Abstract
Desert plays an important role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, but an unimportant role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. Saul Smilansky has recently put forward a defense of this asymmetry. In this study, I argue that it fails. Then, drawing on an argument of Richard Arneson’s, I suggest an alternative consequentialist rationale for the asymmetry. But while this shows that desert cannot be expected to play the same role in distributive justice that it can play in retributive justice, it does not fully vindicate the asymmetry, since desert can still play an important role in the former.
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Notes
The desert that we will be concerned with is pre-institutional and pre-justicial. For further discussion of these features of desert, see Scheffler (2003).
Smilansky identifies several other “underlying factors,” or differences between retributive and distributive justice (2006, p. 512). He suggests that they could be developed into freestanding arguments for the asymmetry, but does not do so. I focus on his two explicit arguments.
For a discussion of this issue, though not using these labels, see Miller (1999).
The sort of luck Smilansky appears to be worried about is an ineliminable feature of economic life, and of life in general. It is difficult to imagine a practicable economic or political system in which people’s distributive shares are not, in part, the result of luck.
In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” Marx (1986, p. 166) says that, in a “more advanced phase” of communist society, each will receive according to his needs and contribute according to his abilities. Marx does not say that each must contribute as much as he can, however.
Some early socialists endorsed planned economies as a means of ensuring that people’s economic shares matched their contributions. On this point, see White (2003). Of course, we might worry about the ability and motivation of the planners to assess people’s economic deserts. This worry strikes me as no more pressing that the analogous worry about the ability and motivation of legislators and judges to assess people’s retributive deserts.
Arneson may agree with this. He initially presents the attractiveness of the market economy as a objection to distribution according to desert (2007, p. 266), but suggests later that his challenge may be at least partially met by designing social policies that “achieve our values to the greatest feasible extent” (2007, p. 290). I have illustrated how this might be done.
I say “possibly” because I have not specified the role that desert should play in either sphere.
For data on the U.S. prison population, see http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/corr2tab.cfm. For data on its cost, which is borne principally by individual states, see http://www.pewcenteronthestatesorg/reportdetail.aspx?id=35904.
For data on TANF enrollment, see http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/data-reports/caseload/2010/2010_recipient_tan.htm. For data on the cost of this program, see http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=936.
Data on the 2009 U.S. education budget, including expenditures on student aid, can be found here:
This information is collected by the U.S. Census. For data, see http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/families_households/cb10-08.html.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this study, I thank Richard Arneson and the participants at the Second Annual New Orleans Invitational Seminar in Ethics (NOISE), especially my commentator Simon Cabulea May.
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Moriarty, J. Smilansky, Arneson, and the asymmetry of desert. Philos Stud 162, 537–545 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9780-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9780-8