November 20, 2010
Will Hutton's Them and Us: Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society argues for accepting justice as desert. People are deserving or undeserving as in people deserve to be rewarded for their effort,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in its entry on desert says that:
The concept of desert is deeply entrenched in everyday morality. We say that effort deserves success, wrongdoing deserves punishment, innocent suffering deserves sympathy or compensation, virtue deserves happiness, and so on. We think that the getting of what's deserved is just, and that failure to receive what's deserved is unjust. We also believe it's good that a person gets what she deserves, and bad that she doesn't—even if she deserves something bad, like punishment. We assume, too, that it's wrong to treat people better or worse than they deserve, and right to treat them according to their deserts. In these and other ways, the notion of desert pervades our ethical lives.
The problem here is much of what people possess ultimately derives from brute luck. If a person’s assets come from brute luck, then she cannot be said truly to deserve those assets. Everyday morality, ie., considered common sense moral judgment, states that people who made more solely because of genetic advantages did not deserve the extra money, nor was it fair that they get the extra money.
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