Scanlon Against Desertist Theories of Justice

In his 2018 book Why Does Inequality Matter? T. M. Scanlon discusses the question how significant differences of economic advantage can be justified. He surveys a variety of possible justifications. In Chapter 8—‘Desert’—he focuses on the idea that a desertist theory of justice might attempt to justify such differences in certain cases by claiming that those who have more in those cases deserve to have more; while those who have less deserve to have less. Scanlon rejects this sort of attempted justification. Scanlon claims that desert ‘plays no role in distributive justice’. He seems to think that in order to explain how it could be just for people to receive unequal benefits, we will need to appeal to some conception of distributive justice that does not involve desert. In my 2016 book Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve from Our Country I presented what I took to be a thoroughly desertist theory of distributive justice—apparently a theory of precisely the sort Scanlon means to reject. Scanlon does not mention my theory. My aim in the present paper is to explain how my desertist theory avoids Scanlon’s objections. First I explain the conception of desert that Scanlon has in mind; then I present the core of Scanlon’s objections to desertist theories of distributive justice. Finally, I show that his objections have no application to the form of desertism that I proposed.