Abstract
Desert and responsibility are key concepts in political philosophy, most notably in discussions on justice. It is just that people get what they deserve, and what they deserve seems to have something to do with what they are responsible for. This tenet is as close to a fundamental constant as one can get in practical philosophy, so that even some egalitarians, luck egalitarians, make room for exceptions dictated by it: only differences people are not responsible for should be equalized, differences people are responsible for are not unjust, because they are deserved. In this paper I shall contest the second part of this tenet that what people deserve is somehow linked to what they are responsible for. To this end, I shall give a detailed account of the concept of desert in the first half of this paper. In the second half, I shall consider the implications of this for luck egalitarianism, and conclude that while luck egalitarianians can counter some criticisms that are grounded on a wrong understanding of the concept of desert, they cannot rest content in relying on the purely formal notions of responsibility and desert, but need to provide substantial arguments to support their conclusions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Cf. Feinberg (1963:60).
- 2.
Cf. McLeod (1999:61–2).
- 3.
Cf. Feinberg (1963:58 ff.).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Feinberg (1963:62,55).
- 7.
Abad (2007:part 1, chap. II).
- 8.
Rawls (1971:311).
- 9.
- 10.
Sadurski (1985:117, cf. fn. 5 above).
- 11.
Cf. Lamont (1994) for a similar line of argument.
- 12.
For a full discussion, cf. Abad (2007).
- 13.
- 14.
It is because of examples of kinds 3 and 4 that Smilansky’s defense of the connection between desert and responsibility fails: paintings and landscapes are not ever “positively responsible” for anything, nor can they ever be “negatively responsible”, cf. Smilansky (1996:160).
- 15.
Olsaretti (2009:165–6).
- 16.
Vincent (2009:41).
- 17.
These are the examples Olsaretti discusses in her paper.
- 18.
Vincent (2009:45).
- 19.
Cf. Vincent (2009:46).
- 20.
Olsaretti (2009:167, 169).
- 21.
Olsaretti (2009:172).
- 22.
Olsaretti (2009:166).
- 23.
Olsaretti (2009:183).
- 24.
Olsaretti (2009:185).
- 25.
Olsaretti (2009:186).
- 26.
Olsaretti (2009:185).
- 27.
Cf. Olsaretti (2009:186).
- 28.
For a full discussion, cf. Abad (2007:16–9).
- 29.
Vincent (2009:49).
- 30.
Olsaretti (2009:186).
- 31.
Olsaretti (2009:185).
- 32.
Vincent (2009:47).
- 33.
Vincent (2009:46–8).
- 34.
Vincent (2009:49).
- 35.
Cf. Olsaretti (2009:179).
- 36.
Vincent (2009:47).
- 37.
I do not get this impression from her paper, but in private correspondence Vincent leans that way.
- 38.
I do not mean to say that this link between outcome responsibility and liability responsibility holds necessarily. As I have argued in the first part of this paper, to say this would need substantial arguments for each situation in which such a link is said to hold. The present discussion, though, is not on this point but on luck egalitarianism, and for the sake of this discussion, I will conveniently assume that we are talking about a situation in which this link does hold.
- 39.
I have already said in the last section that whether liability responsibility given some outcome responsibility is a case of desert or of propriety is a matter of the particular constitution of the outcome responsibility a.k.a. desert base, and also that nothing hangs normatively on this conceptual distinction.
- 40.
Cf. Vincent (2009:49).
References
Abad, Diana. 2007. Keeping Balance. On Desert and Propriety. Heusenstamm: Ontos.
Bittner, Rüdiger. 2001. Doing Things for Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cupit, Geoffrey. 1996. “Desert and Responsibility.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26:83–99.
Feinberg, Joel. 1963. “Justice and Personal Desert.” First published in Nomos VI: Justice, edited by Carl J. Friedrich and John W. Chapman, 69–97. New York, NY: Atherton Press. Quoted from Doing and Deserving. Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, Joel Feinberg, 55–94. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Feldman, Fred. 1995. “Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom.” First published in Mind 104: 63–77. Quoted from Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert. Essays in Moral Philosophy, Fred Feldman, 177–92. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Lamont, Julian. 1994. “The Concept of Desert in Distributive Justice.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44:45–64.
McLeod, Owen. 1999. “Contemporary Interpretations of Desert. Introduction.” In What Do We Deserve? edited by Louis P. Pojman and Owen McLeod, 61–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olsaretti, Serena. 2009. “Responsibility and the Consequences of Choice.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109:165–88.
Pogge, Thomas W. 1989. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Rachels, James. 1978. What People Deserve. In Justice and Economic Distribution, edited by John Arthur and William H. Shaw, 167–96. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Rachels, James. 1986. The Elements of Moral Philosophy. New York, NY: Random House.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Sadurski, Wojciech. 1985. Giving Desert Its Due: Social Justice and Legal Theory. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Sher, George. 1987. Desert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smilansky, Saul. 1996. “Responsibility and Desert: Defending the Connection.” Mind 105:157–63.
Vincent, Nicole A. 2009. “What Do You Mean I Should Take Responsibility for My Own Ill Health?” Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy 1:39–51.
Acknowledgments
This is a revised version of a paper I presented at the conference “Moral responsibility: Neuroscience, organization & engineering” on August 24–27, 2009 in Delft. I thank Rüdiger Bittner, Logi Gunnarsson, Martina Herrmann, Ute Kruse-Ebeling, Nicole Vincent, and the audience at the conference for their help.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Abad, D. (2011). Desert, Responsibility and Luck Egalitarianism. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1877-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1878-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)