performance-disrupting, are unjust? The answer, as we will see, is affirmative:
on a ‘‘fair opportunity view’’ of desert-based justice, persons justifiably
deserve more or less than others only if all had a fair opportunity to deserve
more or less than others, or a fair opportunity to be unequally deserving.
Unequal choices made against a background in which luck is neutralized can
ground unequal deserts that meet this fair opportunity requirement. Let me
first sketch the fair opportunity view, and then say something in its support.
The possibility of formulating a view of desert-based justice that requires
more luck-neutralization than the conventional view rests on acceptance of
two claims, a substantive claim about justice, and a conceptual one about
desert.
The first, substantive claim about justice is this: the justice of a distribution
of social and economic benefits depends not only on the (supposed) indi-
vidual desert claims people have in isolation, but also on the background
conditions that affect the distribution of the opportunity to deserve. In other
words, for deserved inequalities to be just, they must not reflect unfair
advantage of some individuals over others; and in order for these inequalities
not to reflect unfair advantage of some over others, everyone must have had a
fair opportunity to deserve more or less than others. The presence of unequal
background luck undermines the fairness of the distribution of opportunities
to deserve. If someone ends up worse off than someone else as a result of
factors that were outside her control, so that she could not have ended up
equally deserving, then there is an unjust inequality. If we accept this first
claim about justice, we may then go on to insist that this claim should be
captured by the notion of desert that we want to adopt as a principle of
justice. A principle of desert that does not register this claim, we might say, is
not one that can justify inequalities, much though it may reflect ordinary
judgments that are commonly made.
The second claim that underpins the fair opportunity desert-based view
follows on from the first claim, and is about the concept of desert. Among the
various conceptions of desert that are available, there is indeed one that
squares up with the conviction conveyed by the fair opportunity requirement.
This is desert on the basis of the choices people make, so that people deserve
unequally to the extent that they have made unequal choices against a
background in which unequal luck has been neutralized. To deserve, on this
view, is to be responsible for what one deserves, and one is responsible for
what one deserves relative to others only if her deserving more or less than
them is not the result of unequal luck. This conception of desert is not
justice, luck, and desert 445