think of desert as forward-looking. The forward-looking view struggles to explain the deservingness of subjects that (...) have conflicting desert-making features in the future, it requires that we accept asymmetries and exceptions in desert theory and that we commit to a form of moderate determinism. In response, I present a comparative approach that offers a unified framework for explaining forward-looking cases without the drawbacks associated with the forward-looking view. (shrink)

Several leading theorists embrace the Simple Desert Account of Discrimination. This account involves two claims: it claims that a mismatch between what people deserve, on the one hand, and what they get, on the other hand, is (a) integral to discrimination, and (b) wrong. I shall query (a). First, I challenge what I see as the principal, positive argument for the Simple Desert Account. Second, in some cases wrongful discrimination brings about a better match between desert and what people get. (...) Situations in which this could be the case include those where: the discriminatee is a serial discriminator herself; the person wrongfully discriminated in favour of deserves greater advantages than she enjoys; by engaging in wrongful discrimination the discriminator reduces her moral deservingness and thereby the gap between her level of deservingness and her otherwise unfittingly low level of advantage. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that those who succeed with the aid of enhancement technologies deserve the rewards associated with their success less, other things being equal, than those who succeed without the aid of such technologies. This claim captures some widely held intuitions, has been implicitly endorsed by participants in social–psychological research and helps to undergird some otherwise puzzling philosophical objections to the use of enhancement technologies. I consider whether it can be provided with a rational basis. I examine three (...) arguments that might be offered in its favour and argue that each either shows only that enhancements undermine desert in special circumstances or succeeds only under assumptions that deprive the appeal to desert of much of its dialectic interest. (shrink)

This article clarifies what a neuroscience challenge to criminal justice must look like by sketching the basic structure of the argument, gradually filling out the details and illustrating the conditions that must be met for the challenge to work. In the process of doing so it explores influential work by Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, and Stephen Morse respectively, arguing that the former should not be understood to present a version of the challenge, and that the latter's argument against the (...) challenge is unpersuasive. This analysis allows the article to flesh out the challenge, and demonstrate why it is currently non-completeable. However, the paper argues that contrary to what is often assumed the burden of proof falls on the defenders of criminal justice, and that they will find meeting it a monumental task. (shrink)

Fred Feldman and, more recently, David Schmidtz have challenged the standard view that a person's desert is based strictly on past and present facts about him. I argue that Feldman's attempt to overturn this 'received wisdom' about desert's temporal orientation is unsuccessful, since his examples do not establish that what a person deserves now can be based on what will occur in the future. In addition, his forward-looking account introduces an unnecessary asymmetry regarding desert's temporal orientation in different contexts. Schmidtz (...) advances a promissory account of desert, only part of which presents a strong challenge to the received wisdom. After disambiguating the two main elements of his account, I examine Schmidtz's arguments for forward-looking desert. I find these arguments to be unconvincing because they seem to either rely on past or present facts about people, including people's dispositions, or they give us desert without desert bases. I briefly examine the relationship between desert and merit, and I argue that some dispositions might be desert bases and others might be merit bases. I conclude the paper with a summary of the arguments against desert as a forward-looking concept. (shrink)

A standard criticism of act-utilitarianism is that it is only indirectly concerned with the distribution of welfare between individuals and, therefore, does not take adequate account of the separateness between individuals. In response a number of philosophers have argued that act-utilitarianism is only vulnerable to that objection because it adheres to a theory of the good which ignores non-welfarist sources of intrinsic value such as justice. Fred Feldman, for example, argues that intrinsic value is independently generated by the receipt of (...) welfare and the degree to which receipt accords with the demands of justice, and that an action is right insofar as it maximizes the sum of both those sources of value. In response it is argued that justicized consequentialism only blocks the objection at the expense of presupposing deontological constraints. In addition, it is argued that the value of justice cannot be explained non-deontically and, therefore, that the proposed theory is not consequentialist all the way down. (shrink)

Rawls famously argued against meritocratic conceptions of distributive justice on the grounds that the accumulation of merit is an unavoidably lucky process, both because of differences in early environment, and innate talents. Thomas Mulligan (2018a) has recently provided a novel defense of meritocracy against the “luck objection”, arguing that both sources of luck would be mostly eliminated in a meritocracy. While a system of fair equality of opportunity ensures that differences in social class or early environment do not lead to (...) differences in the accumulation of merit, Kripke’s essentiality of origin thesis means that our genetic endowments, and thus our innate talents, could not have been any other way. But if we could not fail to have our innate talents, Mulligan argues, then it is not a matter of luck that we have them, and so the merits we accumulate on their basis are not so luck-dependent. This paper argues that Mulligan’s appeal to the essentiality of origin thesis fails to rescue meritocratic conceptions of distributive justice from the luck objection for two reasons. First, even granting essentiality of origin and fair equality of opportunity, the contingencies of the market and the social environment mean that having some innate talents is far luckier than having others. And second, the appeal to essentiality of origin misses the underlying motivation for the luck objection, and ignores the intimate connection between desert and responsibility. (shrink)

The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics interviewed Kagan about his formative years; his work on death, the moral status of animals, and desert; his views on changing one’s mind and convergence in philosophy; and his advice for graduate students in moral philosophy.

The paper argues that promise rights presuppose independently existing (if not pre-existing) claims. The argument relies on the Bifurcation Thesis, according to which all claims, and all rights, can be exhaustively divided into two categories: capacity based and exercise based.

A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within (...) the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it. (shrink)

This article argues that the price obtainable in an open market provides the best standard for determining the justice or injustice of the price of a product. The article argues that this standard, which is closely related to positions which have been held for hundreds of years, is superior to several alternative conceptions of the just price that have been put forward in recent years and is not subject to fundamental criticisms which can be addressed to them. The article also (...) shows how this standard is grounded in more fundamental principles of justice such as desert and equality. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (...) (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position. (shrink)

The target of my discussion is intuitions lay people have about justice in the context of drug policy—intuitions that take on a more or less moral-desert-based shape. I argue that even if we think desert is the right measure of how we ought to treat people, we ought still be in favour of Harm Reduction measures for people who use drugs. Harm Reduction measures are controversial with members of the public, and much of the opposition seems to come from something (...) like an appeal to a desert conception of justice—the notion that a just state of affairs is one in which everybody gets what they deserve, no more, no less. A recent study, for example, found that ‘moral outrage’ predicts a preference for prevalence reduction over Harm Reduction. The thinking seems to be that, since drug use is wrong, letting people who use drugs suffer and/or die as a consequence of their use is just. Aiding their health and safety, while perhaps compassionate, is unjust. I argue that there is a bad desert fit between using drugs and suffering avoidable harm even if using drugs is morally wrong. Many of the possible harms of drug use are socially/policy driven, and much problematic drug use is context dependent, not cleanly attributable to the decisions of the person who uses drugs. This means that even if drug use is wrong, people who use drugs deserve Harm Reduction policies, at minimum. (shrink)

What is the connection between action that is caused by inauthentic antecedent springs of action, such as surreptitiously engineered-in desires and beliefs, and moral obligation? If, for example, an agent performs an action that derives from such antecedent springs can it be that the agent is not obligated to perform this action owing to the inauthenticity of its causal antecedents? I defend an affirmative response, assuming that we morally ought to bring about the states of affairs that occur in the (...) intrinsically best worlds accessible to us and that a version of attitudinal hedonism is the axiology for ranking worlds. (shrink)

Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give every man his due. The principles of law are these: to live virtuously, not to harm others, to give his due to everyone. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of the just and the unjust. Law is the art of goodness and justice. By virtue of this [lawyers] may be called priests, for we cherish justice and profess knowledge or goodness and equity, separating right from wrong (...) and legal from the illegal. (shrink)

The concept of desert is familiar to everyone. We have all heard that wrongdoers deserve punishment, that the virtuous deserve happiness, that hard workers deserve success, that innocent victims deserve compensation, that everyone deserves an adequate level of medical care, that no one deserves to be born handicapped, and so on. ;From these sayings, it is clear that desert is an evaluative concept. It therefore belongs to the class of concepts that includes rightness, justice, rationality, goodness, beauty, and others. Desert (...) is thus a familiar, evaluative concept. ;It is ironic, then, that desert has not received anything like the amount of philosophical attention enjoyed by the other evaluative concepts that I mentioned. In this dissertation, I focus my attention on desert. ;I begin, in Chapter 1, by trying to explain why desert has been neglected by philosophers. In Chapter 2 I argue that much of the received philosophical wisdom about desert is false. Chapter 3 is dedicated to "institutional" theories of desert. These theories make desert relative to institutional rules or purposes. Chapter 4 explores some views about the purported connection between desert and the emotions. In Chapter 5 I argue that a well-known attempt to justify desert-claims fails, and that this failure is the result of mistaken views about the connections between desert and the concepts of moral obligation and of value. One aim of Chapter 6 is to reveal the defects of some prominent theories of desert of wages. A deeper aim is to expose a fundamental defect in a standard way of looking at desert in general. ;In Chapter 7, I present my own theory of desert. It contains, among other things, a catalogue of bases for desert and an explanation of "all-in desert" in terms of "prima facie desert" and "weight." The structure of my theory of desert is therefore similar to the structure of W. D. Ross's theory of moral rightness. (shrink)