Abstract
The question of whether desert depends on institutions or institutions on desert continues to divide politicians and political theorists, particularly in disputes over the justification of the welfare state. Even though it is a significant question with direct relevance for issues of economic justice, little has been done so far to evaluate the various positions in dispute and to make explicit the concepts involved. In this paper, I first present the main senses in which the concepts of desert, dependence and institution are used by different desert theorists and I argue that conflicting claims concerning desert's pre/institutional nature may turn out to be compatible and similar claims, inconsistent, when the senses of these concepts are made explicit. Secondly, I identify the senses of ‘desert’, ‘dependence’ and ‘institution’ which are most appropriate for the debate. Thirdly, I argue that, from the perspective of this conceptual framework, it is not possible to decide whether or not desert depends on institutions, unless the framework is supplemented by a more precise specification of the concept of institution.
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Notes
This paper is part of a larger project on origins of practical normativity, which I pursued during the last 3 years as a postdoctoral Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. I am grateful to the members of the Centre for Philosophy for hosting my research. I thank Roxana Baiasu, David Miller, Hillel Steiner, Thomas Uebel and Ursula Vogel for written comments. A version of this paper has been presented to the research seminars organized by the Department of Government at the LSE in February 2005. I am grateful to the audience for useful questions and comments, in particular to Cecile Fabre, Katrin Flikschuh and Paul Kelly. I also thank two anonymous referees for this journal for their comments, suggestions and criticism. I owe special thanks for extremely thorough and painstaking debates on desert and related issues to Tiberiu Rãdulescu.
I start from the assumption that the relationship between desert and institutions is one of dependence and not simply a contingent link. This is the assumption at work in the arguments of most desert theorists.
In what follows, I will talk about a concept and its use or sense or understanding. I refer in this way to a concept and its interpretation or, in Rawls's terminology, to a concept and its conception (Rawls, 1971, 10).
I assume that we can draw a distinction between the meaning of a claim and its validity, between the criterion used to determine a claim's meaning and the criterion used to determine its validity. Even for a claim like ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’, it is possible to distinguish between the criterion of its correct meaning (perhaps a good dictionary) and the criterion of its validity (the Law of Identity).
Feinberg responds to what he takes to be assertions in support of the institutional character of desert in D.D. Raphael's Moral Judgement (1955) and Benn's and Peters's (1969) Social Principles and the Democratic State (Feinberg, 1970a, 55 n1).
A similar argument can be formulated for the second sense of ‘institution’ — institution as a scheme of purposes.
The first to draw the distinction between pre/institutional and pre/justicial deserts is Scheffler (Scheffler, 2000, 978–980). But Scheffler formulates the distinction in a different way than I do. For him, the pre/institutionality of desert refers to the problem of the relationship between desert and actual institutions, whereas the pre/justicial character of desert, to that of the relationship between desert and just institutions. By ‘just institutions’, he understands just systems of rules. By contrast, I take the pre/institutionality of desert to refer to the relationship between desert and just institutions, whereas the pre/justicial character of desert, to the relationship between desert and just rules or purposes.
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Baiasu, S. Institutions and the Normativity of Desert. Contemp Polit Theory 6, 175–195 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300261
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300261