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 few pages into the Groundwork Kant claims that only actions from duty have moral worth.ii Even though as an aside he also says that a dutiful action from sympathy or honor, though lacking in moral worth, "deserves praise and encouragement", it is tempting not to take him very seriously. One suspects that he regards this praise as only a poor and morally insignificant cousin of the esteem reserved for actions from duty. In the end, it seems hard to avoid (...) the conclusion that, for him, only dutiful actions from duty deserve any morally significant positive evaluation.iii This conclusion in turn raises a standard objection:iv How can this be squared with the fact that we think highly of actions motivated, not by duty, but by desires to help those we love or those for whom we feel compassion? Of course, if we could ignore our suspicions and take Kant's aside seriously, the conflict would lessen. Contrary to the standard objection, Kant does indeed think that actions motivated by such desires are worthy of praise and encouragement. But the difficulties would not, for then we would then have to answer serious questions about the nature of the "praise" deserved by a dutiful action not performed from duty, what moral significance (if any) a Kantian view can attribute to it, and the relationship it has to moral worth. (shrink)

In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility “in the desert-entailing sense”. This distinguishes it from causal or legal responsibility and draws it closer to our other moral concepts. Moral responsibility and desert are natural partners: morally responsible agents can be blameworthy and praiseworthy; they can deserve blame and praise. This convergence on responsibility “in the desert-entailing sense” is a welcome development, for it helps secure competing accounts as rival accounts, a status that (...) appears to require having the same target notion in mind. Yet despite the convergence, it is all the more striking that so little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. One potential worry is that without saying more about desert, we risk merely replacing one difficult concept (moral responsibility) with one just as difficult (desert). This paper seeks to address this lacuna in the moral responsibility literature. I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to socalled Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform a conception of desert or merit, one that can be usefully applied to discussions of moral responsibility. I’m less concerned with defending the view than with explicating it as a conjecture and examining what work it might be able to do. As such, this paper is both speculative and overtly non-committal. I do not seek to argue for a conception of desert, so much as to investigate a potential line of thinking about it. I do, however, argue that the candidate view, what I’ll call, Desert as Fittingness (or DAF), merits additional attention. I’ll do so by making two claims: first, that it does better than extant Fitting Attitude accounts of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness with respect to three different considerations; and second, that it has an initial plausibility with respect to informing a general account of desert.. (shrink)

My subject is the theory of blame recently propounded by George Sher in his book, In Praise of Blame. I argue that although Sher has succeeded in capturing a number of genuine features of the concept of blame, there is an important element that he has omitted, which is the fact that necessarily, when A blames B for something and expresses this to B, A will realise that B is likely to find this unpleasant. The inclusion of the latter element (...) renders the question of whether any agent ever deserves blame a more open one than Sher allows. (shrink)

This book argues that moral desert should be excluded as a consideration in normative and applied ethics, as it is likely that no-one ever morally deserves anything for their actions and, if they do, it is in most cases impossible to know what. I also explain how moral deliberation in relation to punishment, distributive justice and personal morality can proceed without appeals to moral desert.

Welfarism says that the value of a possible world is got by taking the numbers that measures each person's welfare level---how good that person's life is for them---and adding them up. But welfarism is false. Instead, the value of a possible world should also depend on how deserving the people in that world are. But how are we to use facts about welfare and about desert to compute the values of possible worlds? There appear to be too many ways to (...) do it, and no way to tell which is best. I isolate one way to do it and defend its superiority. (shrink)