Desert and Equality
| Abstract | Does justice require, at least in part, that people get what they deserve? The question is whether ideals of desert play a substantial and nonderivative role in establishing the content of social justice principles. Of course, even if the correct answer to this question were negative, once one has determined the requirements of justice independently of substantive considerations of desert, one could always add that the treatment of individuals that justice demands is to be identified with the treatment that they deserve. However, on this way of proceeding, ideals of desert do no real work and could be dropped from the account without any loss. This first question resonates with a second one. Should egalitarian justice resist or accommodate the idea that desert considerations should be incorporated into the formulation of principles of justice at the ground floor level? Are desert and equality comrades marching together or sworn enemies or what? Egalitarian justice here shall be understood as principles that hold that if we are dealing with a fixed population and choosing social arrangements that will not affect the aggregate total of well-being but may affect its distribution across persons, arrangements that would bring about an equal distribution of well-being, if that is obtainable, should be chosen.¹ The class of.. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesSerena Olsaretti (ed.) (2003). Desert and Justice. Oxford University Press.
Richard Norman (2001). Criteria of Justice: Desert, Needs and Equality. Res Publica 7 (2).
Peter Vallentyne (2003). Brute Luck Equality and Desert. In Sabrina Olsaretti (ed.), Desert and Justice.
Carl Knight (2011). Responsibility, Desert, and Justice. In Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and Distributive Justice. Oxford University Press.
Kristján Kristjánsson (2005). A Utilitarian Justification of Desert in Distributive Justice. Journal of Moral Philosophy 2 (2):147-170.
Jeffrey Moriarty (2013). Smilansky, Arneson, and the Asymmetry of Desert. Philosophical Studies 162 (3):537-545.
Jeffrey Moriarty (2002). Desert and Distributive Justice in a Theory of Justice. Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (1):131–143.
Jeffrey Moriarty (2003). Against the Asymmetry of Desert. Noûs 37 (3):518–536.
Jeffrey Moriarty (2005). The Epistemological Argument Against Desert. Utilitas 17 (2):205-221.
Louis P. Pojman & Owen McLeod (eds.) (1999). What Do We Deserve?: A Reader on Justice and Desert. Oxford University Press.
Bradford Skow (2012). A Solution to the Problem of Indeterminate Desert. Mind 121 (481):37-65.
David Schmidtz (2006). Elements of Justice. Cambridge University Press.
Howard Simmons (2010). Moral Desert: A Critique. University Press of America.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-12-22Total downloads66 ( #13,627 of 549,071 )Recent downloads (6 months)10 ( #6,811 of 549,071 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
