Philosophical Concept Of Desert Research Paper

1. Desert And Merit

The terms ‘desert’ and ‘merit’ are often used interchangeably. Some writers, however, have insisted on their conceptual distinction. If, for example, the ancient tie between diligence and desert (deservire: to serve zealously) is focused upon, the language of merit may be used to capture those outcomes warranted by other forms of value. Milne, for example, argues that

a natural beauty spot is worthy of, or merits, or rates inclusion in a published guide to places of natural beauty, but it does not make sense to say that the inclusion in the guide is something deserved in the way of reward. The classification of human beauty (or intelligence, or skill) is a parallel case: the naturally beautiful person merits a certain rating, but he or she does not deserve it any more than Niagara Falls is rewarded by its rating as a tourist spectacle. Only insofar as effort is expended in producing the achievement or contribution, or in acquiring a skill, is there the basis of a desertclaim: a person cannot be deserving of praise or reward without trying (Milne 1986, p. 240).

The point is expressed generally by Pojman. Merit (or demerit), he claims, is the more inclusive term, referring to ‘any feature or quality that is the basis for distributing positive [or negative] attribution,’ whereas desert is a species of merit, ‘typically or paradigmatically connected with action, since it rests on what we voluntarily do or produce’ (Pojman 1999, p. 86). He then distinguishes a secondary, negative, compensatory or rectificatory use of desert, to accommodate cases in which—relatively faultlessly—a person suffers some evil and recompense is appropriately called for.

Although a distinction of sorts can thus be made, it is at best a soft one, since a great deal of current debate about desert (see below, Sect. 11) has concerned the enhancement of arbitrarily possessed advantages through diligent effort or the exacerbation of disadvantages, including some relating to effort.

2. Preinstitutional And Institutional Deserts

In recent philosophical discussion, a distinction has frequently been drawn between preinstitutional and institutional deserts—between deserts that are said to be ‘naturally’ implicated by virtue of some characteristic activity of their subject, and those that are attributable only within the framework of some institutionalized arrangement. A person is said— preinstitutionally—to deserve his good fortune, or— institutionally—to have deserved to win a particular prize. The former is often said to be prior to the latter: ‘desert is a ‘‘natural’’ moral notion (that is, one which is not logically tied to institutions, practices, and rules)’ (Feinberg 1963, p. 70). In many of its attributions to humans, preinstitutional desert is tied to ‘reactive attitudes—the sense we have of others’ agency, of their sharing with us at the deepest human level’ (Strawson 1962). And the rejection of preinstitutional desert is often associated with a deterministic naturalism (Scheffler 1992).

Those who contend that only institutional desert claims have a legitimate place in our understanding claim that talk of preinstitutional deserts assumes, contrary to fact, that the characteristics on the basis of which such claims are made are fairly distributed. But, such critics of preinstitutional desert argue, since people naturally and arbitrarily differ in the talents, capacities, and social environments that ground what preinstitutional desert claims would allocate to them, they cannot really be said to deserve such things, or their fruits (cf. Rawls 1971, pp. 104–6, 312–4).

Leaving these latter claims aside (though see Sect. 11), it may nevertheless turn out that the distinction between preinstitutional and institutional deserts is one of degree more than one of kind. The good weather which—it might be said—A deserves for her vacation makes sense in part because the social institution of providing vacations has a point (recreation) to which ‘good weather’ intelligibly relates. Where no social institution is in place, it is much more difficult to make a specific attribution of desert. Thus, given the institution of punishment, it is easier to argue that those who deserve it are wrongdoers, than to argue—ab initio—that what wrongdoers deserve is punishment. It may well be that doing good has positive deserts, and doing ill has negative deserts; but the specific character of those deserts, whether good or ill, may not be determinable independently of particular social institutions (that, admittedly, are them- selves open to scrutiny). It is—in part—the difficulty in establishing what, preinstitutionally, people deserve that creates some of the moral space for contemporary debates about restorative justice. Certainly wrong-doing deserves some form of negative response: but should that response take the form of punishment (narrowly understood as fines, imprisonment), or instead as confrontation, blame, reparation, apology, penitence, and so forth?

3. Desert And Entitlement

But even if the distinction between preinstitutional and institutional deserts is soft, it should not lead to a conflation of desert with entitlement. ‘A deserves p’ is not equivalent to ‘A is entitled to p.’ Deserts seem to function comparatively or incrementally—as more or less; entitlements tend to be absolute—either we are or we are not entitled to something. Because of his talent and the effort he has put into training, A may be the most deserving when it comes to winning the race. But if he pulls a muscle and has to withdraw, he is not entitled to the prize, nor even to win. The purpose of a race may be to determine who is the fastest runner, and A may be the fastest runner and therefore deserve to win. But the rules of the race—which formalize the process of determining who is the fastest runner—will determine who is entitled to win. The entitlement rules may not always succeed in establishing the most deserving, and sometimes they may even serve to exclude the most deserving.

4. Moral And Nonmoral Deserts

Desert often functions as a moral notion, especially where fair distributions of social benefits and burdens are involved. But it need not do so. If a person deserves success, or deserves to win a prize, or deserves good weather, we need not be talking about moral desert. True, it may seem to align with a certain cosmic fairness, but this need not be moral in character. Even if deserts are paradigmly moral, they shade off into the nonmoral. In asserting that the Niagara Falls is deservedly famous or that the Mona Lisa deserves its reputation or even that a person’s efforts deserved a better result, we are not making a moral claim. Desert is a normative notion, not necessarily a moral one.

5. The Structure Of Desert Claims

It is generally agreed that desert claims have the implicit structure: ‘A deserves p in virtue of x,’ where A is the subject of the desert claim, p its object, and x its basis.

For the most part, the subjects of desert claims will be persons personal conduct (individual or collective) or people-related artifacts constructs (such as art objects, cities, and so forth), although common parlance sometimes extends the language of desert to environmental and other natural objects (the sequoia, for example, may be said to deserve preservation or its reputation).

The range of deserved objects is vast: to those mentioned earlier may be added inter alia jobs, wages, grades, respect, wins, and losses. Linking all such objects is their perception as goods or ills, as benefits or burdens, as valued or disvalued. Although there may be marginal cases in which one deserves to be treated neutrally rather than well or ill (Sverdlik 1983, p. 320–1), such cases are parasitic on a context in which the distribution of goods and ills is primary. Sometimes—as in the case of A’s good weather—what seems to be deserved is a state of affairs rather than some mode of treatment by others or some achievement of one’s own.

There is an ambiguity in the negative claim ‘A does not deserve p.’ It may mean, ‘A does not deserve p (but deserves q instead)’ or ‘A does not deserve p (or q).’ In the former case we may speak of A being nondeserving, in the latter case of A being undeserving.

6. Desert Bases

Desert claims are more than expressions of personal assessment. They are subject to public scrutiny and criticism. In particular, some proportionality between the desert basis and deserved outcome is presupposed, though the principle of proportionality stands in need of clearer articulation than it is generally given. So, although we might be inclined to say that a person who was injured in an automobile accident—because he foolishly refused to use a safety belt—deserved the injuries he suffered (though not to be killed), we would be reluctant to say of a person who failed to wear a safety belt that he deserved to get injured (though we might want to say that if he gets injured he will deserve it).

Most writers on desert consider that desert bases must not lie in the future, but are instead constituted by some past behavior or characteristics already possessed by the deserving object (Kleinig 1971, p. 73, Sher 1987, pp. 150–93). Appeals to future consequences as bases for distributing benefits and burdens may sometimes be justified, but cannot be justified as deserts. Or, at least these consequences cannot be directly justified as deserts. As indirect desert bases, reference to future-oriented considerations may be more plausible. For example, it may be argued that though a person may deserve p only in virtue of his past diligence, diligence may be valued as a virtue (in part) because of its consequential productive significance.

A few writers, however, have recently argued that a desert base might lie directly in the future (New 1992, 1995, Feldman 1995, p. 69–71). The examples used to sustain this thesis refer to some known future facts (say, death and suffering), on the basis of which its subjects are said to deserve some recognition now. It is not clear, however, that the examples show what they are intended to (Smilansky 1994): either there is some past or present commitment that is the basis for the desert or the language of desert is better replaced by that of distributional fairness.

7. Locating Desert Bases

It has been suggested above, and argued at length by others, that the nature of a desert base can be established only by going outside the concept of desert to external goals and values that inform the activity in relation to which p is said to be deserved (Cummisky 1987, Lamont 1994). That is, merely by looking at the concept of desert, we cannot tell—except in the most general terms—what a particular act or course of conduct deserves. Moreover, because the goals and values of the activities in question may differ, depending on the context, disagreements about deservedness can become intractable if this wider context is forgotten. Disagreements may also be chronically unresolvable if there is no clarity about the goals and values implicit in the activities or institutions in relation to which attributions of desert are made. In addition, of course, there may be a further debate about the appropriateness of the goals and values to the activities or institution in question, and that debate may also impact on a discussion of the appropriateness of a particular desert basis or on the deservingness of those who are the recipients of its benefits or burdens.

Consider, for example, the institution of paying wages or a salary for work. It may not be determinable—given only a person’s expenditure of productive effort outside the context of an employment contract—what she deserves: whether she should receive further opportunities, praise, good fortune, sustenance, free housing, or a wage salary. But, given that we have in place the work-related institutions that we do, we might wish to argue that A’s work deserves—at a minimum—a living wage. If the work that A does is especially demanding and/or highly valued, we might want to say that it should be more highly rewarded. Even so—to simplify the illustration—we might view A’s work in at least two ways, and these may be considered separately or in combination. We may focus on the demandingness of the work, on its productivity, or on some combination of the two. If the former constitutes our focus, work that manifests great effort, even if minimally productive, will be seen as most deserving of remuneration (whatever we do about entitlements). If the latter is more significant for the particular institution, then productivity will provide the basis for remunerative desert, even if the achievement reflects native talent more than effort. Given that, for many social institutions, productivity and effort will tend to be correlated, we may decide to take both into account in determining what a person’s remunerative deserts should be—though if we are not sure for how much each is to count, there may be interminable disputes about a person’s deserts. In such cases, rules governing entitlements will enable the institutions to function.

Consider now the salaries earned by sports and pop stars. At one level, we might wish to claim that Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson deserve—in terms of the institutions within which they operated—the status they possess and the remuneration they have received. But it is also open to us to debate the social value our society has accorded to sporting and singing prowess and, if as a result we conclude that they are overvalued, we will also consider that they have received more than they deserved (albeit no less than that to which they were entitled).

Where, as in many human activities, effort and achievement tend to be highly valued as desert bases, it is sometimes asserted that the desert basis—whether it focuses on effort or achievement—must be something for which the deserving person is responsible or over which he or she must have a significant degree of control. So, for example, a person cannot plausibly be said to deserve punishment unless that in virtue of which punishment is said to be deserved is something for which the person can be held responsible.

It is, however, more likely that the issue of responsibility control is to be settled by reference to the goals and values of the institution to which the desert is related rather than to some feature of desert itself. In the case of impositions such as punishment, the idea that they could be deserved without the triggering behavior being under the person’s control would be deeply problematic. On the other hand, there is no great problem involved in thinking that those who deserve to win beauty contests are trading on genetic endowments more than on personal effort. And if inanimate objects—such as the Grand Canyon—can be said to be deservedly famous, the question of responsibility does not even arise.

There are, moreover, institutional contexts in which attributions of desert seem to require that one not have had control over one’s circumstances. Consider, for example, deserved compensation. Here the deserving party is not usually seen as being in any way responsible for the misfortune in virtue of which he or she is said to deserve the compensation. Suggesting that the person who caused the misfortune is responsible puts the responsibility in the wrong place, and it is not adequately put in the right place by suggesting that the person who is deserving had to be nonresponsible for putting himself in the way of the misfortune. What is more, the compensation may be deserved even if the cause of the misfortune cannot be held responsible for bringing it about.

Thus the issue of responsibility too is determined by reference to the activity or institution in relation to which the desert claim is made. Prizes may be distributed to reward achievement or some combination of achievement and effort; wages may be given to reward productivity or some combination of productivity, talent, social importance, and effort. Some of these are more closely associated with personal control than others.

Among those who have wished to assert a tight relationship between desert and responsibility—or at least between desert and certain kinds of objects, such as punishments—several subsidiary discussions have ensued.

(a) One arises out of debates about personal identity. It has been argued (notably by Derek Parfit) that since our personal identity is constituted by our beliefs, a significant change in our beliefs will reconstitute our identity as other than it was, with implications for our deserts. Parfit considers the case of a person who, at ninety, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, confesses to injuring a police officer when he was twenty. Given the changes he has undergone, he no longer deserves punishment for what he did: ‘just as someone’s deserts correspond to the degree of complicity with some criminal, so his deserts now, for some past crime, correspond to the degree of psychological connectedness between himself now and himself when committing the crime’ (Parfit 1984, p. 326). Although Parfit’s account of identity has come in for criticism, his discussion draws attention to an important assumption about the subject of desert claims (though see Fields 1987).

 (b) A problem has also surfaced in discussions of moral luck (Richards 1986; or, more generally, Rosebury 1995). If it is simply a matter of good or bad luck that certain consequences come about through A’s actions, should this bear on the matter of desert? Given that luck refers to something beyond one’s control, it might seem as though it should not. Nevertheless, we often act as though it does. If A drives recklessly through the streets and—as a matter of bad luck—an innocent pedestrian happens to step out just as he passes, we will be inclined to see the injury or death as exacerbating the recklessness and making him more deserving of whatever penalty might have been due him. Richards disagrees. Deserts are, he thinks, reflective of character, and the character of an unlucky and lucky reckless driver is the same. He suggests that the difference is largely an epistemic one. We are to judge on the basis of what we have good reason to know about their deserts, and the person whose recklessness (or other failing) luckily results in no harm to others does not provide us with the epistemic basis for judging him as severely as the person who—unluckily, but not surprisingly—injures the other person. ‘Luck … affects how we ought to treat him, not by changing what he deserves, but by changing the grounds on which we are obliged to judge’ (Richards 1986, p. 200–1). ‘To a very large extent people are lucky only in our verdicts, not in what they deserve, and their luck must affect our verdicts because it affects our grounds for reaching them’ (Richards 1986, p. 206). Richards’ position has not gone unchallenged: recklessness may not deserve what is normally attributed to the driver in the event of an accident (Adler 1987, p. 247); moreover, we may be in an epistemically better position to judge the lucky driver’s character because of a record of his speeding tickets (Adler 1987, p. 247). Furthermore, Richards fails to give appropriate regard to the way in which the actual harm exacerbates the situation.

8. Enumerating Desert Bases

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that ‘everyone agrees that in distributions the just share must be given on the basis of what one deserves, though not everyone would name the same criterion of deserving: democrats say it is free birth, oligarchies that it is wealth or noble birth, and aristocrats that it is excellence’ (Aristotle 1962, pp. 118–19). For a modern reader, this well illustrates the dependence of desert bases on the goals and values of the activities or institutions within which desert attributions are made. In a world that is now characterized more noticeably by institutions and values that give greater weight—on the one hand—to individual responsibility and effort and—on the other—to achievement and social contribution, the bases for desert tend to be similarly characterized. As part of the tension between individual and collective values, a tension is also seen between desert bases that focus on individual responsibility, diligence, and effort and those that are more outcome directed.

8.1 Effort Diligence

Writers who emphasize the importance of effort as a distributive desert base usually limit it in various ways. The effort must be purposeful, in the sense of being directed to the ends of the activity that grounds the desert; it must display a certain level of competence, in the sense of bearing some reasonable relation to achieving the ends of the activity in question; and the activity itself must be normatively acceptable: ‘There is no question of rewarding murderers and rapists, no matter how much effort has been expended by them’ (Milne 1986, p. 240).

If two people put in the same amount of effort, but one succeeds whereas the other one does not, then it might be said that they are equally deserving in virtue of their efforts. If, however, I offer a reward (or, more correctly, a prize) to the person who succeeds, then only the person who succeeds deserves it. Here the desert has been institutionalized. Our language is blurred between prizes and rewards, reflecting an overlap that sometimes occurs in competitive situations—but it should not lead us to the conclusion that achievement is ‘the’ proper basis for award claims.

8.2 Achievement

Those who focus on the importance of achievement draw attention to the inadequacy of effort unless it embodies competence—that is, is likely to be productive. If brilliant A can effortlessly produce the goods that diligent B cannot, then A, and not B, is likely to deserve whatever rewards or benefits are associated with that achievement. However, if it is sheer luck that results in the outcome for A, it is not so clear that A is more deserving than B. Even in cases in which the focus is on achievement, there seems to be some gesture in the direction of purposive effort.

9. The Force Of Desert Claims

What follows from the claim A deserves p? Several possibilities have been canvassed: (a) B ought to ensure that A gets p; (b) A ought—all things considered—to get p; (c) A has a right to p; (d) There is a reason for giving p to A; and (e) A would be presumptively justified in getting p.

Most of these options are implausible. (a) It would be a rare desert claim that imposed a duty on some particular party. If A deserves to be punished, it does not follow that the state or some particular person should inflict it; if A deserves to succeed it is unlikely to fall to any particular person to ensure that she does so. (b) Even if desert claims imply that someone ought to get something, they do not provide an overriding reason for it. Suppose, for example, that A deserves to be punished. There may, nevertheless, be countervailing—and overriding—reasons why A ought not to be punished: perhaps mercy ought to be shown, or the social consequences of punishment would be disastrous. The same would hold of good deserts: other considerations of social justice may take priority. (c) Is also much too strong. (d) Seems too weak—not just because there may be many other considerations (besides deserts) that constitute reasons for giving p to A—but because deserts seem to be quite strong reasons for giving p to A. (e) Represents most closely the force of a desert claim. Such claims are presumptively strong enough to justify A’s getting p even if, in a particular case, some countervailing consideration would defeat the presumption. In practice, the situation is more complicated. If, for example, p refers not to some preinstitutional generality, but legal punishment or a competitive prize, other conditions may be necessary if the p is to be justified. In such cases, a formalized desert-determining procedure (an entitling procedure) will take precedence over the non-formal assessment of deserts.

10. Desert And Justice

One way of understanding desert claims is as claims about justice. John Hospers, for example, writes, ‘Justice is getting what one deserves. What could be simpler?’ (Hospers 1961, p. 433). Desert claims then would have the force of claims about justice. But many have thought that this way of connecting desert with justice is too simple (Feinberg 1963, p. 90, Sher 1987, p. 49, and Slote 1973, p. 333). Even so, these writers have retained some sort of conceptual link between desert and justice. After all, when people do not get what they deserve, our immediate response is to think that they have suffered unfairly or unjustly. It is one thing to say, however, that a person’s deserts constitute a factor—albeit an important one—in deciding what justice requires, and another to say—with Hospers— that deserts are the sole determinant of justice. The justice of social institutions may affect what people deserve no less than their deserts may constitute a factor in determining how they are to be justly treated (Sher 1987, p. 206–10).

11. The Rejection Of Desert

Although I have argued that desert bases need not refer to conduct for which people are held responsible; nevertheless, for some distributions desert bases need to be factors for which people can be held responsible. Punishment, I noted, can hardly be said to be deserved if the conduct for which it is said to be deserved is not conduct for which the person to be punished can be held responsible.

Rawls has turned this point into a general thesis against the justice of desert-based distributions. Rawls argues that the factors that are usually adduced as desert bases in the distribution of social resources are not really things for which people can be held responsible. Those who have greater abilities and hence greater achievements have them because of their ‘greater natural endowments,’ not because of something for which they can be held responsible. Even a person’s ‘character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit’ (Rawls 1971, p. 104). It is ‘one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society’ (Rawls 1971, pp. 103–4). Not even effort will get around this. ‘Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances’ (Rawls 1971, p. 74).

Although many have interpreted Rawls as taking a deterministic position on effort and achievement— seeing all effort and achievement as the inevitable outcome of native endowment and social opportunity—Rawls’s rejection of desert is actually less categorical. He does not argue that we are only what we are born and bred to be, but that the task of separating out the various factors that have contributed both to our effort and to our achievement— those for which we are responsible from those that represent our endowment and opportunities—and thus enable an assessment of desert, is ‘impracticable’ (Rawls 1971, p. 312). Judgments about deserts should therefore be excluded from assessments of social justice. Curiously, Rawls does not draw out the same implications for his briefer discussion of retributive justice.

If we allow that deserts need not depend on things for which we can be held responsible, it might not seem so problematic to maintain both that the traditional desert bases can be used as one possible ground for distribution, and also that these are not things for which we can be held—in any strong sense— responsible. Nozick has argued that ‘it needn’t be that the foundations underlying desert are themselves deserved, all the way down’ (Nozick 1974, p. 225). If I win a race in part because of my natural talent, I may plausibly claim to deserve the prize. My personal desert does not presuppose that my talent was also deserved.

Nozick’s critique goes further. Whereas Rawls infers from the arbitrariness of natural talent that such talents should be seen as common assets, Nozick does not see how the arbitrariness and undeserved nature of their natural distribution serves to disqualify those who have them from benefiting from them. Since the holdings that come into the world are already held, is it not plausible to assume that those who fortuitously have the holdings are ‘preinstitutionally entitled’ to the benefits that flow from them? Plausible, but not self-evident. We may consider it appropriate to grant the naturally talented and socially advantaged the benefits that flow from their fortuitous position, just as we may consider inherited wealth an entitlement of those who benefit from it. But it is hardly more obvious in the former case than in the latter that this is a matter of desert. If it appears so, this is because it is usually the case that the naturally talented and socially advantaged have to make something of their own of the endowments and opportunities they have received.

In its own way, the contemporary debate about personal desert reflects a much larger social debate about the extent to which our individuality—and that which might be said to flow from that by way of our share of social goods and ills—is viewed simply through the lens of our efforts and achievements, and the extent to which those efforts and achievements are considered as elaborations of a social environment that has fostered and sustained them. Because the answer is unlikely to lie at either extreme, the defense of desert will inevitably be qualified.

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