How to deserve

TY - JOUR

T1 - How to deserve

AU - Schmidtz, David

N1 - Funding Information: SCHMIDTZ DAVID University of Arizona schmidtz@u.arizona.edu 12 2002 30 6 774 799 sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text 10.1177/0090591702238203 POLITICAL THEOR Schmidtz / HOW TO Y / December 2002 DESERVE HOW TO DESERVE DAVID SCHMIDTZ University of Arizona Peopleoughttogetwhattheydeserve.Andwhattheydeservecandepend on effort, on performance, or on excelling in competition, even when excel- lence is partly a function of a person's natural gifts. Or so most people believe. Philosophers often say otherwise. John Rawls famously calls it one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character AUTHOR'S NOTE: My intellectual debts regarding this essay are many. This is only a partial list of those whose input has been pivotal: David Alm, Julia Annas, Marvin Belzer, Paul Bloomfield, Gillian Brock, Tom Christiano, Andrew Cohen, David Copp, Jonathan Dancy, Peter Danielson, Stephen Darwall, Steve Daskal, John Patrick Diggins, Paul Dotson, Amitai Etzioni, Ray Frey, Allan Gibbard, Charles Goodman, Chris Griffin, Amy Gutmann, Allen Habib, Bill Haines, Richard Healey, Rosalind Hursthouse, Jenann Ismael, David Johnston, Scott LaBarge, Loren Lomasky, Eduardo Rivera Lpez, Michael McDonald, Fred Miller, Darrel Moellendorf, Richard Montgomery, Donald Moon, Christopher Morris, Mark Murphy, Jan Narveson, Wayne Norman, David Owen, Jeff Paul, Michael Pendlebury, Guido Pincione, Steve Pink, Francis Fox Piven, James Rachels, Peter Railton, Henry Richardson, Dan Russell, Jack Sanders, Daniel Shapiro, Houston Smit, Michael Smith, Rhonda Smith, David Sobel, Horacio Spector, Christine Swanton, Fernando Tesn, Mary Tjiattas, David Truncellito, David Velleman, Elizabeth Willott, Matt Zwolinski, and two anonymous reviewers. I thank audiences at the Rochester Institute of Tech- nology, Chung Cheng University, Torcuato di Tella Law School, and the Universities of Michi- gan, West Virginia, Witwatersrand, Auckland, Arizona, British Columbia, Calgary, Yale, and Bowling Green State for their hospitality. In addition to people already named, I want to I thank Hahn Hsu, Rob Gressis, Joseph Tolliver, Bob Ware, Rogers Smith and Corey Robin, and Marina Oshana and Kory Swanson for arranging those talks. I also wish to thank the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, the Centre for Applied Ethics at the Uni- versity of British Columbia, the Earhart Foundation, and the University of Arizona for research support. Finally, I want to thank Chris Maloney. We live in the same neighborhood and often walk home together as the sun sets behind us, discussing justice and other philosophical topics. I treasure those walks, although Chris is not to blame for how I write them up. POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 30 No. 6, December 2002 774-799 DOI: 10.1177/0090591702238203 2002 Sage Publications 774 Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 775 depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.1 Eric Rakowski sees the passage as an "uncontroversial assertion, which even libertarians such as Nozick accept."2 The view is, in a way, compelling. Inevitably, our efforts are aided by natu- ral gifts, positional advantages, and sheer luck, so how much can we deserve? And if our very characters result from an interplay of those same factors, how can we deserve anything at all?3 Accordingly, says Samuel Scheffler, "none of the most prominent contemporary versions of philosophical liberalism assigns a significant role to desert at the level of fundamental principle."4 This essay begins by indicating how desert is conceived in philosophical literature. The main objective, though, is to consider what we can do to be deserving. In particular, I argue that there is an aspect of what we do to make ourselves deserving that, although it has not been discussed in the literature, plays a central role in everyday moral life, and for good reason. I. THE "BIG BANG" THEORY AND A COMPATIBILIST ALTERNATIVE Nearly everyone would say people ought to get what they deserve. But if we ask what people deserve, or on what basis, people begin to disagree. A few will say we deserve things simply in virtue of being human or being in need. Many will say we deserve reward in proportion to the effort we put into our projects or in proportion to the real value our efforts add to those projects. Some say we deserve on the basis of our manifest talent or our excellence in competition.5 If we could sort out which of these alleged desert bases are genuine, it is hard to know exactly what the members of the resulting set would have in common. However, as George Sher plausibly suggests, to judge a person deserving is to respond to features of the person that we judge to be of value.6 To judge Bob deserving of X is to judge Bob worthy of X. Intuitively (although admittedly this is less obvious), to acknowledge that there are things Bob can do to be deserving X is at some level to acknowledge that Bob is a person.7 Something roughly like this is implicit in normal deliberation about what a person deserves. The skeptics' theory, in its most sweeping form, depicts desert in such a way that to deserve X, we must not only supply the sort of input that is standardly thought to ground a desert claim; we also must be deserving of the 776 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 prior history of the world that caused us to be in a position to supply that input.8 Needless to say, we all have whatever we have partly in virtue of luck, and luck is not a desert maker. Every outcome is influenced by factors that are morally arbitrary. (Arbitrary has a negative connotation, but without further argument, we are entitled only to say luck is morally neutral or inert, and that is how I intend the term arbitrary to be understood here.) But does the suppo- sition that some of an outcome's causal inputs are morally arbitrary entail that all of them must be? No. Everyone is lucky to some degree, but there is a big difference between being lucky and being merely lucky. The bare fact of being lucky is not what precludes being deserving. Being merely lucky is what precludes being deserving, because to say we are merely lucky is to say we have not supplied inputs (the effort, the excellence) that ground desert claims. To rebut a desert claim in a given case, we need to show that inputs that can ground desert claims (and on a nonempty conception, there will be some9) are missing in that case. The fact that there also will be inputs that do not ground desert claims (luck, the Big Bang) is both inevitable and inconse- quential and, thus, goes without saying. Skeptics say every causal chain has morally arbitrary links, but no one doubts that. The idea with genuinely skeptical ramifications is that no chain has nonarbitrary links. The argument is that even character, talent, and other internal features that constitute us as persons are arbitrary so long as they are products of chains of events containing arbitrary links. The upshot is that internal features of persons must be uncaused, lest they be reduced to the sta- tus of mere luck. Hard determinism is the view that every event is determined, thus there is no free will. Skeptics about desert accept an analog of hard determinism: every causal chain traces back to something morally arbitrary, therefore noth- ing is deserved. So, why not respond with an analog of what philosophers call compatibilism?10 In other words, why not say (somewhat as a compatibilist would say) that while every event has a cause, some causal chains work their way through features internal to persons? Such features are not all morally arbitrary, unless everything is. If a skeptic says, "Character is arbitrary," a nonskeptic replies, "Compared to what? We are talking about features that make persons persons. If character does not matter, what does?" We distin- guish between outcomes that owe something to a person's choices, character, talent, and effort, and outcomes that do not.11 Desert makers, if there are such things, are relations between outcomes and internal features of persons. In general, nothing is assumed about what caused those features to come into existence. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 777 Is there anything odd or surprising about the fact that we generally make no assumptions about a desert maker's causal history? Probably not. What if we had been talking about the features of nonpersons? Joel Feinberg observes, "Art objects deserve admiration; problems deserve careful consid- eration; bills of legislation deserve to be passed."12 John Kleinig says the Grand Canyon deserves its reputation.13 Such remarks about nonpersons are offered as small digressions, mentioned in passing and then set aside, but they point to something crucial. We never say the Grand Canyon deserves its repu- tation only if it in turn deserves the natural endowments on which its reputa- tion is based. We never question artistic judgments by saying, "Even the greatest of paintings were caused to have the features we admire. Not one ever did anything to deserve being caused to have those features." Intuitively, obviously, it doesn't matter. Skeptics assume it does matter in the case of persons, but the assumption appears to be groundless. As with nonpersons, when a person's internal fea- tures support desert claims, the support appears to come from an appreciation of what those features are, not from evidence that the features are uncaused. Here, then, is where matters currently stand. Ordinary thought about desert would be a recipe for skepticism if it were true that ordinary thought assumes people deserve credit for doing X only when people in turn deserve credit for having the ability and opportunity to do X. However, insofar as ordinary practice does not assume this, ordinary practice has no such prob- lem. We seem to have two options. First, we can say no one deserves any- thing, and that is what we will say if we assume we deserve credit for working hard only if we in turn deserve credit for being "destined" to work hard. The second option is to say we deserve credit for working hard not because we deserve to have been destined to work hard, but simply because we did, after all, work hard. The latter is our ordinary practice. Neither option is compelling. We are not forced to believe in desert; nei- ther are we forced to be skeptics. We decide. If we take a fresh look, we can ask whether we treat people more respectfully when we give them credit for what they do or when we deny them credit. Or we can ask what kind of life we have when we live by one conception rather than another. These are different questions, and not the only questions we could ask. Perhaps the answers all point in the same direction. Perhaps not. Sweeping skepticism is unattractive to most people, but there is no denying that skepticism is an option, and that some do choose to be skeptics. Refuting the skeptic and answering the question "How can we deserve anything at all?" are different tasks. This chapter answers the question, but not by refuting skeptics. For those who want an answer--for those who do 778 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 not want to be skeptics--this essay's objective is to make room within a philosophically respectable theory of justice for the idea that there are things we can do to be deserving. II. DESERVING A CHANCE Suppose we know what a person has to do to be deserving. Is there also a question about when a person has to do it? James Rachels says, "What people deserve always depends on what they have done in the past."14 David Miller says, "desert judgments are justified on the basis of past and present facts about individuals, never on the basis of states of affairs to be created in the future."15 I think that if we are not careful, we could interpret such statements in a way that would lead us to overlook an important, perhaps even the most important, category of desert-making relation. It is a conventional view that what people deserve depends on what they do, and surely it is a conventional view that we deserve no credit for what we do until after we have done it. There seems to be a further aspect to academic convention, though, namely, that when we first receive (for example) our natural and positional advan- tages, if we have not already done something to deserve them, it is too late. We are born into our natural and positional advantages by mere luck, and that which comes to us by mere luck cannot be deserved. This further aspect is what I reject. I said being merely lucky precludes being deserving. I did not say, and do not believe, that being merely lucky at t1 precludes being deserving at t . Even when action is needed to forge a con- 2 nection between outcome and internal features, I argue, the action need not precede the outcome. In particular, we have not yet done anything to deserve our natural gifts at the moment of our birth, but that need not matter. What matters, if anything at all matters, is what we do after the fact. Let me make a claim that may at first seem counterintuitive: We sometimes deserve X on the basis of what we do after receiving X rather than what we do before. Upon receiving a surprisingly good job offer, a new employee vows to work hard to deserve it. No one thinks the vow is paradoxical. No one takes the employee aside and says, "Relax. There's nothing you can do. Only the past is relevant, and the past is arbitrary from a moral point of view." But unless such everyday vows are misguided, we can deserve X on the basis of what we do after receiving X. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 779 How can this be? Is it not a brute fact that when we ask whether a person deserves X, we look backward, not forward? Suppose we say yes, conceding for argument's sake that we must look back. Even so, notice we still need to ask: backward from where? Perhaps we look back from where we are but mistakenly assume we need to look back from where the recipient was at the moment of receiving X. If we look back, a year after hiring the new employee, wondering whether she deserved the opportunity, what do we ask? We ask what she did with it. When we do that, we are looking back even while looking at events that happened after X was received. From that perspective, we see we can be deserving of opportunities.16 We deserve them by not wast- ing them--by giving them their due, as it were.17 Therefore, even if we necessarily look back when evaluating desert claims, the crucial point remains that the use sometimes--even when the use occurs after the fact--bears on whether a person was worthy of the opportu- nity. Imagine another case. Two students receive scholarships. One works hard and gets excellent grades. The other parties her way through her first year before finally being expelled for cheating. Does their conduct tell us nothing about which was more deserving of a scholarship? Can we defend the convention (that whether we deserve X depends on what happens before we receive X) by saying the students' conduct is rele- vant only because it reveals what they were like before receiving the award? It would appear not. When we look back at the expelled student's disgraceful first year, our reason for saying she did not deserve her award has nothing to do with speculation about what she did in high school. We may agree that both students were equally qualified for scholarships qua reward. Or suppose they were equally unqualified; both were chosen via clerical error and prior to the award were equally destined for a lifetime of failure. The difference lies in subsequent performance, not prior qualifications. What grounds our convic- tion that one is more worthy of the scholarship qua opportunity is that one stu- dent gave the opportunity its due; the other did not. Again, we sometimes deserve X on the basis of what we do after receiving X rather than what we do before. Needless to say, skeptics greet this conclusion with skepticism. It can look dubious even to less skeptical philosophers. Why? Part of the problem is that as philosophers we learn to focus on desert as a compensatory notion. The idea is, inputs we supply prior to receiving X put a moral scale out of balance, such that our receiving X rebalances the scale. To those who see desert as nec- essarily a compensatory notion, we deserve X only if X represents a restoring of moral balance. We deserve X only if we deserve it qua reward, only if our receiving X settles an account. 780 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 In ordinary use, though, desert sometimes is a promissory notion. Some- times our receiving X is what puts the moral scale out of balance, and our sub- sequently proving ourselves worthy of X is what restores it. X need not be compensation for already having supplied the requisite inputs. There are times when it is the other way around--when supplying the requisite inputs is what settles the account. In either case, two things happen, and the second settles the account. In compensatory cases, desert-making inputs are supplied first, then the reward settles the account. In promissory cases, the opportunity is given first, then supplying desert-making inputs settles the account. On the promissory model, a new employee who vows, "I will do justice to this opportunity. I will show you I deserve it" is not babbling. She is not saying future events will ret- roactively cause it to be the case that her receiving X represents the settling of an account now. Instead, she is saying future events will settle the account. Her claim is not that she is getting what she already paid for but that she is get- ting what she will pay for.18 So why does James Rachels assert that, "What people deserve always depends on what they have done in the past"?19 Rachels says, "the explana- tion of why past actions are the only bases of desert connects with the fact that if people were never responsible for their own conduct--if strict determinism were true--no one would ever deserve anything."20 Crucially, when he says, "past actions are the only bases of desert," Rachels is stressing "actions," not "past." What Rachels sees as the unacceptable alternative is not a theory such as mine but rather the view that people deserve to be rewarded for their natu- ral endowments. He is thinking of past actions versus past nonactions and is not considering whether actions postdating X's receipt might be relevant. That is why Rachels could see himself as explaining why "past actions are the only bases of desert" when he argues that "if people were never responsible for their own conduct, . . . no one would ever deserve anything." Notice: this argument in no way connects desert bases to events predating X's receipt. It connects desert to action, but not to past action.21 Rachels also says, "People do not deserve things on account of their will- ingness to work but only on account of their actually having worked."22 There are reasons why Rachels would say this, and he may be exactly right when we are talking about rewards. It appears analytic that rewards are responses to past performance. However, rewards are not the only kind of thing that can be deserved. We sometimes also have reasons to say things like, "she deserves a chance." We may say a young job candidate deserves a chance not because of any work she has done but rather because she is plainly a talented and well- meaning person who wants the job and who will throw herself into it if given the chance. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 781 A more senior internal candidate may be deserving in a different way: that is, worthy of reward for past performance. Yet, the idea that an inexperienced candidate can deserve a chance, and for the reasons mentioned, is something most people find compelling. We can be glad they do, too, because thinking this way helps to bring it about that opportunities go to those worthy of them in the promissory sense, that is, those who do justice to them when given a chance. If we say a job candidate deserves a chance and then, far from throwing herself into the job, she treats it with contempt, that would make us wrong.23 The promissory aspect of desert will have failed to materialize. She will have had a chance to balance the account and will have failed to do so.24 Note that if any part of the time line is relevant merely as information, it is the part before she was hired, not the part after. The "before" part justifies the hiring commit- tee's prediction that she will supply the requisite inputs. The "after" part is what makes the prediction true.25 We sort out applicants for a reason. Normally, the point is not to reward someone for past conduct but to get someone who can do the job. That is why, by the time we reach t , the question 2 is not what she did before the opportunity but what she did with it. The ques- tion at t need not and often does not turn on what was already settled at t . 2 1 To further clarify the nature of the promissory model, we should separate it into two elements. The first element explains what we can say about Jane from the perspective of t . The second element explains what we can say 2 about Jane from the perspective of t . 1 Element (a): A person who receives opportunity X at t can be deserving at t in virtue of hav- 1 2 ing done justice to it. Element (b): A person who receives opportunity X at t can be deserving at t in virtue of 1 1 what she will do if given the chance. What does element (a) tell us? It tells us that it can be true at t that the 2 account has been settled. Jane supplied inputs that did justice to X. We do not suppose Jane already supplied those inputs at t . When we call Jane deserving 1 at t , as per element (a), we are not denying that she may have been merely 2 lucky at t . All we are saying is, when the chance to prove herself worthy pre- 1 sented itself, Jane did what she needed to do. Next consider element (b). We asked what is supposed to be true at t . If we 2 instead ask what is supposed to be true at t , that would be a question for ele- 1 ment (b). Element (b) says Jane can deserve X at t , but this does not mean 1 Jane has already done something such that rewarding her with X at t settles 1 an account. Instead, what is supposed to be true at t is that Jane is choice- 1 worthy. Specifically, a hiring committee may, at t , judge Jane's choice- 1 782 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 worthiness in terms of whether she will settle the account, given the chance. There are various ways of formulating element (b) and none are perfect; how- ever, when we think of contexts like hiring decisions, it seems natural to say the hiring committee is looking not merely for someone who theoretically can do the job, but for someone who will do the job given a chance, where "given a chance" means not only "if we offer her the job" but also "barring unforeseen catastrophe" and so on. Also, our invocation of element (b) at t is, 1 in effect, a prediction that by the time we get to t , we will be in a position to 2 invoke element (a). We are predicting that by t , she will have supplied the rel- 2 evant desert-making inputs. However, we are not merely wagering on future performance. Rather, we are wagering that the person has desert-making internal features that will translate into future performance barring unex- pected misfortune. We are saying she is the kind of person who will do the job given the chance. (When we are confident that a machine will perform well if we give it a chance, we generally do not speak of the machine as deserving a chance. At very least, we do not mean the same thing when speaking of a per- son's character as when speaking of a machine's characteristics.) Finally, we could interpret choice-worthiness as a question of what is true of the candi- date or as a question of what the committee knows about the candidate. There are pros and cons either way. The committee justifies its decision by citing the best evidence it can gather regarding how she will do. Still, we might hold that what makes it true that she is choice-worthy is the fact that she truly is the kind of person who will supply the requisite desert-makers and thus become deserving at t in the sense of the promissory model's element (a). 2 What the promissory model's element (a) says is that although desert requires a balance between what Jane gives and what Jane is given, Jane need not move first. Element (b) says Jane can deserve opportunity X (in the sense of being choice worthy) before she does her part. In contrast, element (a) pointedly does not say Jane can deserve X before doing her part. Element (a) stresses that even if Jane deserves X only after doing her part, it still does not follow that she has to do her part before receiving X. Element (a) therefore is the essence of the promissory model's departure from the idea that we deserve X only if we deserve it as a reward for past performance. So far as our purpose is to challenge this idea, we do not need element (b). We need some version of element (b) only insofar as we seek to vindicate ordinary practice, and in particular our tendency to speak of candidates as deserving a chance in virtue of what they can and will do if given a chance. Admittedly, if a committee invokes element (b) in concluding that Jane is choice worthy at t , then whether the committee judged correctly remains to 1 be seen. Is this a puzzle? If so, it is less a puzzle about desert and more a puz- zle about prediction. To see this, consider an analogy. Suppose at t we say 1 Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 783 Jane will be married at t . Jane then gets married. In that case, events at t have 2 2 indeed settled the truth-value of a claim uttered at t . Does anyone find this 1 puzzling? So far as I know, no one speaks of future events as backward- causing a prediction to be true. Future events simply settle that a prediction was true. Events at t can settle the truth-value of a claim like, "She'll get mar- 2 ried, given a chance." They also can settle the truth-value of a claim like, "She'll do justice to X, given a chance." There comes a time when we can say, "You said she'd get married; it turns out you were right," or when a committee can say, "We said she'd do justice to the opportunity; it turns out we were right." In either case, Jane settles what had been unsettled. "She deserves X," meaning she will do justice to it if given a chance, is no more paradoxical than "Salt is soluble," meaning it will dissolve in water if given a chance. Insofar as the hypothesis that Jane deserves a chance at t is a matter of 1 whether Jane has relevant dispositional properties at t , and insofar as the test 1 of this hypothesis lies in the future, the promissory model's element (b) implies that moral life sometimes involves decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Hiring committees make decisions about which candidates are most worthy with no guarantee that they are deciding correctly. When a committee judges at t that Jane deserves a chance, they are placing a bet. 1 They also are judging her character. They may even be transforming her char- acter insofar as their trust may inspire Jane to become the kind of person they judge her to be. At t , though, it remains to be seen whether Jane is or will 1 become that kind of person. Jane settles that later, in an epistemological sense, and perhaps in a metaphysical sense too, insofar as Jane will have to decide, not merely reveal, whether she really is that trustworthy, that hard- working, and so on. The committee will have to wait and see. Since life truly is difficult in precisely this way, I regard it as a virtue of my theory that it cor- rectly depicts the difficulty. I have no wish to develop a theory that makes moral life look simpler than it really is.26 In passing, what can the promissory model tell us about unsuccessful can- didates, or more generally about people who lack opportunity? Element (a) is silent on questions about people who never get an opportunity, but element (b) is bolder, allowing us to go further in defending ordinary practice. Ele- ment (b) can say about unsuccessful candidates roughly what it says about successful ones; namely, they may well deserve X in the sense that they too would have done justice to X, given a chance. It is no part of my thesis to sug- gest that people who lack opportunities are undeserving. Also in passing, would I entertain a promissory theory of punishment? ("He may be innocent now, but if we put him in jail, he'll turn into the sort of person who belongs in jail.") No. Reward and punishment are two sides of the compensatory model's coin, but no such parallel exists between opportunity 784 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 and punishment. The transformative role of expectations (that is, the fact that we tend to live up to them, or down, as the case may be) can justify the show of faith involved in granting an opportunity, but it cannot justify punishment. If Jean Valjean wrongly is imprisoned and says, "OK, if they treat me like a criminal, I'll act like one," that cannot vindicate the wrongful punishment. Indeed, that the punishment induces further wrongs further condemns it. In contrast, if Valjean later is rocked by a bishop's kindness and says, "OK, if they treat me like a decent human being, I'll act like one," that does vindicate the bishop's kindness.27 III. DESERVING AND EARNING We commonly show respect for people's achievements by saying things like, "You deserved it." Sometimes we refer to things people did prior to receiving a reward. Sometimes we refer to things people did since receiving an opportunity. The issue is not merely about how we happen to use words. I contend that the locution "You deserved it" is as apt in one case as in the other. If we want to indulge in a bit of linguistic legislation, though, there are dis- tinctions here worth marking. In particular, the terms deserving and earning are nearly interchangeable in ordinary use, but there is a difference, and it will be useful to give the difference a bit more emphasis than it gets in ordinary use. A paycheck is not earned until the work is done. Upon being hired, I will do what I need to do to earn the paycheck, but the future does not settle that I have earned the paycheck now. I have not earned it until I put the work in. Thus, while we do speak of people as deserving a chance even before they supply the requisite inputs, we do not speak of people as having earned a pay- check in advance of supplying requisite inputs. In part, this appears to be because what Jane deserves has relatively more to do with her character, while the question of what Jane has earned has relatively more to do with her work. Jane's character can be manifest before she supplies the requisite inputs. Her work cannot similarly be manifest prior to supplying the requisite inputs since her work is the requisite input when the question concerns what she has earned. Jane can be deserving at t in virtue of what she will do, if 1 given a chance. To have earned a paycheck at t , though, she has to have done 1 the work at t . Therefore, that she would earn the check at t is not relevant to 1 2 what Jane has earned at t , even though--according to element (b)--it is 1 highly relevant to whether Jane deserves a chance at t . Therefore, there is no 1 analog of element (b) for earning. So far, then, the compensatory model appears on target as a thesis about earning. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 785 Strikingly, though, there is an analog of element (a). We acknowledged that I have not earned the paycheck until I put the work in. Does it follow that I earn the check only if I do the work first, before the check is issued? No! In everyday life, we do not doubt that a new but trusted employee, paid in advance, can earn the money after the fact. Money is paid at t , and then what 1 was not true at t becomes true at t , namely, the scale is now balanced and 1 2 money given at t has been earned. It becomes true at t that Jane did what she 1 2 was paid to do. Therefore, we cannot save the convention (that we deserve X only if our receiving it represents a reward for previously supplied inputs) by recasting it as a thesis about earning.28 The concepts of deserving and earning are distinct at t , but at t , they converge. We can deserve X at t , and can have 1 2 2 earned X at t , in virtue of work done after X was received. 2 An unearned opportunity is an unearned opportunity, but an unearned opportunity may yet be redeemed. Though unearned, it remains possible to do justice to it. That possibility is what skeptics ignore, and that possibility plays a central role in ordinary moral life. It is what ordinary people often have in mind when they say a person deserves a chance. If any conception tor- tures ordinary language, it is the convention that we cannot deserve what comes to us by mere luck. Language aside, the more important issue is that the convention embodies a resolution to ignore the possibility of redemption involved in working to do justice to an opportunity. That ignored possibility is of immense moral significance. The process of redeeming opportunities is at the heart of so much of what is beneficial and even noble about ordinary human commerce. In a popular film about World War II, Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller is fatally injured while rescuing Private Ryan. As Miller dies, he says to Ryan, "Earn it!" At that moment, neither character is under any illusions about whether Ryan has earned the rescue. He has not, and they both know it. Neither is Ryan choice worthy in the sense of the promissory model's ele- ment (b), and they both know it.29 Still, as both characters also know, that is not the end of the story, for it is now up to Ryan to settle whether Miller's sac- rifice was in vain.30 It is not too late for Ryan to strive to redeem the sacrifice by going on to be as worthy of it as a person could be. If there is anything Ryan can do to earn the rescue, it will be at t , not t , as 2 1 analogous to the promissory model's element (a). That is, we could hear Miller's dying words as commanding Ryan to treat the rescue as if it were advance salary to be earned later. Fittingly, the film ends with a scene from decades later. An elderly Ryan visits Miller's grave. Anguished, Ryan implores his wife to, "Tell me I've been a good man!" The implication: if Ryan has been a good man, then he has done all he could to earn the rescue that gave him a chance to be a good man.31 786 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 In some ways, Ryan's situation is like a lottery winner's. If Miller hands Ryan a winning lottery ticket and says with his dying breath, "Earn it," is it possible for Ryan to earn it? No one would say Ryan has earned it at t ,32 but 1 that is not the end of the story because even when a windfall is sheer luck, it is not only sheer luck. It is also a challenge, and there is a right way of respond- ing to it. Some day, there will be a fact of the matter regarding whether Ryan responded well. Private Ryan's situation also is like that of a person born with natural and positional advantages. We are not born having done anything to deserve advantages as rewards. So, the compensatory model has no resources that could underwrite claims of desert at the moment of birth. Also, at that moment, there is no basis for deeming us choice worthy, if choosing us were even an issue. Thus, the promissory model's element (b) likewise has no resources to underwrite claims of desert at the moment of birth. Still, regard- ing our advantages, there is something we can do later on, in the manner of element (a). We can do justice to them. IV. WHY ONE CONCEPTION RATHER THAN ANOTHER? The main issue is not whether we use the same word when referring to those who did their best before receiving rewards and to those who did their best after receiving opportunities. We do, but the larger question is, are we justified in thinking desert claims are as weighty in the second instance as in the first? I argued that in everyday life we grasp the concept of deserving a chance in virtue of what we do with it. I would not appeal to common sense to justify our commonsense understanding, though. To justify, we look elsewhere. This section indicates (although only indicates) where we might look. Part of what makes it difficult even to begin such a discussion is that, in trying to justify, we risk trivializing. We risk seeming to ground a thing in considerations less important than the thing itself. That could especially be a problem with anything seen as an attempt to justify a conception of justice. When assessing alternative conceptions of justice, we generally cannot settle the contest by appeal to yet another lofty but contested ideal of justice. How- ever, if, in trying to avoid begging the question, we appeal to something other than (our conception of) justice itself, we are bound to be appealing to that which seems less important. But that is okay. We are not seeking the founda- tion of that which is itself foundational. We simply ask what can be said on the conception's behalf. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 787 Margaret Holmgren says justice "demands that each individual be secured the most fundamental benefits in life compatible with like benefits for all," then adds, "the opportunity to progress by our own efforts is a fundamental interest."33 Richard Miller concurs: "Most people (including most of the worst off) want to use what resources they have actively, to get ahead on their own steam, and this reflects a proper valuing of human capacities."34 Com- menting on Rawls, Holmgren says contractors in the original position would know that, as a perfectly general feature of human psychology, people not only want to be given stuff; they want to be involved in successful endeavors, and they want their success to be deserved. Accordingly, the most grossly risk-averse contractors, focusing only on the prospects of the least advan- taged economic class, would be anxious to ensure that members of that class have an opportunity to advance by their own effort. "Rather than focusing exclusively on the share of income or wealth they would receive, they would choose a principle of distribution which would ensure that they would each have this opportunity."35 Holmgren's claim will seem incompatible with the difference principle (which is what risk-averse contractors in Rawls's original position are sup- posed to choose) if we interpret the principle as a ground-level mandate for redistribution. Why? Because the idea that Jane can be deserving threatens to limit our redistributive mandate. By contrast, suppose we interpret the differ- ence principle not as a ground-level principle of just distribution (that is, not as a principle that says "keep giving to the least advantaged until you reach the point where, if you tried to give them more, they end up getting less") but rather as a meta-level criterion for evaluating basic structure, whose thrust concerns whether society's basic structure works to the benefit of the least advantaged (that is, as a principle that says we choose between rules like "give people what they deserve" and "give everything to the least advantaged, free of charge" by asking which is best for the least advantaged in actual empirical practice). The latter is undoubtedly the principle's canonical inter- pretation.36 In that case, the difference principle, far from competing with principles of desert, can support the idea that people can deserve a chance. It would do so if Holmgren is correct to say the least advantaged want and need the chance to prosper by their own merit. Likewise, it would do so if it is his- torically true that the least advantaged tend to flourish within, and only within, systems that respect what they and others can do to deserve rewards and also (perhaps especially) opportunities.37 We need not be Rawlsians to see these considerations as weighty. Likewise, we need not be utilitarians to care about consequences. Feinberg says, "The awarding of prizes directly promotes cultivation of the skills which constitute bases of competition."38 Rawls seems to agree with 788 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 Feinberg when he says, "Other things equal, one conception of justice is pref- erable to another when its broader consequences are more desirable."39 Yet, neither one sees himself as a utilitarian, and rightly so. While utility is not a desert maker, the fact remains that the things that are desert makers (effort, excellence) can make people better off, and making people better off is mor- ally significant. Rachels adds, In a system that respects deserts, someone who treats others well may expect to be treated well in return, while someone who treats others badly cannot. If this aspect of moral life were eliminated, morality would have no reward and immorality would have no bad con- sequences, so there would be less reason for one to be concerned with it.40 In short, our ordinary notion of desert serves a purpose. One (if only one) key way in which a society benefits people is by distributing fruits of cooper- ation in proportion to contributions to the cooperative effort. That is how societies induce contributions in the first place. Desert as normally under- stood is part of the glue that holds society together as a productive venture. Respecting desert as normally understood (respecting the inputs people sup- ply) makes people in general better off. To be sure, it would be a misuse of terms to say Bob deserves a pay raise on the grounds that giving him a raise would have utility. We may say Bob deserves a raise because he does great work, does more than his share, and does it without complaint. We do not say giving Bob a raise would have utility. But if we ask why we should acknowl- edge that Bob is a great worker, a big part of what makes Bob's efforts worthy of recognition is that his efforts are of a kind that make us all better off. If we ask why Bob is deserving, the answer should be: Bob supplied the requisite inputs. If we ask why we care whether Bob supplied inputs that go into mak- ing a person deserving, one answer would be: supplying those inputs makes Bob the kind of person we want our neighbors, our children, and ourselves to be, and makes us all better off to boot. The point need not be to maximize utility so much as to show respect for customs and institutions and characters that make people better off. (Either way, desert tracks constructive effort rather than effort per se. Effort tokens need not be successful, but they do need to be of a type that tends to produce worthy results.) If we are to do justice to individual persons, then when their individuality manifests itself in constructive effort, we had better be prepared to honor that effort and to respect the hopes and dreams that fuel it. We do that when we regard productive workers as deserving and when we refuse to see their good fortune as a moral problem that somehow discredits their hard work. When we say, "She deserves a chance," how does that differ from saying she needs a chance? Deserves suggests she has some realized or potential Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 789 merit in virtue of which she ought to be given a chance, whereas needs sug- gests neither real nor potential merit in any straightforward way. However, if we say, "All she needs is a chance," that comes close to saying she deserves a chance. It comes close to saying she is the kind of person who will give the opportunity its due. Nonetheless, I agree with Gillian Brock that whatever room we make for desert, the fact remains that people's needs matter, at least at some level.41 In fact, I would go so far as to say desert matters partly because needs matter. That Bob needs X is no reason to say Bob deserves X for the same reason that X's utility is no reason to say Bob deserves X. And if that is true, then need is not a desert basis. But there are other ways for need to be relevant. Suppose for simplicity's sake that the only way to deserve X is to work hard for X. In that case, by hypothesis, need is not at all relevant to whether Bob deserves X. All that matters is that Bob worked hard for X. Now suppose we go on to ask a further question, "What difference does it make whether Bob worked hard for X? Who cares?" Here is where need becomes relevant because we may say that as a matter of empirical fact, there is a general reason why people work hard for X, and the reason is that they need X. So, although need has nothing to do with our reason for thinking Bob deserves X, it remains a reason for car- ing about desert. One reason to give people what they deserve is that it renders people willing and able to act in ways that help them (and the people around them) to get what they need, and even to flourish. Welfare considerations (such as need, or more generally what helps us flourish) are not desert mak- ers, but they can still provide non-question-begging reasons for taking a given desert maker seriously (e.g., for respecting people who work hard).42 When the question is whether a person did justice to an opportunity, we typically do not look back to events occurring before the opportunity was received, and often that is a good thing. I indicated how we might argue the point on consequentialist grounds. It may be a good thing on Kantian grounds too. Although I will not press the point, the idea is, there is something neces- sarily and laudably ahistorical about simply respecting what people bring to the table. We respect their work, period. We admire their character, period. We do not argue (or worse, stipulate as dogma) that people are products of nature/nurture and thus ineligible for moral credit. Sometimes, we simply give people credit for what they achieve and for what they are. And some- times, simply giving people credit is the essence of treating them as persons rather than as mere confluences of historical forces. Part of the oddity in doubting whether Jane deserves her character is that Jane's character is not something that happened to her. It is her. Or if we were to imagine treating Jane and her character as separate things, then it would have to be Jane's character that we credit for being of good character, so the 790 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 question of why Jane per se should get the credit would be moot. In truth, of course, it is people, not their characters, that work hard. Thus, if we say exem- plary character is morally arbitrary, it is people, not merely character, that we are resolving not to take seriously. Martin Luther King once said, "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." King did not dream his children would live in a nation where their characters would be seen as accidents for which they could claim no credit. King asks us to judge his children by the content of their character, not by its causes. That is how we take character seriously. If their characters are not taken seriously, they will get neither the rewards nor the opportunities they deserve. This is no place for lengthy discussion of desert's relations to other moral desiderata, but these remarks indicate that the possibility of deserving a chance is not mere common sense. In the end, the bottom line is in part a prac- tical question, somewhat amenable to empirical testing: which way of talking (about what we can do to be deserving) empowers people to make use of their opportunities? V. JUSTICE, INSTITUTIONAL AND NATURAL To Feinberg, "desert is a natural moral notion (that is, one which is not log- ically tied to institutions, practices, and rules)."43 Rawls, meanwhile, con- cedes the legitimacy of desert claims as institutional artifacts. Faster runners deserve medals according to rules created for the express purpose of giving medals to faster runners. However, Rawls hastens to add, such claims (1) have no standing outside the context of particular institutional rules, and therefore (2) do not bear on what rules we should have in the first place.44 Other senses of desert, of course, are less closely tied to institutional struc- tures. A medalist who trains for years deserves admiration in a way that a medalist who wins purely on the strength of genetic gifts does not, even when the two are equally deserving of medals by the lights of the institutional rules. Likewise, athletes prove themselves worthy of the faith of their families and coaches by doing all they can to win and by being role models in the process, even when institutional rules are silent on the relevance of such inputs. But setting this aside for a moment, even if we were seeking only to understand desert's institutional contours, we still would need to know what can defeat claims grounded in rules of particular institutions. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson ran the fastest time in the hundred-meter race at the 1988 Olympics. He did nothing to show that he deserved his genetic gifts, or his competitive Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 791 character, or the excellence of his coaches. All he did was run faster than the competition, which on its face entails he deserved the gold medal. However, blood tests revealed that Johnson had taken steroids. Did it mat- ter? Yes it did. The fact that he took steroids raises questions of desert, whereas the bare fact that he had a background (he had genes; he grew up in an environment) does not. Being born in the wake of the Big Bang did not stop Johnson from deserving a medal, but there is a real question about whether taking steroids preempts inputs by which sprinters come to deserve medals. We may ask whether steroids are in fact banned. That is an institu- tional question. We also may ask whether steroids should be banned. That question is straightforwardly pre-institutional: its answer (1) does not turn on particular institutional rules and (2) does bear on what rules we should have in the first place. I agree that some desert claims carry moral weight as institutional arti- facts. The point, though, is that some claims do not simply happen to carry weight as institutional artifacts. They ought to carry weight as institutional artifacts because they carry weight pre-institutionally. We see winning sprinters as deserving when we see their excellence as resulting from years of ferocious dedication. If instead we thought the key to winning was to take larger doses of more dangerous chemicals, we would not regard winners as deserving. This difference is not an institutional artifact. We see the cases dif- ferently even when the chemicals are permitted by the institutional rules. Part of our reason for caring is that the race's point is to set an example--to show us all how excellent a human being can be. If we have to explain success in terms of steroids rather than in terms of features of persons that ground desert claims in a pre-institutional sense, the institution is not working. Like- wise, if the competition inspires impressionable viewers to take steroids rather than to develop their talents, the institution is not working. If one way of competing risks competitors' lives and sets a dangerous example for chil- dren who idolize them, while a version that bans steroids is healthier for everyone, then we have pre-institutional grounds for thinking it was right to establish, publicize, and enforce the ban, and that my countryman Ben John- son did not deserve a medal.45 VI. CONCLUSIONS This essay's purpose has been to offer a non-skeptical conception of desert to those who wish to make room within a philosophically respectable theory of justice for the idea that there are things we can do to be deserving. Spe- cifically, it is possible for Jane to deserve an opportunity. Moreover, whether 792 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 Jane deserved an opportunity can depend at least partly on what she did with it. It is crucial that the scales be balanced. It is not crucial that components of the balance be supplied in a particular order. If X is conferred first and the desert base is supplied later, that too is a balancing of the moral scale. This possibility, although not yet a subject of philosophical debate, is central to ordinary moral life. The import of the promissory model's element (a) is that what was once morally arbitrary need not remain so. The most valuable things we are given in life are opportunities, and the main thing we do to deserve them is to do jus- tice to them after the fact. Good luck cannot rob us of the chance to act in ways that make people deserving (although bad luck can, which is one reason why bad luck is bad).46 The import of element (b) is that we can accommodate the idea that people can deserve a chance. They can deserve a chance not because of what they have done but because of what they can and will do, if only we give them a chance. We need to keep this essay's conclusions in perspective. What I call "deserving a chance" is not the whole of desert. Desert is not the whole of jus- tice. Justice is not the whole of morality.47 This part of a larger theory tells us to treat opportunities as challenges and to respect those who meet their own challenges in fitting ways, but this part does not answer all questions. It does not say what Wilt Chamberlain should have been paid or what opportunities Wilt should have had.48 It answers one question: what can Wilt Chamberlain or anyone blessed by good fortune do to be deserving? Its answer is: when we look back on Chamberlain's career, wondering whether he deserved his package of natural and positional advantages, we are not restricted to consid- ering what he did before receiving that package. We can acknowledge that what really matters, if anything matters, is what he did with that package.49 I followed Rawls in assuming for argument's sake that natural and posi- tional advantages are on a par, but we do well to hesitate here. As just men- tioned, not every important question is a question about desert, and in particu- lar, it would be a mistake to assume Wilt needs to deserve his natural assets in order to be entitled to them. Conceptions of desert respond to the fact that people are active agents. Conceptions of entitlement respond to the fact that people are separate agents. As a separate agent, it may be no one else's busi- ness whether Wilt does justice to the potential given to him by luck of the draw in the natural lottery. Wilt is not indebted to anyone for his natural assets. No scale is out of balance merely in virtue of Wilt having characteris- tics that make him Wilt. Still, even if it is no one else's business whether Wilt does justice to his potential, the fact remains that Wilt will do or fail to do jus- tice to it. Regardless of whether it is anyone else's business, there are things Wilt can do to be deserving. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 793 This conception makes room not for honoring those who have opportuni- ties as compared to those who do not but simply for honoring people who do what they can to be deserving of their opportunities. This part of the larger theory asks not whether Wilt has the right salary but whether he has the right character. More precisely, this part asks whether Wilt has internal features relating to the outcome in relevant ways, such that the outcome is not simply a matter of arbitrary luck (unless everything is). This part asks about character as manifested in action--whether Wilt has done or will do what he can to deserve his salary, whatever his salary happens to be. Desert is not an essentially competitive notion. The fundamental question is whether a person has supplied the requisite inputs, not whether the person has done more than someone else has. There are cases like the following: 1. Wilt Chamberlain has X and you have Y, 2. Wilt did something to deserve X while you did something to deserve Y, 3. X is more than Y, and (so far as desert is concerned) 4. there is nothing wrong with X being more than Y, despite the fact that Wilt does not deserve "more than you" under that description. In other words, the first question about Wilt is not whether Wilt has done something to deserve more than you but whether Wilt has done something to deserve what he has. Perhaps there was never a time when an impartial judge, weighing your performance against Wilt's, concluded or had any reason to conclude that Wilt's prize should be larger than yours. All that happened is that Wilt did justice to his opportunities and you did justice to yours. At issue is not a relation between you and Wilt; rather, what is at issue is one relation between what Wilt did and what Wilt has and a second relation between what you did and what you have. That is all. If a central distributor were charged with the task of distributing according to desert, and if resources were scarce, then the central distributor presum- ably would have to make a series of comparative judgments about what peo- ple deserve, and then allocate funds so as to produce a pattern of shares track- ing the pattern of people's relative deserts. (Thus, if the average colleague deserves a ten percent raise but we have only enough to give average raises of five percent, then we cannot give everyone what they deserve, but we can give everyone the same percentage of what they deserve.) The situation is differ- ent if there is no central distributor. If Wilt worked hard for his salary of X while you worked hard for your salary of Y, then there is something apt about Wilt having X and you having Y. Each of you supplied desert-making inputs connecting you to your respective shares. Perhaps it would be impossible for a central distributor to justify allocating X to Wilt and Y to you, but by 794 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 hypothesis, there was no such allocation decision, and there is no central dis- tributor who needs to justify making such a decision. This does not mean the difference between X and Y needs no justification (on, say, egalitarian grounds). The point is only that the difference does not need justifying in the same way deliberately creating the difference would need justifying. One justification for giving people credit for peacefully making full use of their opportunities is that doing so helps people live peaceful and productive lives. It empowers people to make full use of their opportunities. However, our reasons to respect desert as normally understood also are reasons to respect desert's limits as normally understood. In particular, there are limits to what a society can do, and limits to what it can expect its citizens to do, to ensure that people get what they deserve. Thus, even something as funda- mental as the principle that people ought to get what they deserve has limits. In particular, a just system works to minimize the extent to which people's entitlements fly in the face of what they deserve, but not at a cost of compro- mising people's ability to form stable expectations regarding their entitlements and thus to get on with their lives in peaceful and productive ways. It goes both ways, though, for desert also corrects the caprices of right- ful entitlements, and that too is a good thing. For example, a proprietor may know her employee is entitled to a certain wage while also seeing that the employee is exceptionally productive and (in both promissory and compen- satory senses) deserves a raise. If she cares enough about desert, she restruc- tures her rightful holdings (her payroll) accordingly, benefiting not only the employee but probably her company and her customers as well. A society cannot work without a "rule of law" system that secures people's savings and earned wages, thereby enabling people to plan their lives,50 but neither can a society's rule of law function properly in the absence of an ethos that deeply respects what people can do to be deserving.51 Part of our job as moral agents is to do justice to opportunities embedded in our entitlements. It is in meeting that challenge that we make entitlement systems work. NOTES 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971), 104. 2. Eric Rakowski, Equal Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 112. Samuel Scheffler likewise calls the passage "uncontroversial." See Scheffler, "Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics," Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992): 299-323, here p. 307. Indeed, F. A. Hayek says, "A good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face or a skillful hand, and a ready wit or an attractive personality are in large measure as independent of a person's efforts as the opportunities or experiences he has had." Hayek insists it is neither desir- able nor practicable to ask basic structure to distribute according to desert. See Hayek, The Con- Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 795 stitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 94. David Gauthier says, "We may agree with Rawls that no one deserves her natural capacities. Being the person one is, is not a matter of desert," although Gauthier doubts that this fact has normative implications. See Gauthier, Moral by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 220. 3. Rawls's positive theory of justice is meant to apply only to society's basic structure, but his critique of desert is not similarly constrained and cannot be constrained merely by stipulating that it is constrained. When Rawls says, "the concept of desert seems not to apply" to any case where outcomes are influenced by natural advantages (or characters), he is making a claim not about basic structure but about the larger moral universe. In particular, he is claiming that the larger moral universe contains nothing (other than his own first principle of justice) to rein in the difference principle as the test of basic structure's justness. 4. Scheffler, "Responsibility," 301. 5. Joel Feinberg coins the term desert base to refer to factors that ground desert claims. The idea is that every well-formed desert claim is a three-place relation of the form "P deserves X in virtue of feature F." See "Justice and Personal Desert," in Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 58. I do not know whether it is possible to produce a complete catalog of all possible desert bases. Suffice it to say, the standard bases on which persons are commonly said to be deserving include character, effort, achievement, and (at least insofar as it is constructively exercised) talent. 6. See George Sher, Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 195. See also Jan Narveson, "Deserving Profits," in Profits and Morality, ed. Robin Cowan and Mario Rizzo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48-97, esp. 50-51. 7. This idea would seem more awkward if we were thinking of what it means to deserve punishment, but it has a Kantian pedigree. See Christopher Morris, "Punishment and Loss of Moral Standing," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 53-79. 8. Is this Rawls's view? Perhaps. Rawls repeatedly stresses, and thus evidently thinks it matters, that, "Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordi- nary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances" (Theory of Justice, 74). In any case, many authors endorse such a view, and many are inspired to do so by Rawls. Most recently, Gillian Brock, "Just Deserts and Needs," Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1999): 165-88. See her section on "How can we deserve anything since we don't deserve our asset bases?" For better or worse, such a theory cannot sort people out. To Rawlsians, this is good. Wanting to say inequalities should be arranged so as maximally to benefit the least advantaged, Rawlsians regard as unwelcome competition the idea that people deserve more--and therefore should receive more--if and when and because their talents and efforts contribute more to society. Rawls's critics have responded by rejecting the premise that, to be a desert maker, an input must itself be deserved in turn. For example, see Narveson, "Deserving Profits," 67; Sher, Desert, 24; and Alan Zaitchik, "On Deserving to Deserve," Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977): 370-88, at 373. That is roughly where that debate stands. Michael Walzer says, "Advocates of equality have often felt compelled to deny the reality of desert." In a footnote, Walzer says he is thinking in particular of Rawls. Walzer portrays the anti- desert argument as supposing the capacity to make an effort or to endure pain is, like all their other capacities, only the arbitrary gift of nature or nurture. But this is an odd argument, for while its purpose is to leave us with persons of equal entitlement, it is hard to see that it leaves us with persons at all. How are we to conceive of these men and women once we have come to view their capacities and achievements as accidental accessories, like hats and coats they just hap- pen to be wearing? How, indeed, are they to conceive of themselves? 796 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 260. 9. If, on a given conception of desert, there are no desert makers at all--no inputs we could supply that would make us deserving--then that conception is empty. On a nonempty concep- tion, there is a real question about what a person does or does not deserve; there will be inputs that a person could supply, or fail to supply. 10. Within the context of the free will debate, a compatibilist is someone who agrees with the hard determinist that every event has a cause but then notes, contra the hard determinist, that this is compatible with the free-will thesis because that thesis says not that our actions are uncaused but rather that our own choices are integral parts of the causal chains that culminate in our actions. I am not endorsing compatibilism here but simply borrowing the structure of the idea. 11. I borrow the felicitous "owing something" locution from James Rachels, "What People Deserve," Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 175-97, at 184. 12. Feinberg, "Justice and Personal Desert," 55. 13. John Kleinig, "The Concept of Desert," American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 71- 78. 14. Rachels, "What People Deserve," 176. 15. David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 93. 16. I speak interchangeably of deserving a chance, being deserving of a chance, and being worthy of it. Sometimes, it is more natural to describe a person as being deserving of X rather than as deserving X, especially when the question concerns opportunity rather than reward. But this is a verbal point. If a graduate student said, "No one deserves anything, yet there is much of which people are deserving," we would think the student was making some sort of joke. 17. Is this a sufficient condition? No. If something is wrong with the opportunity, as when we have a chance to use stolen property, then not wasting it does not suffice to show we deserve it. We could say the same of standard theories about deserving rewards: when we know the reward is stolen property, qualifying for it does not suffice to show we deserve it. 18. A few writers at least hint in different ways at the idea that desert can have a forward- looking component. Most prominently, Fred Feldman argues that a soldier who volunteers for a suicide mission can deserve a medal in advance. However, while I find much in Feldman with which I agree, and in particular that there may be reason to award a medal in advance, the case does not fit my model. The medal is not an opportunity. It is a reward. (Feldman does not argue that people can deserve opportunities or that people can deserve them in virtue of doing justice to them.) See Feldman, "Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom," Mind 104 (1995): 63-77, at 70-71. Jeremy Waldron and Fred Miller see forward-looking elements in Aristotle's discussion of meritocracy in distributing political offices. Aristotle (Politics, book III, chap. 12, 1282b, line 30ff) says, When a number of flute players are equal in their art, there is no reason why those of them who are better born should have better flutes given to them; for they will not play any better on the flute, and the superior instrument should be reserved for him who is the superior artist. See Fred D. Miller, "Sovereignty and Political Rights," Aristoteles Politik, ed. Otfried Hffe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 107-19. Intriguingly, Waldron suggests a school might choose among candidates by comparing how meritorious the school would be if it hired one rather than another. See Waldron, "The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle's Politics," Political Theory 23 (1995): 563-84 at 573. 19. Rachels, "What People Deserve," 176. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 797 20. Ibid., 180. 21. In light of this discussion, should we reassess our interpretation of quotations from Rachels and Miller with which this section began? When they say that what we deserve depends on what we have done in the past, and never on the future, should we suppose they meant only that what we deserve depends on what we do? Should we go even further and suppose they were in favor of the proposition that we can deserve an opportunity in virtue of what we will do with it? To my knowledge, nothing they say explicitly rules out this reinterpretation, and certainly I hope they would accept the proposition today, but the idea that they had this idea in mind at the time is baseless. At the time, they did not accept the proposition that we can deserve X in virtue of what we do after receiving X. Neither did they reject it. At the time they were writing, it had not occurred to anyone to be for it, or against it. The contribution of this essay is not to defend the proposition against legions of committed enemies but simply to bring it to people's attention as a possible position. 22. Rachels, "What People Deserve," 185. 23. Note: being wrong about what the candidate deserved in this sense does not imply that we were wrong about other desert bases as well. It may remain true that, say, the candidate had the highest score on the aptitude test. It is no part of my view that all desert bases (even those pertain- ing specifically to opportunities) stand or fall with, or are reducible to, the promissory notion introduced here. 24. If the candidate treats the job with contempt, then she has supplied neither the perfor- mance nor even the good-faith effort that the hiring committee expected. If instead the candidate fails through no fault of her own, then the committee cannot hold it against her. Furthermore, if the reason for her failure is not something that the committee could have foreseen--if it is simply a stroke of bad luck--then the committee cannot blame itself for having chosen wrongly either. They may correctly judge in retrospect that although the new employee failed, it was not her fault, and they were still right to believe she deserved a chance in the sense of element (b). Although she failed to do justice to the opportunity, that is because she did not really get the opportunity that the committee intended. If she had really gotten the chance, she would have done justice to it. (By analogy, suppose we decide to give salt a chance to dissolve in water, and then through no fault of ours, what we actually end up doing is giving it a chance to dissolve in olive oil. If the salt fails to dissolve, we still can insist the salt would have dissolved in water, given the chance.) 25. Recall David Miller's claim that "desert judgments are justified on the basis of past and present facts about individuals." I can agree that the epistemological justification of desert claims is backward-looking because that is where the information is, while still holding that truth makers for some desert claims can lie in the future. (We would say the same of predictions in general.) 26. I thank Guido Pincione and Martn Farrell for their insight on this point. 27. Jean Valjean is a character from Victor Hugo, Les Misrables (Paris: Hetzel, 1888). 28. However, we might defend a version of Fred Feldman's thesis in this way. (See note 18.) The soldier, awarded a medal in advance, does not deserve it and has not earned it. (The medal is an award, not an opportunity. If it is deserved at all, it must be deserved qua award, which is to say it must be deserved along lines specified by the compensatory model.) Even so, it can make sense to honor the soldier now for what the soldier is about to do. Moreover, after the soldier makes the heroic sacrifice, it will then make perfect sense to speak of the soldier as having earned the medal. 29. As the story goes, the reason why High Command orders Ryan's rescue has nothing to do with Ryan's worthiness. Ryan's three brothers have just died in battle. The point of rescuing Ryan is to avoid having to send a telegram to Ryan's mother saying her entire family has just been wiped out. 798 POLITICAL THEORY / December 2002 30. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, one of the most moving speeches ever made, gains its rhetorical power from precisely this point, speaking as it does of the unfinished work of those who died in battle, calling on us to make sure their last full measure of devotion shall not be in vain. 31. It is worth noting that Ryan's story is neutral with regard to the relative significance of alternative desert bases. Where the elderly Ryan's wife might say the relevant basis is effort and thus that Ryan is deserving in virtue of having done all he could, Ryan himself may see achieve- ment as the relevant basis, thus concluding that despite his efforts, he has not accomplished nearly enough to make him worthy of all the lives that were sacrificed to save his. The problem is general. If sufficiently great sacrifices were made so as to put us in a position to flourish, we have to wonder whether there is anything we can do to be worthy of those sacri- fices. There is one easy answer, namely, that if we do all we can, then we have done all anyone could ask. Yet, if we are reflective, we cannot help but think this answer is too easy and that there is no guarantee that "all we can" will truly be enough. 32. If the case were more like the kind of case covered by element (b), Miller conceivably might say Ryan deserves the ticket. Suppose Miller needs to select someone from a list of appli- cants and sees that Ryan would move mountains to prove himself worthy. In that case, deeming Ryan choice worthy, on that basis, might be Miller's best-justified option. 33. Margaret Holmgren, "Justifying Desert Claims: Desert and Opportunity," Journal of Value Inquiry 20 (1986): 265-78 at 274. 34. Richard W. Miller, "Too Much Inequality," Social Philosophy and Policy 19 (2002): 275-313. 35. Holmgren, "Justifying Desert Claims," 275. 36. Unfortunately, we naturally slip into thinking of bargainers as choosing a ground-level plan for redistribution. Rawls himself slips in this way when he says, There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed according to desert. . . . Now justice as fair- ness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original posi- tion. (A Theory of Justice, p. 310) In a way, it is true that such a principle would not be chosen, but the reason is because distri- butional principles are not on the menu. They are not even the kind of thing that bargainers choose. What bargainers choose are meta-level principles for evaluating things like distribution according to desert. 37. By the lights of the difference principle, it should matter that it is the least advantaged who can least afford the self-stifling cynicism that goes with believing no one deserves anything; neither can they afford the license for repression that goes with the more advantaged believing no one deserves anything. 38. Feinberg, "Justice and Personal Desert," 80. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Rachels, "What People Deserve," 190. 41. Brock, "Just Deserts," 166. 42. To keep this in perspective, though, we should keep in mind that the basic concept of jus- tice often is determinate enough that we can see what is just without needing to appeal to other goals and values. For example, we know it is unjust deliberately to punish an innocent person. It is analytic that punishment is not what the innocent are due. We do not appeal to consequences to decide that. The only time we appeal to considerations external to the basic concept, such as con- sequences, is when the basic concept is not enough to sort out competing claims of rival concep- tions. That is all. Schmidtz / HOW TO DESERVE 799 43. Feinberg, "Justice and Personal Desert," 56. 44. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 103. 45. This conclusion does not presuppose the promissory model. The possibility of pre- institutional desert is manifest even within the compensatory framework. 46. For example, if Private Ryan is killed by a stray bullet within minutes of having been res- cued, then there is no fact of the matter about whether he did justice to the opportunity to live a good life since as it happens he did not actually have any such opportunity. Bad luck robbed him of it. 47. I try to fit this into a more comprehensive theory in The Elements of Justice, in progress. 48. The infamous Wilt Chamberlain example comes from Nozick's discussion of "How Lib- erty Upsets Patterns." Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 160-64. 49. I have followed Rawls in assuming for argument's sake that natural and positional advan- tages are on a par. I do not intend to be relying on any such assumption, though. I am sympathetic to the idea that it is a mistake even to ask whether people deserve their natural assets. People are not deserving; neither are they undeserving. Instead, the real questions about natural assets are questions of entitlement. Because we are separate persons, our (unchosen!) representatives in the Rawlsian original position have no right to treat our natural assets as common property to be allocated on grounds of desert or anything else. We do not come to the bargaining table hoping to walk away with as big a piece of ourselves (and of others) as possible. If we cannot come to the table as unquestioned self-owners, then we do not come to the table at all. Or at least, we do not come voluntarily but are instead brought to the table against our will, as community assets rather than as separate persons. I thank Paul Dotson for especially helpful discussion of this point. 50. Jeremy Waldron, "The Rule of Law in Contemporary Liberal Theory," Ratio Juris 2 (1989): 79-96. 51. The promissory model obviously departs from Rawls-inspired skepticism. Likewise, the promissory model obviously departs from Nozick's historical and unpatterned entitlement the- ory. Although the promissory model is historical, it also is patterned. See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 157. David Schmidtz (schmidtz@u.arizona.edu) is a professor of philosophy and joint profes- sor of economics at the University of Arizona. He is coauthor of Social Welfare and Indi- vidual Responsibility (Cambridge, with Robert Goodin), author of Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton), coeditor of Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (Oxford, with Elizabeth Willott), and editor of Robert Nozick (Cam- bridge). His essay for this issue is part of a larger work on The Elements of Justice. 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971), 104. 2. Eric Rakowski, Equal Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 112. Samuel Scheffler likewise calls the passage “uncontroversial.” See Scheffler, “Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992): 299-323, here p. 307. Indeed, F. A. Hayek says, “A good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face or a skillful hand, and a ready wit or an attractive personality are in large measure as independent of a person's efforts as the opportunities or experiences he has had.” Hayek insists it is neither desirable nor practicable to ask basic structure to distribute according to desert. See Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 94. David Gauthier says, “We may agree with Rawls that no one deserves her natural capacities. Being the person one is, is not a matter of desert,” although Gauthier doubts that this fact has normative implications. See Gauthier, Moral by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 220. 3. Rawls's positive theory of justice is meant to apply only to society's basic structure, but his critique of desert is not similarly constrained and cannot be constrained merely by stipulating that it is constrained. When Rawls says, “the concept of desert seems not to apply” to any case where outcomes are influenced by natural advantages (or characters), he is making a claim not about basic structure but about the larger moral universe. In particular, he is claiming that the larger moral universe contains nothing (other than his own first principle of justice) to rein in the difference principle as the test of basic structure's justness. 4. Scheffler, “Responsibility,” 301. 5. Joel Feinberg coins the term desert base to refer to factors that ground desert claims. The idea is that every well-formed desert claim is a three-place relation of the form “P deserves X in virtue of feature F.” See “Justice and Personal Desert,” in Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 58. I do not know whether it is possible to produce a complete catalog of all possible desert bases. Suffice it to say, the standard bases on which persons are commonly said to be deserving include character, effort, achievement, and (at least insofar as it is constructively exercised) talent. 6. See George Sher, Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 195. See also Jan Narveson, “Deserving Profits,” in Profits and Morality , ed. Robin Cowan and Mario Rizzo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48-97, esp. 50-51. 7. This idea would seem more awkward if we were thinking of what it means to deserve punishment, but it has a Kantian pedigree. See Christopher Morris, “Punishment and Loss of Moral Standing,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 53-79. 8. Is this Rawls's view? Perhaps. Rawls repeatedly stresses, and thus evidently thinks it matters, that, “Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances” ( Theory of Justice , 74). In any case, many authors endorse such a view, and many are inspired to do so by Rawls. Most recently, Gillian Brock, “Just Deserts and Needs,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1999): 165-88. See her section on “How can we deserve anything since we don't deserve our asset bases?” For better or worse, such a theory cannot sort people out. To Rawlsians, this is good. Wanting to say inequalities should be arranged so as maximally to benefit the least advantaged, Rawlsians regard as unwelcome competition the idea that people deserve more—and therefore should receive more—if and when and because their talents and efforts contribute more to society. Rawls's critics have responded by rejecting the premise that, to be a desert maker, an input must itself be deserved in turn. For example, see Narveson, “Deserving Profits,” 67; Sher, Desert , 24; and Alan Zaitchik, “On Deserving to Deserve,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977): 370-88, at 373. That is roughly where that debate stands. Michael Walzer says, “Advocates of equality have often felt compelled to deny the reality of desert.” In a footnote, Walzer says he is thinking in particular of Rawls. Walzer portrays the antidesert argument as supposing the capacity to make an effort or to endure pain is, like all their other capacities, only the arbitrary gift of nature or nurture. But this is an odd argument, for while its purpose is to leave us with persons of equal entitlement, it is hard to see that it leaves us with persons at all. How are we to conceive of these men and women once we have come to view their capacities and achievements as accidental accessories, like hats and coats they just happen to be wearing? How, indeed, are they to conceive of themselves? See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 260. 9. If, on a given conception of desert, there are no desert makers at all—no inputs we could supply that would make us deserving—then that conception is empty. On a nonempty conception, there is a real question about what a person does or does not deserve; there will be inputs that a person could supply, or fail to supply. 10. Within the context of the free will debate, a compatibilist is someone who agrees with the hard determinist that every event has a cause but then notes, contra the hard determinist, that this is compatible with the free-will thesis because that thesis says not that our actions are uncaused but rather that our own choices are integral parts of the causal chains that culminate in our actions. I am not endorsing compatibilism here but simply borrowing the structure of the idea. 11. I borrow the felicitous “owing something” locution from James Rachels, “What People Deserve,” Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 175-97, at 184. 12. Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert,” 55. 13. John Kleinig, “The Concept of Desert,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 71-78. 14. Rachels, “What People Deserve,” 176. 15. David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 93. 16. I speak interchangeably of deserving a chance, being deserving of a chance, and being worthy of it. Sometimes, it is more natural to describe a person as being deserving of X rather than as deserving X, especially when the question concerns opportunity rather than reward. But this is a verbal point. If a graduate student said, “No one deserves anything, yet there is much of which people are deserving,” we would think the student was making some sort of joke. 17. Is this a sufficient condition? No. If something is wrong with the opportunity, as when we have a chance to use stolen property, then not wasting it does not suffice to show we deserve it. We could say the same of standard theories about deserving rewards: when we know the reward is stolen property, qualifying for it does not suffice to show we deserve it. 18. A few writers at least hint in different ways at the idea that desert can have a forward-looking component. Most prominently, Fred Feldman argues that a soldier who volunteers for a suicide mission can deserve a medal in advance. However, while I find much in Feldman with which I agree, and in particular that there may be reason to award a medal in advance, the case does not fit my model. The medal is not an opportunity. It is a reward. (Feldman does not argue that people can deserve opportunities or that people can deserve them in virtue of doing justice to them.) See Feldman, “Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom,” Mind 104 (1995): 63-77, at 70-71. Jeremy Waldron and Fred Miller see forward-looking elements in Aristotle's discussion of meritocracy in distributing political offices. Aristotle ( Politics , book III, chap. 12, 1282b, line 30ff) says, When a number of flute players are equal in their art, there is no reason why those of them who are better born should have better flutes given to them; for they will not play any better on the flute, and the superior instrument should be reserved for him who is the superior artist. See Fred D. Miller, “Sovereignty and Political Rights,” Aristoteles Politik , ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 107-19. Intriguingly, Waldron suggests a school might choose among candidates by comparing how meritorious the school would be if it hired one rather than another. See Waldron, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle's Politics,” Political Theory 23 (1995): 563-84 at 573. 19. Rachels, “What People Deserve,” 176. 20. Ibid., 180. 21. In light of this discussion, should we reassess our interpretation of quotations from Rachels and Miller with which this section began? When they say that what we deserve depends on what we have done in the past, and never on the future, should we suppose they meant only that what we deserve depends on what we do? Should we go even further and suppose they were in favor of the proposition that we can deserve an opportunity in virtue of what we will do with it? To my knowledge, nothing they say explicitly rules out this reinterpretation, and certainly I hope they would accept the proposition today, but the idea that they had this idea in mind at the time is baseless. At the time, they did not accept the proposition that we can deserve X in virtue of what we do after receiving X. Neither did they reject it. At the time they were writing, it had not occurred to anyone to be for it, or against it. The contribution of this essay is not to defend the proposition against legions of committed enemies but simply to bring it to people's attention as a possible position. 22. Rachels, “What People Deserve,” 185. 23. Note: being wrong about what the candidate deserved in this sense does not imply that we were wrong about other desert bases as well. It may remain true that, say, the candidate had the highest score on the aptitude test. It is no part of my view that all desert bases (even those pertaining specifically to opportunities) stand or fall with, or are reducible to, the promissory notion introduced here. 24. If the candidate treats the job with contempt, then she has supplied neither the performance nor even the good-faith effort that the hiring committee expected. If instead the candidate fails through no fault of her own, then the committee cannot hold it against her. Furthermore, if the reason for her failure is not something that the committee could have foreseen—if it is simply a stroke of bad luck—then the committee cannot blame itself for having chosen wrongly either. They may correctly judge in retrospect that although the new employee failed, it was not her fault, and they were still right to believe she deserved a chance in the sense of element (b). Although she failed to do justice to the opportunity, that is because she did not really get the opportunity that the committee intended. If she had really gotten the chance, she would have done justice to it. (By analogy, suppose we decide to give salt a chance to dissolve in water, and then through no fault of ours, what we actually end up doing is giving it a chance to dissolve in olive oil. If the salt fails to dissolve, we still can insist the salt would have dissolved in water, given the chance.) 25. Recall David Miller's claim that “desert judgments are justified on the basis of past and present facts about individuals.” I can agree that the epistemological justification of desert claims is backward-looking because that is where the information is, while still holding that truth makers for some desert claims can lie in the future. (We would say the same of predictions in general.) 26. I thank Guido Pincione and Martín Farrell for their insight on this point. 27. Jean Valjean is a character from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: Hetzel, 1888). 28. However, we might defend a version of Fred Feldman's thesis in this way. (See note 18.) The soldier, awarded a medal in advance, does not deserve it and has not earned it. (The medal is an award, not an opportunity. If it is deserved at all, it must be deserved qua award, which is to say it must be deserved along lines specified by the compensatory model.) Even so, it can make sense to honor the soldier now for what the soldier is about to do. Moreover, after the soldier makes the heroic sacrifice, it will then make perfect sense to speak of the soldier as having earned the medal. 29. As the story goes, the reason why High Command orders Ryan's rescue has nothing to do with Ryan's worthiness. Ryan's three brothers have just died in battle. The point of rescuing Ryan is to avoid having to send a telegram to Ryan's mother saying her entire family has just been wiped out. 30. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, one of the most moving speeches ever made, gains its rhetorical power from precisely this point, speaking as it does of the unfinished work of those who died in battle, calling on us to make sure their last full measure of devotion shall not be in vain. 31. It is worth noting that Ryan's story is neutral with regard to the relative significance of alternative desert bases. Where the elderly Ryan's wife might say the relevant basis is effort and thus that Ryan is deserving in virtue of having done all he could, Ryan himself may see achievement as the relevant basis, thus concluding that despite his efforts, he has not accomplished nearly enough to make him worthy of all the lives that were sacrificed to save his. The problem is general. If sufficiently great sacrifices were made so as to put us in a position to flourish, we have to wonder whether there is anything we can do to be worthy of those sacrifices. There is one easy answer, namely, that if we do all we can, then we have done all anyone could ask. Yet, if we are reflective, we cannot help but think this answer is too easy and that there is no guarantee that “all we can” will truly be enough. 32. If the case were more like the kind of case covered by element (b), Miller conceivably might say Ryan deserves the ticket. Suppose Miller needs to select someone from a list of applicants and sees that Ryan would move mountains to prove himself worthy. In that case, deeming Ryan choice worthy, on that basis, might be Miller's best-justified option. 33. Margaret Holmgren, “Justifying Desert Claims: Desert and Opportunity,” Journal of Value Inquiry 20 (1986): 265-78 at 274. 34. Richard W. Miller, “Too Much Inequality,” Social Philosophy and Policy 19 (2002): 275-313. 35. Holmgren, “Justifying Desert Claims,” 275. 36. Unfortunately, we naturally slip into thinking of bargainers as choosing a ground-level plan for redistribution. Rawls himself slips in this way when he says, There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed according to desert.... Now justice as fairness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original position. ( A Theory of Justice , p. 310) In a way, it is true that such a principle would not be chosen, but the reason is because distributional principles are not on the menu. They are not even the kind of thing that bargainers choose. What bargainers choose are meta-level principles for evaluating things like distribution according to desert. 37. By the lights of the difference principle, it should matter that it is the least advantaged who can least afford the self-stifling cynicism that goes with believing no one deserves anything; neither can they afford the license for repression that goes with the more advantaged believing no one deserves anything. 38. Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert,” 80. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Rachels, “What People Deserve,” 190. 41. Brock, “Just Deserts,” 166. 42. To keep this in perspective, though, we should keep in mind that the basic concept of justice often is determinate enough that we can see what is just without needing to appeal to other goals and values. For example, we know it is unjust deliberately to punish an innocent person. It is analytic that punishment is not what the innocent are due. We do not appeal to consequences to decide that. The only time we appeal to considerations external to the basic concept, such as consequences, is when the basic concept is not enough to sort out competing claims of rival conceptions. That is all. 43. Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert,” 56. 44. Rawls, A Theory of Justice , 103. 45. This conclusion does not presuppose the promissory model. The possibility of preinstitutional desert is manifest even within the compensatory framework. 46. For example, if Private Ryan is killed by a stray bullet within minutes of having been rescued, then there is no fact of the matter about whether he did justice to the opportunity to live a good life since as it happens he did not actually have any such opportunity. Bad luck robbed him of it. 47. I try to fit this into a more comprehensive theory in The Elements of Justice , in progress. 48. The infamous Wilt Chamberlain example comes from Nozick's discussion of “How Liberty Upsets Patterns.” Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 160-64. 49. I have followed Rawls in assuming for argument's sake that natural and positional advantages are on a par. I do not intend to be relying on any such assumption, though. I am sympathetic to the idea that it is a mistake even to ask whether people deserve their natural assets. People are not deserving; neither are they undeserving. Instead, the real questions about natural assets are questions of entitlement. Because we are separate persons, our (unchosen!) representatives in the Rawlsian original position have no right to treat our natural assets as common property to be allocated on grounds of desert or anything else. We do not come to the bargaining table hoping to walk away with as big a piece of ourselves (and of others) as possible. If we cannot come to the table as unquestioned self-owners, then we do not come to the table at all. Or at least, we do not come voluntarily but are instead brought to the table against our will, as community assets rather than as separate persons. I thank Paul Dotson for especially helpful discussion of this point. 50. Jeremy Waldron, “The Rule of Law in Contemporary Liberal Theory,” Ratio Juris 2 (1989): 79-96. 51. The promissory model obviously departs from Rawls-inspired skepticism. Likewise, the promissory model obviously departs from Nozick's historical and unpatterned entitlement theory. Although the promissory model is historical, it also is patterned. See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , 157.

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