Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...) together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)

Some meritocratic defenders of capitalism rely on the principle that cooperators should receive a share of the product commensurate with their contribution. However, such defences of capitalism fail due to a dilemma. Either they rely on an understanding of contribution that arguably will be reflected by the capital-labour split in suitably idealized capitalist economies, but cannot serve as a plausible standard of merit; or they rely on an interpretation of contribution that is a plausible standard of merit, but which won’t (...) tend to be reflected by the capital-labour split in capitalist economies. (shrink)

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)

The orthodox view of the metaphysics of desert is that desert is a triadic relation that obtains between a subject, an object and a desert base. Not only is this view lacking in motivation, but conceiving of the desert base as part of the desert relation renders the concept of desert incoherent. Instead, desert should be thought of as a dyadic relation between a subject and an object, where desert bases are simply the grounds for dyadic desert facts.

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)

I argue that a theory of distributive justice is sensitive to desert if and only if it does not require an institutional scheme that prevents individuals from treating one another as they deserve, and requires a desert ethos. A desert ethos is a set of principles that, though not embodied in a society’s basic coercive structure, nevertheless governs interpersonal relations between citizens. These two necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for ‘giving desert its due’ in a theory of justice. I therefore (...) reject the received view that a desert-sensitive theory must endeavor to guarantee distributions patterned according to desert. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEntrepreneurs should act as stewards of entrepreneurial rent. Entrepreneurial rent is the difference between the ex post value of a venture and its ex ante costs. It is the result of competition among buyers and sellers within the market process rather than the sole efforts of the entrepreneur. As a result, entrepreneurs should allocate entrepreneurial rent for the benefit of other market participants rather than consuming it for themselves. The moral obligation to steward entrepreneurial rent is consistent with traditional bases (...) of property rights and the norm of social welfare maximization, and it applies to corporations and their shareholders, as well as individual entrepreneurs. (shrink)

The question I wish to take up in this paper is whether competitive markets, as mechanisms that initiate the distribution of scarce goods, allocate those goods in accordance with what participants in those markets deserve. I want to argue that in general people do not in fact deserve what they get from market interactions, when “what they get” is determined by the competitive forces coming to bear on the market. This more general claim is meant to apply to all participants (...) in the market. However, my strategy here is to focus on the particular case of the role of entrepreneurs, as I will define them, and whether they deserve the profits they reap in a competitive capitalist market. In particular, I will argue that the claim that entrepreneurs deserve their profits, when spelled out precisely, is indeed not plausible. Generalizing from this claim, I want to suggest how moral desert is inappropriate as a justification of market shares whenever competition determines the magnitude of those shares. I should stress, though, the particularity of my central claim: it is that “ entrepreneurs do not deserve their profits.” This is not to say that, for other reasons, people should not receive the rewards doled out by a market. My claim is only that desert has nothing directly to do with it. I am deviating significantly here from the usual strategy for denying the relevance of desert claims to principles of distributive justice. (shrink)

The facts of global poverty are staggering. Consider, for instance, how 1.5 billion people subsist below the international poverty line, which means about a quarter of the world's current population lives in poverty. There is much talk about how freer markets will help the situation of these people, in particular how it will help the worst off. So far the evidence for this claim is fairly unclear. ‘At any rate, on several accounts, alleviating the worst aspects of poverty would impose (...) fairly small costs on us in more affluent countries, yet we continue to do very little about alleviating this situation. For instance, a 1 per cent tax on world product would make enormous inroads in lifting people out of poverty. Alternatively, simply a shift in priorities could do this without any added taxes: a 1 per cent decrease in military spending in the developed world and a 10 per cent decrease in military spending in the developing world could have the same effect. (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)

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract law (...) conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry. (shrink)

There is a series of candidates for the ground of intrinsic value. Different theories posit that the ground consists of some or all of the following: types of experiences, desire-satisfaction, virtue, meaningful relationships, true beliefs, desert-satisfaction, etc. The ground can be local or global depending on whether it grounds value of a spatial, temporal, or fact-specific part of the universe (e.g., Jones enjoying this ice cream) or all facts considered (e.g., the universe over time). In this paper, I argue that (...) the single ground of global intrinsic value is the total amount of desert-adjusted well-being. I begin by providing a sketch of moral desert. I then argue that desert-adjusted well-being alone satisfies our intuitions about global intrinsic value. (shrink)

This paper investigates one of Anderson’s (2007) objections to individually-allocating principles of distributive justice: that they are incompatible with the free market. I argue that Anderson’s objection applies only to the specific principle she discusses, associated with luck egalitarianism, and not to individually-allocating principles generally. I then discuss different individually-allocating principles, the precepts of justice, broached by Rawls (1971,1999) but never developed by him. The precepts determine people’s distributive entitlements based on their contributions, efforts, and needs. I offer an interpretation (...) of each precept, explain why its distributive standard is compelling, show how the precepts avoid Anderson’s objection, and address Rawls’s rationale for not using the precepts in his account of distributive justice. I conclude by comparing the precepts to the kind of principle that Anderson prefers, range-constraining rules, arguing that the precepts meet the key standard associated with those rules. (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)