Criticisms of the Concept of Desert in Theories of Justice

The idea of desert-the belief that people should get what they deserve based on their effort, talent, or contribution-feels almost like common sense. We praise hard workers, reward high performers, and feel uneasy when someone “undeserving” gets ahead. Yet within political theory, this intuitive idea has been challenged from several directions. Philosophers question whether desert can be coherently defended, whether it can ever be measured, and whether it should guide how a society distributes its resources at all. This post examines the major criticisms of desert in theories of justice, grouped into four broad categories: metaphysical, epistemological, pragmatic, and libertarian arguments.

What does “desert” mean in theories of justice? 🔗

In everyday language, to “deserve” something means to be entitled to it because of who you are or what you have done. In political philosophy, desert is treated as a possible basis for distributive justice-the principle that determines who gets what in society. A desert-based theory holds that a just distribution rewards people in proportion to some morally relevant feature, such as their merit, effort, or contribution. The roots of this idea trace back to Aristotle and later thinkers like Locke and Mill, who held that a system is just when it allocates rewards according to merit.

The criticisms below do not all reject desert in the same way. Some attack the very concept of desert, arguing it is incoherent. Others accept that desert makes sense in principle but argue we cannot apply it reliably. Still others say desert simply should not have a central role in how the state distributes goods. Keeping these three different lines of attack separate is the key to understanding the debate.

The metaphysical argument: do we really deserve our advantages? 🔗

The most influential criticism of desert is the metaphysical argument, which questions whether the concept itself can be defended. The argument holds that the factors which supposedly make us deserving are themselves things we did nothing to earn. If the foundations of desert are undeserved, then desert cannot do the moral work asked of it.

Rawls and the “natural lottery” 🔗

John Rawls is the philosopher most often associated with this view. In his theory of justice as fairness, Rawls argues that principles of justice should be chosen from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, where no one knows their place in society, their class, or their natural talents. From this impartial standpoint, Rawls claims, people would not choose to distribute resources according to moral desert.

His reasoning rests on a striking observation. The qualities that make someone “deserving”-intelligence, talent, even the capacity for sustained effort-are largely products of what Rawls calls the natural lottery and of social circumstance. A person born with a gift for mathematics, or into a family that nurtured discipline, did nothing to earn those starting conditions. Because these advantages are, in Rawls’s phrase, arbitrary from a moral point of view, he concludes that they cannot ground genuine desert claims. On a common reading, this leads Rawls to hold that desert should have no fundamental role in distributive justice, since undeserved factors influence every possible basis for desert.

Entitlement instead of desert 🔗

Rawls does not abandon the language of “deserving” entirely. Instead, he replaces moral desert with legitimate expectations: once just institutions are in place and their rules are public, people can be said to be entitled to what those rules promise them. According to Samuel Scheffler, Rawls holds that people’s deserts are to be identified with their legitimate institutional expectations rather than with any pre-institutional moral worth. Desert, in other words, becomes a product of just rules rather than a standard those rules must satisfy.

It is worth noting that some critics find Rawls’s rejection of desert unstable. One line of criticism argues that his theory in fact presupposes a strong theory of desert to justify the original position itself-suggesting the concept may be harder to expel from justice than Rawls assumed.

The epistemological argument: can we even measure desert? 🔗

A second criticism grants, for the sake of argument, that desert might be a coherent idea-but insists we can never determine it accurately. This is the epistemological argument, concerned with the limits of our knowledge rather than the soundness of the concept.

Hume and the unreliability of judgment 🔗

David Hume’s broader philosophy supplies the foundation for this line of thinking. Hume was famously sceptical about the reach of human reason, repeatedly arguing that we cannot gain complete knowledge of many notions we casually take for granted. Applied to desert, this scepticism suggests that human judgment is too flawed and biased to reliably establish what any individual truly deserves.

Consider a familiar example: the workplace performance review. Such reviews aim to assess an employee’s real contribution, but they are shaped by the evaluator’s biases-favouritism, prejudice, personal relationships, or simple error. If even a structured, deliberate assessment of merit is so easily distorted, the prospect of an entire society reliably tracking desert looks doubtful.

The problem of tangled causes 🔗

Desert also runs into the difficulty of complex causality. When a business succeeds, how much credit belongs to the founder’s effort, and how much to market conditions, timing, inherited capital, or sheer luck? Disentangling the contribution of free choice from the contribution of circumstance is extraordinarily hard.

This generates a sharp practical worry. As one statement of the epistemological argument puts it, ethics assumes that “ought implies can”-so if we cannot requite desert, then arguably we ought not to try, and desert should be set aside as a criterion of justice. Defenders of desert respond that we need only a rough, “coarse-grained” measure rather than a perfect one, but the burden of accurate measurement remains a serious objection.

The pragmatic argument: the costs of chasing desert 🔗

The pragmatic argument shifts attention from theory to consequences. Even if desert were coherent and measurable, this argument warns, organising society around it may produce real harm.

Resentment and social division 🔗

A society that openly distributes rewards according to perceived desert risks deepening resentment. Those who receive less are effectively told they merit less, which can breed discontent and erode social cohesion. Where contributions are undervalued or misjudged, the sense of injustice festers. In a society like India, with deep historical inequalities and widely varying socio-economic starting points, the assessment of “desert” is especially fraught-what looks like individual merit often reflects unequal access to schooling, nutrition, networks, and opportunity. This is part of the reasoning behind constitutionally mandated affirmative action, where reservation policies deliberately depart from a pure merit-based distribution to correct entrenched disadvantage.

Distorted incentives 🔗

A further pragmatic concern is that fixating on desert can crowd out other important values such as need, equality, and social stability. A purely desert-driven system might leave the genuinely needy without support simply because their hardship cannot be traced to a deserving cause. Interestingly, even thinkers sympathetic to incentives have looked for substitutes for desert: Henry Sidgwick, for instance, defended what has been called a “quasi-desert” incentive principle, rewarding productivity not because it is deserved but because doing so benefits society overall. The reward is justified by its useful effects, not by moral worth.

Libertarian arguments: desert is not the state’s business 🔗

The final set of criticisms comes from an unexpected quarter. Libertarians, who are often associated with defending unequal market outcomes, also reject desert as a primary basis for distribution-though for reasons very different from Rawls’s.

The right-libertarian view: entitlement, not desert 🔗

The classic statement of right-libertarianism is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Nozick advances an entitlement theory of justice. On this view, a distribution is just if every person is entitled to their holdings according to principles of just acquisition, transfer, and rectification. What matters is the history of how holdings came to be held, not whether the pattern of holdings matches anyone’s idea of merit.

Nozick calls his theory “historical” and “unpatterned.” Because a desert-based or meritocratic distribution imposes a pattern-a goal the distribution must conform to-it would require constant interference with people’s voluntary exchanges to maintain. As Britannica summarises Nozick’s position, any distribution of holdings, however unequal, is just so long as it arose through legitimate means. For the right-libertarian, desert may be a perfectly good guide for personal decisions, but it is not a standard the state should use to allocate or redistribute resources.

The left-libertarian view 🔗

Left-libertarians share the foundational commitment to self-ownership-the idea that each person fully owns themselves and the fruits of their labour. Where they part ways with the right is over natural resources. Left-libertarians argue that the world’s unowned resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian sense, so their appropriation must satisfy a fairness condition, often through redistribution or compensation. Thinkers in this tradition, such as Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne, build distribution around self-ownership and equal claims to natural resources rather than around who deserves what. Despite their egalitarian leanings, desert again plays no foundational role.

Bringing the criticisms together 🔗

These four arguments attack desert at different levels, and recognising the difference matters. The metaphysical argument says desert is conceptually unsound because its foundations are unearned. The epistemological argument says that even a coherent desert is unknowable in practice. The pragmatic argument says that pursuing desert produces bad outcomes. And the libertarian arguments say that desert-whatever its merits-is simply not the right principle for the state to enforce, since justice is about legitimate processes and rights rather than deserved patterns.

Yet the debate is far from settled. Defenders of desert point out that our everyday moral life is saturated with desert judgments-we hold people responsible, we feel gratitude and resentment, we believe effort should count for something. Some critics, including commentators on Rawls and Sidgwick, argue that their rejection of desert rests on contestable assumptions and that desert keeps re-entering theories of justice through the back door, dressed as “entitlement” or “legitimate expectation.” The persistence of desert, even among its critics, suggests it captures something about justice that is difficult to discard entirely.

What do you think? If our talents and even our willingness to work hard are shaped by factors we never chose, can anyone be said to truly “deserve” their success? And should the state distribute resources based on what people deserve, what they need, or simply on whether their holdings were acquired fairly?

References

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260855/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
3. https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/nozick-distributive-justice-and-difference-between-entitlement-and-desert
4. https://iep.utm.edu/desert/
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470594X211036088
6. https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0034670500015850
7. https://iep.utm.edu/hume/
8. https://scholars.bentley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=philosophy_facpubs
9. https://www.britannica.com/topic/reservation-Indian-government-policy
10. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Nozick/The-entitlement-theory-of-justice
11. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/