desert-based justice, it is arguably wrong in stopping short of neutralizing
some justice-disrupting luck. Before proceeding, it should be clarified that
‘‘luck,’’ in what follows, refers to events outside of a person’s control which
she could not have predicted and could not have avoided, or what has been
called ‘‘brute luck’’ (Dworkin 2000 , 73 ); and it should be emphasized that the
focus of the discussion that follows is on distributive justice only, which
concerns the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation, as
opposed to retributive justice, which concerns the meting out of punishment.
1 The Conventional View
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Personal desert is a three-place relation between a person, a good or treat-
ment she is said to deserve, and the grounds in virtue of which that good or
treatment is deserved. These grounds—‘‘the desert bases’’—must be some
feature of the (deserving) person herself, and include, but are not limited to,
features that are relevant for assessing a person as a moral agent, that is, as
deserving of moral praise and blame. Desert theorists have long discussed the
question of what features constitute desert bases, and have often defended
different answers to this question (Feinberg 1970 ; Barry 1965 ; Sher 1987 ;
Lamont 1994 ; Sadurski 1985 ; see also McLeod 1999 ). The distinctive feature
of the conventional view of desert-based justice consists in its claim that we
deserve on the basis of our achievements, the outcome of our actions, or the
quality of our performances. This contrasts both with the claim that people
deserve on the basis of the sheer possession of certain features (such as, for
example, their IQ), independently of whether they act in ways which display
and put to use those features; and with the claim that people deserve on the
basis of the quality of their will or the effort that they make, regardless of the
outcome of those efforts or the results of their exercising their will. Defenders
of the conventional view include David Miller, whose characterization of
desert is the main focus in what follows (Miller 1976 , 1989 , 1999 ), Jonathan
Riley ( 1989 ), and, recently, David Schmidtz ( 2002 ).
With its emphasis on performance and achievement as the grounds on
which people deserve, the conventional view captures many everyday judg-
ments of desert. Consider claims about people deserving to win races or book
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