Abstract
In his 2018 book Why Does Inequality Matter? T. M. Scanlon discusses the question how significant differences of economic advantage can be justified. He surveys a variety of possible justifications. In Chapter 8—‘Desert’—he focuses on the idea that a desertist theory of justice might attempt to justify such differences in certain cases by claiming that those who have more in those cases deserve to have more; while those who have less deserve to have less. Scanlon rejects this sort of attempted justification. Scanlon claims that desert ‘plays no role in distributive justice’. He seems to think that in order to explain how it could be just for people to receive unequal benefits, we will need to appeal to some conception of distributive justice that does not involve desert. In my 2016 book Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country I presented what I took to be a thoroughly desertist theory of distributive justice—apparently a theory of precisely the sort Scanlon means to reject. Scanlon does not mention my theory. My aim in the present paper is to explain how my desertist theory avoids Scanlon’s objections. First I explain the conception of desert that Scanlon has in mind; then I present the core of Scanlon’s objections to desertist theories of distributive justice. Finally, I show that his objections have no application to the form of desertism that I proposed.
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Notes
Scanlon (2018), P. 117; emphasis added. From here on, I will refer to this work as ‘Desert’.
Scanlon (2013). From here on, I will refer to this work as ‘GDID’.
The principle’s name is mine, not Scanlon’s.
Again, the principle’s name is mine, not Scanlon’s.
Otherwise we might be able to justify a similar change in attitude and behavior toward a husband who is mistakenly thought to have engaged in abusive misbehavior. In certain circumstances that could have similar good results, but would not be deserved.
Scanlon mentions Feinberg as an example of such a philosopher. Scanlon 2013, endnote 9, 115.
Many other philosophers would add a principle to the effect that if S deserves d in virtue of having desert base db, then S must be responsible for having db. I discussed this principle at some length in my 1995: 104 as well as in 2016, 42–3. I also argued against this principle. Scanlon apparently does not endorse it.
Scanlon also mentions an argument due to Rawls according to which it is not the business of a government to reward people for having good character. Furthermore, he mentions the idea that those who get smaller shares might not consent to this, on the ground that merely having a better moral character does not make a person deserve greater benefits. I am not certain that Scanlon is fully committed to these arguments.
Not Scanlon’s example.
Thanks to Owen McLeod for helping me to understand the structure of Scanlon’s argument in this way.
The concept of community essential need is explained in Chapter 4 of my Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country. See especially Sect. 4.1 “Aristotle and Community Essential Need”, 75–80.
I stated my theory in two slightly different ways in my book. On p. 26 I left out all mention of the government and put it this way: ‘… there is perfect distributive justice in a state if and only if in every case in which a citizen of that state deserves – in virtue of his or her political economic desert bases – to have some political economic desert, he or she gets it.’ On pp. 71–2, I expressed the view in a slightly different way saying ‘… there is perfect distributive justice in a country if and only if in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political economic desert in virtue of having a political economic desert base, he or she receives that desert from the appropriate political economic distributor.’ Again, there is no explicit mention of the government, though, of course, if the government is the appropriate distributor, this would be equivalent in import to the second version stated here. I am inclined to think that the version stated above in the text has certain advantages over the others.
In virtue of limited space, I am leaving out discussion of injustice, and how it may be combined with levels of justice so as to yield an overall rating for a country. For details, see my Distributive Justice.
Though, to be fair, it must be acknowledged that I did not say much about this in my book.
My view about institutions that fall within the deserved range is explained in Distributive Justice in Sect. 4.2.3 “Legitimate Entitlement”, 86–94. I illustrate this view by appeal to examples involving cases in which different citizens deserve different-sized economic benefits from their country. Among the examples discussed there is one in which tax-payers deserve different sized refund checks from their government. (91–2) I claim that if the taxation scheme in their country is from the deserved range, and it mandates different sized checks in some case, then recipients are not only legally entitled to those different sized checks, they deserve them as well.
References
Feldman, Fred. 1995. Desert: reconsideration of some received wisdom. Mind New Series 104(413): 63–77.
Feldman, Fred. 2016. Distributive Justice: Getting what we deserve from our country. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T.M. 2013. Giving desert its due. Philosophical Explorations 16(2): 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2013.787437.
Scanlon, T.M. 2018. Why Does Inequality Matter? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Owen McLeod and Noah Lemos for many helpful criticisms, suggestions, and steady encouragement.
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Feldman, F. Scanlon Against Desertist Theories of Justice. J Ethics 25, 1–12 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09355-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09355-x