Joseph de la Torre Dwyer

This chapter notes that, were the Just Deserts proposal in fact implemented, the economy would look much different. As such, the chapter highlights three areas of impact: philanthropy, women, and disability. By separating chance from merit, philanthropic organizations will see the characteristics of their beneficiaries radically change. Surprisingly, and justly, the economic gender gap will disappear. Lastly, disability is likely to receive increased attention as ability, opportunity, and desert begin to play such an important role in people’s lives. The hope is that philanthropists, feminists, and stakeholders in the disability field will consider Just Deserts an ally and will seek to further its aims by refining its estimates of merit.

At first, equality of opportunity seems to require a process of “leveling the playing field.” I argue in this chapter that the Just Deserts proposal, by using an agnostic and ex post procedure, will more simply, accurately, and coherently equalize opportunity. This chapter defines opportunity, robust equality of opportunity, and its difference from probability. Turning toward a discussion of policies, this chapter then discusses five weaknesses of ex ante interventions to realize equality of opportunity and clarifies the benefits of ex post interventions such as those based on desert.

Although what one deserves requires evaluation of chance, this is not perfectly feasible as a public policy given current limitations in our knowledge. As a result, some have recommended a political process to determine what counts as chance. This chapter rejects this suggestion and argues that a fundamental baseline that all can agree on, even the most hardened skeptic, is to consider the outcomes of the natural lottery as chance. This argument is followed by a more tentative suggestion as to how we use those natural lottery outcomes to estimate the desert-basis. The chapter recommends an initial, plausible baseline and a ratchet system to further refine our estimates that is open to both classical models such as linear regression and more black-box models that might come from machine learning techniques. It then describes the data and methods. Lastly, this chapter confronts some objections by skeptics about these estimations.

Today, morally arbitrary chance dominates the distribution of economic resources. How ought we morally assess an individual who is morally responsible for an outcome when that outcome is, to some extent, governed by pure chance? Chapter 2 begins by offering a theory of moral responsibility, a necessary precondition to a theory of desert. Highlighting the importance of the control principle, it turns out that for multiple theories of moral responsibility, circumstances are the key to understanding moral assessments of an individual. Arguing that moral responsibility is always contrastive and partial, I then defend against some objections.

How ought we justly allocate economic resources among individuals? That is the central question of this book. Although it may come as a surprise to those currently concerned with inequality, poverty, and economic immobility as moral wrongs to be undone, the principle of justice that will serve as the foundation of this book is desert. Desert is currently a sorely underutilized principle in the anti-inequality, anti-poverty, and pro-economic mobility literature on public policy and in philosophical circles. The outline of the book follows.

This chapter seeks to identify who or what is in fact a moral agent that might deserve a distributive justice reward. Reviewing the empirical research into intergenerational earnings dynamics, this chapter highlights a number of exclusions that the Just Deserts proposal would not recommend, including individuals with outcomes valued at zero. Second, this chapter argues that the individual moral agent ought to be understood as persisting across their lifetime—thus, the desert-relation is a correspondence between lifetime “value contributed” and lifetime “economic resources.” The chapter then highlights some interesting theoretical and policy puzzles that follow from this.

A popular understanding of the principle of efficiency is one that seems to require a laissez-faire market economy because, supposedly, taxes always reduce aggregate welfare. This chapter argues that the Just Deserts proposal, by imposing a carefully designed endowment tax, may realize a perfectly efficient economy under a broad class of conditions and, under real-world constraints, may surpass our current economy in terms of efficiency and welfare. Bringing the concepts of economic rents and endowment into a theory of desert, the chapter discusses lump-sum endowment taxes and shows that the Just Deserts proposal just is such a tax under a broad set of conditions. Lastly, the chapter provides a concrete demonstration of the flexibility of lump-sum endowment taxes and argues for specific parameters as canonical.

This chapter compares the Original pre-tax distribution of lifetime “value contributed” to the distribution thereof under four Just Deserts policy variations. The chapter presents the basic descriptive findings of these distributions, while also describing the distribution of chance, the desert-basis, and tax rates. These five distributions are then compared in terms of inequality, income shares, desert, economic mobility, and poverty. Lastly I discuss the consequences of an imperfect Just Deserts distribution.

As the reader might fear that the Just Deserts proposal runs roughshod over individual liberty in an effort to redistribute, this chapter addresses two potential objections. First, many modern liberals are perfectly comfortable with taxes but reject lump-sum endowment taxes as described in the last chapter—allegedly this constitutes illegitimate coercion or force in a way that typical income taxes do not. Second, conservative libertarians generally argue that, today, only outcomes agreed to by valid consent by each individual may produce distributive justice. Thus, this chapter further clarifies the scope of individual endowment in order to overcome the liberal objection and further shows that we may adjust the canonical parameters to guarantee that no individual is ever “coerced” to earn more than they would choose under a laissez-faire policy. The chapter then sketches an argument that conservative libertarianism provides dynasties, not individuals, with freedom while unearthing the luck-egalitarian side of Locke and undercutting Nozick’s appropriation rule due to its indeterminacy.

Having established a theory of moral responsibility, the Just Deserts proposal needs to integrate this within a theory of desert. First, I delimit the scope of what I mean by distributive desert. Then I present a formal representation of desert and sketch various lines of argument that I see as important to defending its intrinsic connection to agent responsibility. Having covered the basal grounds of desert, I then turn to the appraisal grounds—specifically, the sensitivity principle. Here I present a novel solution, luck-egalitarian desert.

Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” made an important intervention into the literature on moral responsibility via a classical Frankfurt-type example, arguing that “the principle of alternate possibilities” is false. This paper argues that classical Frankfurt-type examples fail due to the use of agentic counterfactual interventions who lack agency. Using finite state machines to illustrate, I show the models that classical Frankfurt-type examples must use and why they are incongruent with leeway incompatibilist beliefs—the motivating interlocutor for classical Frankfurt-type examples. I then argue that returning agency to the agentic counterfactual intervention also returns alternate possibilities to the actual sequence of events, undermining a core premise of Frankfurt’s. Lastly, I show why a number of potential counterarguments should fail to persuade the leeway incompatibilist.

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.