Can Comparative Desert do Without Equality?

In the article ‘Equality and Desert,’ Shelly Kagan rejects the principle of equality as an arbiter of distributive justice. He claims instead that all of our intuitions about distributive justice that are thought to support some principle of equality can be captured under the principle of desert. I argue that Kagan's claim fails because, in cashing out his notion of desert, Kagan makes tacit appeal to the principle of equality