Abstract

Philosophical determinism seems to undercut any possibility of our ever deserving anything, because everything about us is caused and thus outside the range of our responsibility. We do not deserve the rewards of our successes because those successes come directly from our abilities and character. To deserve our rewards we would have to deserve our abilities and character. Since we don't deserve these things, neither do we deserve our rewards. To avoid this outcome, and preserve some sense of moral desert, we must either deny determinism, or find a way to reconcile determinism with desert. ;I argue that denying determinism is unacceptable, and all previous attempts at reconciling the two fail because they either do not take determinism seriously, or badly misinterpret the way desert works. Responsibility is shown to be unnecessary for desert. And finally, an understanding of the self as constituted by its attributes, in conjunction with a criterion for determining which attributes are constitutive, will provide an acceptable ground for desert claims without the need for a radical reinterpretation of desert