competitions, or of the meritocratic principle that the person who is best
qualified to perform the job deserves it, or of the view that people deserve
their incomes if these reflect the contributions they make to society by
working: in all these cases, the conventional view seems to be invoked. In
all these cases, people are said to deserve benefits on the basis of bringing
about something that is positively appraised, be this some athletic perform-
ance, a literary work, or a productive contribution. 2 This is just what the
conventional view states: In order to deserve, people must engage in some
activity, the activity must be useful or admirable, and their deserts then vary
in accordance with the degree to which they succeed in realizing what is useful
or admirable.
Besides being able to capture many everyday judgments of desert, the
conventional view may appear attractive insofar as it treats persons as re-
sponsible agents, while recognizing that responsible agents necessarily act in
circumstances not of their own choosing.
The conventional view treats persons as responsible agents because, by
insisting that some performance or action is necessary for desert, it ensures
that desert claims always reflect an appraisal of persons as agents, rather than
as just bearers of some attributes or as patients. To deserve something, after
all, is to claim credit for it, or to earn it; so, in order to deserve something, one
must be responsible for it (Miller 1999 , 136 ; Barry 1965 , 108 ). Now, by holding
that people must be responsible for the performances that ground their
deserts, the conventional view must take a certain stance towards the impact
of luck on people’s lives, since responsibility seems to require control and
‘‘luck’’ refers to what is beyond people’s control. The conventional view holds
that where people’s performance is disrupted by luck, that performance is not
properly theirs, they are not responsible for it, and desert-based justice
requires that we neutralize or discount for luck of this kind, as in the case
of the winning athlete’s good luck of having his more able competitor
unexpectedly collapse before the end of the race. Similarly, the achievements
of an entrepreneur are less great, and her deserts lessened, if her very lucrative
investment is the result of a happy coincidence she did not predict (Miller
1999 , 144 ). The conventional view thus concludes that interventions of luck
2 The meritocratic principle seems diVerent from other desert claims expressed by the conventional
view, in that the performance which grounds the desert claim is the most qualiWed candidate’sfuture
performance. For a treatment of this issue and a defense of the desert-based case for meritocracy, see
Miller ( 1999 ). Schmidtz ( 2002 ) has also made a similar argument. For a critique of desert-based
justiWcations of meritocracy, see Daniels ( 1978 ) and Cavanagh ( 2002 ).
justice, luck, and desert 439