Justice, Desert, and Disagreement: A Response to Alexander Rawls.

• Author: Gjesdal, Adam

In A Theory of Justice ([1971] 1999), John Rawls argues that moral desert should have a minimal role in accounts of distributional justice. In "A Theory of Justice with Claims of Desert," Alexander Rawls argues via an internal critique that John Rawls's disregard of claims of moral desert in the original position is misguided. An orthodox (John) Rawlsian should not find all of Alexander Rawls's criticisms compelling. Yet the challenges Alexander Rawls raises lead to an interesting question he does not explore and that John Rawls never satisfactorily addresses, even in his later work, Political Liberalism ([1993] 2005). What good is a theory of justice--in particular one that adopts a controversial stance on distributional matters--when after fifty years of exhaustive discussion there is still vigorous, reasoned disagreement regarding whether that theory is "correct"? I suggest that question is one that political philosophers working within John Rawls's theoretical framework ought to try to answer rather than trying to determine what the uniquely correct theory of distributional justice is.

Fairness and Desert

I start by laying out the Desert Theory that Alexander Rawls defends, contrasting it with the orthodox Rawlsian Fairness Theory, which holds that society ought to maximize the prospects of its worst-off members over a complete life. Both theories share a commitment to choosing principles of justice for regulating the basic structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance. The Fairness Theory's veil is constructed to make choosers fully insensitive to claims of desert from society's better-off members, leading choosers to attend only to claims of need from society's worst-off. In contrast, the Desert Theory would make parties behind the veil ignorant of their personal information but sensitive to both the claims of need from the worst-off and claims of desert from society's better-off With respect to claims of desert and need, parties behind the Desert Theory's veil "can't help but feel each other's weight as they are balanced against each other in a search for the best accommodation between them."

Alexander Rawls argues that the Fairness Theory's own theoretical commitments lead to endorsing the Desert Theory's construal of the veil of ignorance. For both theories, the veil of ignorance serves as a heuristic for ruling out morally irrelevant considerations from the choice of principles of justice. Knowing your own particular circumstances can distort your choice of principles, leading you to choose those that work in your favor. Making you ignorant of morally arbitrary considerations ensures impartiality in your choice behind the veil. Among these considerations, John Rawls includes claims of moral desert, such as claims to deserve our native endowments or our good moral character ([1971] 1999, 89). Alexander Rawls convincingly argues it is a mistake to rule out claims of desert from consideration on the basis of their moral arbitrariness. As he points out, the traits children develop as a result of good parenting are widely regarded as morally deserved. Other claims of desert, including to wages earned in a free market, are viewed by many natural-law theorists, including John Locke, as having a moral basis ("Venditio," in Locke 1997, 339-43).

According to Alexander Rawls, the fairness theorist has ample reason to permit parties to consider these claims in the original position. Doing so requires rethinking the veil of ignorance's informational constraints. The Desert Theory leaves much of the Fairness Theory's theoretical machinery in place while tweaking the veil's informational constraints. This minor adjustment plausibly leads to selection of different principles of justice than those the Fairness Theory favors.

But this argument against the Fairness Theory misses something important. As Alexander Rawls notes, John Rawls distinguishes between desert claims made against a background of just institutions and those made without that background. According to Samuel Scheffler, John Rawls holds that "people's deserts are in general to be identified with their legitimate institutional expectations" (2000, 966). To know what these legitimate expectations are, we must identify normative standards for assessing our institutions as just. These legitimate claims can be made only after we have identified principles of justice for regulating society in the original position. What we have legitimate claim to is an output of the theory for the Fairness Theory.

In contrast, the Desert Theory treats some of these claims as an input for the original position. This makes sense if the original position should permit parties knowledge of all nonarbitrary morally relevant information, but it can't do that and perform its intended function. The original position is a device for selecting principles of justice to adjudicate competing claims, including those that have their basis in convictions of impartial morality (Rawls [1971] 1999, 194). All of the claims of moral desert Alexander Rawls would have...