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Intuition about Justice: Desertist or Luck Egalitarian?

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Abstract

There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people’s intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism—the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people’s intuitions—are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (good option luck, good brute luck, and bad brute luck) in which the demands of luck egalitarianism and those of a mainstream desert-based view come apart, the latter carries the day. One ramification of these findings is that people’s intuitions about justice are moralized; that is, they appeal to particular conceptions of the good. Luck egalitarians must decide whether to embrace these moralized intuitions by adopting desertism—or to resist them.

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Notes

  1. Economists and philosophers who have pointed out this folk consensus about justice, and how different it is from the main theories of justice on offer in the literature, include Konow and Schwettmann (2016), Miller (1999), Mulligan (2018b), and Scheffler (1992).

  2. We identified studies by searching for the terms “desert”, “desertism”, “luck egalitarianism”, “intuition”, and “distributive justice” on Google Scholar and in the APA, EconLit, and PhilPapers databases, among others. We note that in the field of empirical philosophy itself, there are relatively few studies relevant to our research question. Although we tried to be comprehensive, it is possible that we missed a study that is, in fact, relevant. However, this would not detract much from our main claim: There is ample empirical evidence showing that while luck egalitarianism coheres with our intuitions about justice more closely than egalitarianism or libertarianism do, desert fits our intuitions better.

  3. Readers familiar with luck egalitarianism will notice that the category of bad option luck is absent. We think that there is an interesting divergence between luck egalitarianism and desertism in this category as well; namely, luck egalitarianism does not provide distributive justice reasons for the requital of voluntary, costly, praiseworthy choices—whereas desertism does (cf. Brouwer and Mulligan 2019; Moriarty 2018). However, there is insufficient empirical research on people’s intuitions about the appropriate requital for such choices (see also § 6). Now, some scholars—such as Eyal (2006), Temkin (2011 and 2017), and Thaysen and Albertsen (2017)—have argued that luck egalitarianism ought to compensate people for supererogatory choices which benefit others. In Brouwer and Mulligan 2019, we argue that this makes these scholars not really luck egalitarians, but desertists. It is important to note that while the requital of voluntary, praiseworthy choices is an important difference between luck egalitarianism and desertism in option luck contexts, there are other differences between the two views. The unifying characteristic of these differences is that desert theorists require that the size of people’s rewards be proportional to the size of their contribution, whereas contextualist luck egalitarianism does not contain such a requirement (see also § 3).

  4. For further discussion see, e.g., Brownlee and Stemplowska 2017 and Mitchell and Tetlock 2017.

  5. Arneson (2011) and Lippert-Rasmussen (2016) provide overviews of luck egalitarianism. Prominent luck egalitarians include Cohen (1989), Lippert-Rasmussen (2001), and Roemer (1998). Feldman and Skow (2015) and McLeod (2013) provide contemporary overviews of desert. Pojman and McLeod (1999) have assembled excerpts from important historical and contemporary texts on desert. The seminal conceptual work on desert was done by Feinberg (1963), Kleinig (1971), and Sher (1987).

  6. This approach is similar to that taken by Brouwer and Mulligan (2019) and Voigt (2007).

  7. Cohen (1989) and Temkin (2017) are well-known defenders of pluralistic versions of luck egalitarianism. De la Torre Dwyer (2020), Miller (1999), and Schmidtz (2006) propose pluralistic theories of justice which include desert. Feldman (2016) and Mulligan (2018b) defend monistic versions of desertism.

  8. A well-known statement of the view can be found in Rakowski 1991.

  9. They may, however, resort to pluralism and invoke a principle of need to argue that Bert should still be assisted. On this, see § 5.2.

  10. Recently, some luck egalitarians have defended “all-luck egalitarianism”, the view that both brute luck and option luck need to be neutralized (Knight 2013, 2021). We do not consider all-luck egalitarianism in this paper because it is a view that comes close to strict egalitarianism, which, as we pointed out in the introduction, people intuitively reject.

  11. It seems to us that equal shares, consequentialist, and desertist principles of stakes do not exhaust possible views. We could envision (i) a democratic account, in which the stakes are arrived at by a democratic process (in much the same way that Sen (2011) holds that capability lists should be arrived at), and (ii) a non-domination account, on which agents should bear the consequences of their choices only to the extent that this does not lead to domination by others.

  12. See Olsaretti 2009 and Stemplowska 2009  for discussions of the principles of stakes available to the luck egalitarian.

  13. Some of the other non-contextualist principles of stakes that have been suggested fit even less well with people’s intuitions than contextualism does. This goes for the consequentialist principle, e.g., because while “justice requires consideration of the consequences of acts, specifically, of the size of the total surplus, the efficiency criterion is too austere to serve as a general theory of justice” (Konow 2003: 1205). Indeed, as we shall see in § 5.2, it is perhaps more accurate to say that efficiency considerations like those the consequentialist would attend to compete with, rather than constitute, justice.

  14. Napoletano (2022) is a recent dissenter.

  15. By, among others, Dekker (2010), Hsieh (2000), Miller (1999), Mulligan (2018b), Riley (1989), Sheffrin (2013), and von Platz (2022).

  16. The connection between desert and proportionality harkens back to Aristotle (both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics), who argued for “proportional equality” in distribution (in fact, a desertist principle). What should be made equal between persons, according to Aristotle, are the ratios of merit to reward. On the importance of proportionality for accounts of desert, see also Christman (1994: 89) and Kinghorn (2021: 52).

  17. Extant work on “windfalls” (see, e.g., Carlsson et al. 2013; Li et al. 2019; Reinstein and Riener 2012) further supports the superiority of desert. We regard our moral entitlement to money earned versus money gained as a windfall very differently—we feel more entitled to the former than to the latter. What makes it difficult to really tease out the difference between luck egalitarianism and desertism here is that these windfall profits may be outside of the control of their recipients—in which case, the luck egalitarian would come to a similar analysis as the desertist if he subscribes to the control view.

  18. Motivated by the widespread unpopularity of high corporate officer compensation in the United States, Burak (2018) advances what she calls the “rent-seeking aversion hypothesis”: that the reason Americans object to high corporate officer incomes (she focuses on CEOs) is because these incomes are not commensurate with contribution. She finds strong support for this hypothesis as opposed to the alternative: that these high salaries are unjustified on egalitarian grounds. Although this is a suggestive finding, we are concerned that this study does not demonstrate how people would view pure option luck inequalities due to rent-seeking (as opposed to the rent-seeking inequalities in the actual world), because (among other reasons) good and bad brute luck have not been neutralized.

  19. An interesting area of agreement is inheritances, which are generally considered to be a case of good brute luck (cf. Halliday 2018). At the same time, inheritances are generally considered to be undeserved (cf. Piketty et al. 2023). It would, hence, be compatible with luck egalitarianism and desertism to impose high taxes on inheritances. Such taxes are very unpopular, however—so this is a case in which both luck egalitarianism and desertism do not appear to fit well with people’s intuitive judgements. (For UK survey data, see https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/11/21/iht_polling/ and for US data, see https://news.gallup.com/poll/190067/americans-react-presidential-candidates-tax-proposals.aspx.) Also see Sheffrin (2013: chp 6) and Prabhakar (2015) for discussion of public opposition to inheritance taxation. We believe that more research is required, as the popularity of inheritance taxation may well change if the distribution of income and wealth is brought more in line with the luck egalitarian or desertist ideal. For example, Mulligan (2018b) argues that inheritances are unpopular because there are stark inequalities of opportunity, and parents believe, with justification, that their children’s prospects turn in important part on what they, the parents, provide. Mulligan conjectures that under robust equal opportunity, parents would regard inheritances as much less desirable, and indeed unjust and damaging to their children’s autonomy and well-being.

  20. One dissenter from this desertist consensus is Olsaretti (2006).

  21. In our judgment, concrete cases are proper. This is for, essentially, the Smithian reasons that Freiman and Nichols (2011: 130) point out: “It is in particular instances only that the propriety or impropriety, the merit or demerit of actions is very obvious and discernable. It is only when particular examples are given that we perceive distinctly either the concord or disagreement between our own affections and those of the agent, or feel a social gratitude arise towards him in the one case, or a sympathetic resentment in the other. When we consider virtue and vice in an abstract and general manner, the qualities by which they excite these several sentiments seem in a great measure to disappear, and the sentiments themselves become less obvious and discernable” (Smith 1761: 279–280).

  22. See also Almås et al. 2020.

  23. A similar case might further illuminate whether we are driven by a “cosmic” or contribution-based sense of desert. To wit: Imagine this fire breaks out not at a factory but at a prison. Dylan rushes in and puts it out. Here it is unclear that he is making an economic contribution, and so, if our intuition remains that payment is warranted, that is a point in favor of the cosmic desertist. The case would have to be put very carefully, though, as it is natural enough to suppose that prisons are economically beneficial; among other things, crime is economically damaging and prisons keep criminals from committing them, and prisons play a human capital-improving, rehabilitative role.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Sahar Akhtar, Alexander Andersson, Jeppe von Platz, and audiences in Gothenburg, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. for helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, Tilburg, 5037AB, The Netherlands

    Huub Brouwer

  2. Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics, Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets NW, Washington, DC, 20057, United States

    Thomas Mulligan

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  1. Huub Brouwer
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Brouwer, H., Mulligan, T. Intuition about Justice: Desertist or Luck Egalitarian?. J Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-024-09475-8

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