Desert and Justice (Mind Association Occasional)

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DESERT AND JUSTICE

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Desert and Justice • •

Edited by SERENA OLSARETTI

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume springs from a conference on 'Desert and Justice' which took place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in July 200r. This conference was made possible by the generous hospitality and financial support of Emmanuel College, and by sponsorships by the British Academy, the Mind Association, the Analysis Committee, and the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge. I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments, and Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press. I am also grateful to Hilary Walford of OUP for her work as an editor, to Rupert Cousens, also of OUP, for helping with the book cover, and to John French for the cover picture and design.

CONTENTS List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Debating Desert and Justice

lX X

1

SERENA OLSARETTI I.

Comparative and Noncomparative Desert DAVID MILLER

2.

Desert: Individualistic and Holistic

45

THOMAS HURKA

3. Distributive Justice and Economic Desert SAMUEL SCHEFFLER

4. Comparative Desert

93

SHELLY KAGAN

5. On the Comparative Element of Justice

123

OWEN McLEOD 6.

Return to Twin Peaks: On the Intrinsic Moral Significance of Equality

145

FRED FELDMAN 7.

Brute Luck Equality and Desert PETER VALLENTYNE

8.

Distributive Justice and Compensatory Desert SERENA OLSARETTI

9.

Effort and Imagination

205

GEORGE SHER 10.

The Dilemma of Desert

... JU�"""r\lnr\.J.'" T

.,..,.,..,.

"\-VLl!

219

Contents

Vlll

11.

The Smart Theory of Moral Responsibility and Desert RICHARD J. ARNESON

Bibliography Index

23 3

259 265

LIST OF FIGURES r. r. Comparative and noncomparative desert

2. r. Individualistic moral desert 2.2. Holistic moral desert 4 . 1 . A representative individual desert graph 4 . 2. Two individual desert graphs, with Ns location fixed 4.3 . The Y gap view 4+ The inadequacy of the Y gap constraint taken alone 4.5. The Y gap view with a V-shaped skyline 4.6. The difference between the Y gap view and the X gap view 6.1. Graph D 6.2. Graph C 6·3· Twin Peaks 6+ Revised Twin Peaks 6.5. Twin Peaks-Revision I 6.6. Twin Peaks-Revision 2 6·7· Twin Peaks-Revision 3 6.8. Twin Peaks-Revision 4 6·9· Twin Peaks-Revision 5 6.ro. Twin Peaks-Revision 6

35 47 49 95 1 10 III

1 13 116 1 19 149 1 50 1 55 1 57 1 63 1 63 1 64 1 65 1 67 1 67

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ]. ARNES ON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in moral and political phi­ losophy. His recent writings mainly address two topics: ( I ) the reconcili­ ation of equality and responsibility in theories of distributive j ustice, and ( 2 ) the problems and prospects of consequentialist ethical theory. He is also interested in issues concerning the justification of democracy.

RICHARD

FRED FELDMAN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of Introductory Ethics;

Doing the Best We Can: An Essay in Informal Deontic Logic; Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death; and Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert: Essays in Moral Philosophy. His most recent project is a book on hedonism, tentatively titled Pleasure and the Good Life: On the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism. The manuscript has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press.

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of 'Perfectionism and Virtue, Vice, and Value and works primarily on questions about intrinsic goods and evils.

THOMAS HURKA

SHELLY KAGAN is Professor of Philosophy and the Henry R. Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics at Yale. He is the author of The Limits of Morality and Normative Ethics, and is currently writing a book titled

The Geometry of Desert. OWEN Mc LEOD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lafayette College. He is co-editor, with Louis Pojman, of What do we Deserve? A Reader on Justice and Desert, and has published articles in ethics, metaethics, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, and other areas.

is a Fellow of Nuffield College and Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He has published books and articles on many topics in political philosophy, with a particular long-standing interest in the idea of social justice, represented in his books Social Justice, Market, State and Community and Principles of Social Justice. He is currently invest­ igating what role the idea of national responsibility should play in our thinking ::tbout intcrn:lti0!131 jl.l�t;cP, :'''0 "_,,.iting :1 �hnrt ;ntrnnnrt;nn tn political philosophy. DAVID MILLER

Notes on Contributors

Xl

is a Fellow of St John's College and University Assistant Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She is currently working on a book provisionally titled Responsible Individuals and their Due, which examines some j ustifications of market-generated inequalities. SERENA OLSARETTI

SAMUEL SCHEFFLER is the Class of 1941 World War II Memorial Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, and

Boundaries and Allegiances. GEORGE SHER is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He is the author of Desert, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics, and Approximate Justice: Studies in Non-Ideal Theory. He is currently writing a book about blame. VALLENTYNE is Professor of Philosophy at the Virginia Commonwealth University. He has written on the metaphysics of laws and properties, moral dilemmas, the moral status of children, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and consequentialism. He edited Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on the Work of David Gauthier, co-edited with Hillel Steiner The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings and Left-Libertarianism and its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, and edited the six-volume anthology Equality and Justice. He is currently working on a defence of a version of left-libertarianism (which combines self-ownership with egalitarianism). PETER

is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He is the author of Robert Nozick: Property Justice and the Minimal State, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, and Why Read Marx Today? and various papers in political philosophy. He is currently exploring ways in which political philosophy can better inform public policy.

JONATHAN WOLFF

Introduction: Debating Desert and Justice SERENA O L SA R ETTI • •

The view that desert and justice are intimately related has a troubled history. Aristotle thought it obvious that 'all men agree that what is just in distribu­ tion must be according to desert in some sense', 1 but desert has been largely absent from contemporary discussions about distributive justice, and its decline predicted by more than one observer over the last few decades.2 However, desert has never completely lost its hold on theorizing about justice, and recently a number of moral and political philosophers have joined more long-standing desert theorists3 in examining this notion and its role for distributive justice.4 This volume is testimony to a growing interest in desert. [ am grateful to David Bilchitz, Paul Bou-Habib, Cecile Fabre, Matthew Kramer, Kristjan Kristjansson, and Peter Vallentyne for very helpful comments. I also thank the Oxford University Press referees for suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Sir David Ross. Aristotle added: 'though they do not all specify the same sort of desert.' A ristotle's judgement was shared by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick among others. Z See Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 196 5 ); J. Kleinig, 'The Concept of Desert', American Philosophical Quarterly 8 ( 1 9 7 1 ), 7 1 -8. Throughout, and unless [ specify otherwise, by 'justice' I mean distributive justice. 3 The phrase 'desert theorist' refers in this essay to anyone who analyses and writes about desert, and not only to someone who defends it. 4 After Joel Feinberg'S seminal 'Justice and Personal Desert', in his Doing and Deserving. Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), contributions in the 1970S and 1 9 80s were rather limited, but there have been a few important systematic defenders of desert. See e.g. George Sher, Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 987); David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 76) and Market, State and Community. Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 89); W. Sadurski, Giving Desert its Due: Social Justice and Legal Theory (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1 9 8 5 ) . New contributors on the topic over the last decade have included the following: G. Cupit, Justice as Fittingness (Oxford: OUP, 1996); F. Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge: CUP, 1 997);]. Lamont, 'The Concept of Desert in Distributive Justice', Philosophical Quarterly, 44 ( 1 994), 4 5-64; T. Hurka, 'The Common Structure of Virtue and Desert', Ethics, 1 1 2 (2002), 6-3 I; S. Kagan, 'Equality and D esert', in L. P. Pojman and O. McLeod (eds.), What do we Deserve? A Reader on Justice and Desert (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1999), 298-314; L. P. Pojman, 'Does Equality Trump Desert?', ibid. 283-97; O. McLeod, 'Desert and Institutions', ibid. 1 8 6-9 5 ; S. Scheffler, 'Justice and Desert in Liberal Theory', California Law Review, 88 (2000), 965-90. Alongside the revived interest among moral and political philosophers, there is a growing social science and psychology literature that rlp11� '''lth clf'�wrt. Sf't' M. Ross and D. T. Millf"f (pn�' Thf? f'.fa;r,", ""',fnfin" ;"" �1'l"r... ,A,..,"I' T;l1" ( Cambridge: CUP, 2002) for some very recent contributions to the debate about social p�ychology and beliefs about justice. Some political theorists have drawn on this literature: see esp. David Miller, Principles ofSocial Justice ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

2

Serena O/saretti

The contributions printed here do not reflect a unified view regarding the desirability, and the possibility, of formulating a desert-based conception of justice, although a few of them do set out to defend some such conception.5 What all of them share is a conviction that the question of whether desert has a role to play in a theory of justice is a timely and important one that merits serious investigation. In this introduction I will identify and discuss the most salient issues in the current desert debate to which the chapters of this volume contribute. As a preliminary to this discussion, it is appropriate to note just how wide­ spread and varied scepticism about desert has been in contemporary political philosophy. Libertarians have generally shown little sympathy towards it, discarding it in favour of their entitlement theory of justice, which requires that individuals' rights be respected, not that distributions reflect a pattern of deservingness of persons.6 Neo-liberals, too, have rejected the possibility of desert playing a role in economic justice, on the grounds that it requires a consensus about what makes people deserving that is neither achievable nor desirable? And, finally, desert has enjoyed no more favour amongst liberal egalitarians, who are especially suspicious of its inegalitarian potential. 8 That such divergent positions should all converge on the view that desert has no role to play in distributive justice is a striking fact,9 and, in light of this, the renewed interest in desert calls for some explanation. Two main related factors seem to account for it. The first is the increasing emphasis on the importance of making room for personal responsibility within theories of distributive justice. Most writers on justice now acknowledge that the choices and actions of individuals are relev­ ant to ascertain what they are due as a matter of j ustice, and that the claims individuals have must reflect the recognition that, under certain conditions, they are responsible for the outcomes they bring about. Although, as we will 5 Namely, Shelly Kagan, Thomas Hurka, Owen McLeod, Fred Feldman, David Miller, and George Sher. Not all of them actually provide a defence of desert in their contributions to this vol­ ume. By 'desert-based conception of justice' I refer to a view of justice as requiring that people get what they deserve, whether or not the demands of desert are viewed to exhaust the demands of justice. 6 See R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, I 974). One libertarian who adopts desert alongside entitlement is Jan Narveson. See ] . Narveson, 'Deserving Profits', in R. Cowan and M. J. Rizzo (eds.), Profits and Morality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, I99 5), 48-87. 7 See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, ii. The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I976). 8 See ]. Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Oxford: OUP, 1999), ss. I7 and 48. 9 See S. Scheffler, 'Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and ' Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2I (I992), 299-323, for an analysis of this widespread scepticism about desert. Scheffler suggests that the influence of naturalism on philosophical liberalism has u.. ;:,u!\.\,..J �u a \"vH��,-i�VH LllaL d·�... iH-,tivi� vf i..:..Ji·;i...!u�! .....b..... �.... J �i.. ..!..:rpi�;:ino �!;..1� ,..'f �::.'�:.::-� :� : ....;...., .J�� stantial and that the latter, therefore, should be abandoned.

Introduction

3

see below, the exact nature of the relation between desert and responsibility is a matter of contention among desert theorists, most will concede that the two notions are somehow related, and that rendering a conception of j ustice responsibility-sensitive seems to amount to making it desert-sensitive. The second reason for the increased interest in desert may be found in the need to re-examine the liberal egalitarian position on this principle. Various liberal egalitarians have subscribed to John Rawls's argument that desert should play no role in distributive j ustice. Rawls's main argument for this is that to allow desert to determine distributions would be to allow some to have unfair advantage over others, in that some would have greater claims on the basis of better natural endowments and social circumstances, which they cannot claim credit for. Rawls's argument has been subjected to a number of challenges. One is that it leads to sabotaging the notion of desert altogether, a conclusion that few would be happy to live with. Another is that Rawls's scepticism about desert as a principle of distributive justice does not sit easily with the endorsement of related notions of responsibility and autonomy, or, for that matter, with a retributivist account of the j ustice of punishment, which Rawls himself seems sympathetic to. 10 Philosophers of egalitarian con­ victions who have endorsed Rawls's anti-desert argument, then, face the task of showing that it can surmount the objections that have been raised against it. In so doing, they have begun to engage once again in the analysis of desert in a way that, prior to the development of responsibility-sensitive egalitarian­ ism, would have appeared both unnecessary and regrettable. In light of these developments, it seems natural that desert theorists should have come to address the following two main questions about desert and just­ ice. The first concerns the relation between desert and equality: are desert and equality necessarily conflicting values, or is a pluralist view that reconciles them defensible? The second set of questions regards the nature of distribut­ ive justice and of desert: does respecting desert require that each individual receive what she deserves, regardless of the situation of others, or do com­ parisons with other individuals play a role in determining what each deserves? These two main questions are of central importance in examining what sort of role desert can play in our thinking about distributive justice. They are also the questions on which recent discussions of desert, and the chapters in this volume, in particular, have mostly focused, and for these reasons I will dedicate the best part of this chapter, in sections 2 and 3, to considering them in greater depth. First, however, section I prepares the 10 Scheffler, 'Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes', has highlighted some of these points, while still endorsing Rawls's rejection of desert; see also M . Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: CUP, 1982). Some discussion of Rawls's anti-desert argument has focused on Rawls's misleading implication that, in order to deserve, one should have to deserve the desert basis, or be lL:-''pull�iDlt: alllhe Way Juwu'. S\..\.. L·b· i';vL.iL�·:' AnurLhy, ;)tare ana UtUpUl ana A. LaltChICK, 'Un Deserving to Deserve', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 ( I 977), 3 70-88.

4

Serena O/saretti

discussion of those more specific issues with an overview of the general features of the concept of desert and of the main points of contention in the desert debate to date.

1. C H A R A C T E RIZING D E S E RT; T H R E E MAIN I S SU E S

A glance at a few of the most important contemporary contributions on desert and justice reveals a remarkable variety of different approaches to the topic, with only a few basic points of substantive agreement among desert theorists. These agree that desert is a three-place relation between a person, the grounds on which she is said to be deserving (the desert basis), and the treatment or good which she is said to deserve (the deserved good).l1 Furthermore, most converge on the following three points. First, the grounds on which a person is deserving must, in some relevant sense, be something about that person herself. A student may deserve a high grade for having worked hard and made progress, but not in virtue of the fact that her parents would be extremely disappointed if she got a lower grade.12 Second, desert is generally viewed as related to an appraisal of the putatively deserving person. It is because we take up appraising or evaluative attitudes towards other people's features and actions that they deserve some response, good, or treatment. Desert is said to be a sort of 'fittingness' between certain features and actions of one person on the one hand and another's evaluative attitudes on the other. 1 3 Finally, most desert claims have, or are supposed to have, moral force. To say that someone deserves something is to claim that she ought, other things being equal, to get that thing, or that it would be morally better that she get it. Beyond the identification of these very general features, desert theorists tend to disagree over what else, if anything, may be said about the concept of desert in the abstract. Yet many questions remain about what it means to deserve something. In what follows I identify three main issues that are of particular significance in determining what desert is, and on which desert theorists have taken different views.

The desert bases When we adduce a fact about a person as a reason for why we think she is deserving, what sort of fact can we appeal to ? Can anything be a desert basis, 11 I am here focusing on personal desert, that is, desert the subjects for which are persons. 12 This point, which Joel Feinberg has emphasized, is endorsed by most desert theorists. ..)n::: l-elllOetg, jUMll..c dlH.l .i'ei�ulldi UC:)(;ll". 13 Ibid.; Miller, SocialJustice; Cupit, Justice as Fittingness.

Introduction

5

so long as it is something about the putatively deserving person? Can one, for example, deserve something on the basis of being a human being, despite the fact that this is a feature one has done nothing to acquire and which one shares with all others ? Does having a grandparent who is 100 years old qualify as a reason for deserving something? Examples of desert claims we ordinarily make pull us in different directions. On the one hand, we some­ times use the notion of desert as if it were inextricably bound up with that of treating people as responsible agents: to deserve something, it seems, is to come to earn it, or to be able to claim credit (or discredit) for it. On the other hand, ho�ever, we certainly also claim that all human beings deserve respect, that a needy person deserves help, or that a victim of an injustice deserves compensation, and these judgements do not seem to imply that deserving something amounts to claiming credit for it. Ordinary use of the concept, then, seems to oscillate between more restrictive and more inclusive readings, a tendency reflected by contributions on the topic, which we may group into two main types. 1 4 The first broad group of views is ecumenical, holding that many different things may constitute desert bases. One such view, defended by Feinberg, holds that different desert bases correlate to different modes of treatment, where the latter include the award of prizes; assignment of grades; rewards and punishments; praise, blame, and other informal responses; and repara­ tion, liability, and other modes of compensation. The basis for deserving a prize, for example, is the preeminent possession of a skill, while that for com­ pensation is some loss or injury one has suffered. IS Another ecumenical view is that defended by George Sher, who argues that there are as many desert bases as there are values that j ustify identifying certain features of persons as grounds for their receiving a benefit or burden. So, the value-conferring property of diligent efforts is what accounts for the fact that people deserve on the grounds of their sustained efforts. Similarly, the value of diachronic fairness-fairness in the distribution of burdens and benefits in a single person's life across time-is what accounts for the fact that having committed an offence is a basis for deserving punishment, as well as for the fact that incurring harm makes one deserving of compensation. 1 6 Finally, another ecumenical view that deserves mention is the institutional one: on this view, what grounds individuals are deserving on will depend on what purpose or goal the institution which provides the deserved good has or promotes. There are then as many desert bases as there are goals which institutions pursue. For example, since the purpose of a running race is to reward the best runner, and 14 To suggest that a view is of one of these two types does not mean, of course, that it shares nothing with views of the other type. For example, Miller's and Narveson's views, while being . 1 . .. "" , ... :. L • . , �C:ic,-llvC: auu c:..... UlUL;lU\..�.u, .l\....>t' .............. '"

object of appraisal.

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Li11p1Jd�1:-' UllLJlc: l..UlllC:IlUUlI Ulal Ut::-,tll Dd.:-'C:-' dIe Ule

15 Feinberg, 'Justice and Personal Desert'

16 Sher, Desert.

6

Serena Olsaretti

the best runner is thought to be the one who runs fastest, performance is the relevant desert basis here; and since the goal of the market is that of meeting wants of consumers by allocating rights over scarce resources, efficient alloc­ ating of resources is the basis on which entrepreneurs are said to deserve their profits. 17 These different ecumenical views, of course, face different challenges;but there is one difficulty they must all deal with, which regards the extent to which they use the notion of desert in a distinctive sense. By endorsing the possibility that there are vastly different types of desert, these views run the risk of utilizing the notion in too loose a sense, so that to claim that some­ one deserves something just means that it would be good if that person got that thing. An assertion of desert would then not identify a distinctive sort of moral claim, a claim that we may clearly distinguish, say, from those of entitlement and of need. The second main group of views avoids this difficulty, in that it is selective, and holds that the sorts of features that may constitute desert bases are lim­ ited. One selective view holds that desert bases are features that individuals are responsible for, a view which seems to account for some of our most deeply held convictions about desert, such as that individuals' efforts make them deserving.IS On this view the sheer possession of talents, for example, is not an appropriate desert basis, and, as Rawls and other egalitarians have suggested, nor is the exercise of those talents. 1 9 Another selective view is the appraising attitudes. view, which insists that only things that are the object of appraisal may ground desert: costs and needs, on this view, cannot be desert bases, since we do not appraise such things, while we do appraise, say, a per­ formance or someone's motive for action.2o Finally, an especially important selective view that merits attention is that according to which only features that are morally appraisable are bases for deserving. On this view, all desert is reducible to what may be called moral desert, where to ascribe moral desert to a person is to judge her as a moral agent. For example, the claims that someone who hurt you intentionally deserves your angry reaction and that 17 N. Scott Arnold, 'Why Profits are Deserved', Ethics, 97 (1987), 387-402; D. Cummiskey, 'Desert and Entitlement: A Rawlsian Consequentialist Account', Analysis, 47 ( 1987), 15-19. These views in part overlap with Feinberg's, which allows for some institutionally created desert claims. 1 8 Barry, Political Argument; Sadurski, Giving Desert its Due. For a critique of the view that desert and responsibility are necessarily related, see F. Feldman, 'Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom', Mind, 104 ( 1995). For a defence of effort as a desert basis, see also H . Milne, 'Desert, Effort and Equality', Journal of Applied Philosophy, 3 ( 1 986), 235-43, and for problems with this view of desert, see J. Lamont, 'Problems for Effort-Based Distribution Principles', Journal of Applied Philosophy, 12 ( 1995), 2 15-29 and A. Levine, 'Rewarding Effort', Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), 404-r8. 19 Rawls, Theory ofJustice, s. 48. 2 0 Miller, Social Justice, a n d Principles of Social Justice . . �il Ier act� alIy defends a view . tnat appeals to Oorh appraising aUHUUC� auu 1 t�pOIl�lOlll(y as ueuIllHlug "' Hal .... VUUf.. .:> a.-. bLUUtUt desert.

Introduction

7

saints deserve to be happy appeal to different types of moral desert. So do some claims about punishment, where the latter is conceived as having at least in part an expressive function, that is, as being in part j ustified as an expression of blame.2 1 Views o f moral desert differ depending on which features are deemed to be morally appraisable, and on what one is said to deserve on their basis. We may disagree over whether the quality of individuals' will or the outcome of their actions is what makes them the appropriate object of moral praise and blame. Furthermore, we may disagree over whether to say that individuals are morally deserving just amounts to saying that they are the appropriate target of praise and blame (that is, they are morally responsible), or whether the attribution of moral desert involves the judgement that being virtuous or vicious makes individuals deserving of more or less well-being. 22 Moral desert is acknowledged to be an important type of desert by most desert theorists, including several of the contributors to this volume. Indeed, as Richard Arneson and Samuel Scheffler suggest in their respective chapters, the notion of moral desert and the related notion of moral respons­ ibility seem to be of fundamental importance for understanding the potential role which other types of desert should play in distributive j ustice. Viewing individuals as deserving of moral praise and blame seems inextric­ ably bound up with our practices of treating others as responsible, and it may be thought that viewing individuals as deserving of rewards and punishment is also similarly connected with a recognition of them as freely choosing and responsible agents. While all desert theorists adopt moral desert as one type of desert, many suggest that there is no reason to think that people can be deserving on the basis of moral properties alone, and that moral desert is only one of different types of desert.23 The challenge then faced by the selective view according to which moral desert is the only type of desert, which other selective views must also deal with, is that of j ustifying the identification of only some desert claims as genuine in light of the fact that many other types of comprehensible and perfectly consistent desert claims are commonly made.

2 1 On the view that punishment has an expressive function, see Joel Feinberg, 'The Expressive Function of Punishment', in his Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 970); see also T. Scanlon, What we Owe to Each Other ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 9 9 8 ) . In this volume, Thomas Hurka's 'Desert: Individualistic and Holistic' and Samuel Scheffler's 'Distributive Justice and Economic Desert' also discuss the view of punishment as in part an expression of resentment and blame. 22 Scheffler subscribes to the former view of moral desert, and points out, in his chapter in this volume, that Thomas Scanlon could be seen to do the same. Both reject, however, the latter, thicker view of moral desert, which seems to be supported by Feldman, Hurka, and Kagan. T I:"Q_. '" t='"; .... h,, ...... ... ..-." ",11",�" ( ,_ 1:U '" _ .. ... . . � 2� ,pp \,fjJ1pr, Mf1r/u�t. Statp and Cnmmunih. • .> ./ · � ·- · ' "- · O ' · · · ' ·· · ·- " - ·- · ""' · · · � · -··� · .Jj-' �� ' desert, including moral desert. A similar position is defended in this volume by Hurka.

8

Serena Olsaretti The moral force of desert

The question of whether we believe in moral desert alone should not be confused with the point, mentioned earlier, concerning the moral f�rce of desert. This is the second issue of significance in characterizing desert, and on which different positions may be defended. Most desert claims have moral force, in the sense that they are prima facie ought claims: the fact that some­ one deserves something means that she ought, other things being equal, to receive that thing, or that it would be morally better if she did. This is true of 'non-moral' desert claims, that is, desert on the basis of characteristics other than morally appraisable ones, as much as of claims of 'moral' desert. However, desert theorists conceive of the moral force of desert in different ways. In particular, we can distinguish between telic and deontic desert.24 Desert as a telic principle is one that is relevant for assessing outcomes or states of affairs. Telic desert theorists believe that it is in itself bad or unjust if some people do not have what they deserve, and an outcome may be deemed to be bad or unjust when desert is not satisfied, even if no one is responsible for bringing this outcome about, and even if nothing can be done about it.2s Things are different if desert is conceived as a deontic principle. In this case, desert is used primarily to assess and guide actions rather than evaluate states of affairs, so that a situation in which people do not get what they deserve is not bad or unjust if no one is responsible for bringing it about and nothing can be done to change it. This distinction between telic and deontic desert in part accounts for the fact that desert sometimes is and sometimes is not thought of as related to obliga­ tions. When we j udge that saints deserve to be happy, or that someone who has suffered through unavoidable bad luck deserves some good fortune, there is no implication that someone-whether a specific individual or society as a whole-has a correlative obligation to ensure that the saints and the unlucky person get what they deserve. In making such j udgements, we appeal to telic, rather than deontic, desert. When, by contrast, we claim that women and men deserve equal pay for equal work, or that those who bear undue costs deserve compensation, we standardly imply that someone has an obligation to ensure that these desert claims are satisfied, an obligation which we may think we must meet through the appropriate institutional arrangements. Underpin­ ning claims of this sort there may be an endorsement of deontic desert. 26 24 This draws on Derek Parfit's distinction between deontic and telic egalitarianism in

or Priority?, The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1 995)·

Equality

25 In this volume, Feldman, Hurka, Kagan, and McLeod seem to endorse this view of desert. See also F. Feldman, 'Adjusting Utility for Justice: A Consequentialist Reply to the Objection from Justice', in his Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert. :, Aililuugl1, UlI.,.UUl�L, lilLH.. IH.... LJ Ih.H L ... , ;)�J1I.."" .... �I..u " I.. JJ1H.. V ...... ,_,.. he: c!".d.'::�!'�� dllO lJt:�ell

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. . • , 1 . , v � � �.. Hi � d y l J l g (t1dl l.H.::-.. t .:fr I� d gellU1l1t.: \l dJ UI,... , "'- ,, ; .., T , "1 ' " 1) ",,..,,, . , . QQ f .. "", ,", ,,,, \ " J( , _ ,... ...... . and 'Rawls and Utilitarianism' , in his Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: OUP, 200 I ), I49-72.

Thomas Hurka holistic aspects in an especially straightforward way and is therefore a model for retributive and economic desert. My discussion of its two aspects will follow general lines laid down by Joel Feinberg and Shelly Kagan,3 but will differ from them on several points of detail. As I understand them, claims about desert assign intrinsic value to com­ binations of states as combinations, or in addition to the values their parts have on their own. According to an individualistic principle of moral desert, the relevant combinations are always of states within the life of a single indi­ vidual. If a virtuous person enjoys pleasure, then his virtue is good, his pleas­ ure is good, and there is a further good, which I will call a desert-good, in the fact that these two goods occur in the same life. If a vicious person suffers pain, there is a similar desert-good in the fact that these two evils occur in the same life. But if a virtuous person suffers pain or a vicious one enjoys pleasure, he is getting the opposite of what he deserves and his combination of states is a desert-evil. In addition, I will assume this individualistic principle has what I call an optimality structure: it says that for any degree of virtue or vice there is a quantity of pleasure or pain that it is best in desert terms for a person to have, with greater and lesser quantities having less desert-value and in extreme cases being evil. I will also assume that the principle satisfies a proportionality condition, according to which the best division of a fixed quantity of pleasure or pain among individuals is always proportioned to their degrees of virtue or vice, so a person who is twice as virtuous enjoys twice as much pleasure. This ideal of proportionality has been prominent in the classical literature on desert and can be included in an individualistic principle by means of this con­ dition. The resulting principle is represented in Figure 2. 1 , where each curve shows how the desert-value of a person's pleasure or pain is a function of its quantity, given a fixed degree of virtue or vice in his character. The optimal quantities of pleasure and pain are represented by the peaks on the curves, and two points about these peaks' locations deserve comment. First, the peak for a person who is twice as virtuous or vicious is always twice as far to the right or left of the origin, so his optimal pleasure or pain is twice as great. This is an obvious implication of proportionality, but the peak for a person who is twice as virtuous or vicious is also always twice as high, so his having that optimal pleasure or pain has twice as much desert-value. This, too, follows from proportionality, and is intuitively attractive. If we had the choice between giving the optimal reward to a saint or to someone only slightly virtuous, surely it would be better in desert terms to give it to the saint; if we 1 J . Feinberg, 'Noncomparative Justice', in his Rights, justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 9 80), 2 6 5-306; S. Kagan, 'Equality and Desert', in L. 1). PUJliLd.H dU.J U . l\h.Lcod leu::..}, \\ J},,,U ulJ U C LlC�(;]Tt.': .';' ;;;' f'dI1('1 ( iii jil;:; :i