We may think of this point as follows: while there are many different uses
of ‘‘desert,’’ only some of these are relevant for justice. In particular, in order
to be relevant for justice, desert must havepre-institutionalandindependent
normative force. That is, it must be a principle that accounts for why people
are owed a certain treatment by others, where the fact that they are owed their
deserved treatment is what justifies why some institutions should be in place
(rather than that fact being determined by the rules and norms of institutions
already in place). Furthermore, it must be a principle that expresses a
distinctive demand of justice (rather than being wholly reducible to the
demands made by other principles of justice). Not all uses of ‘‘desert’’ meet
these two criteria. For example, the judgment that the person who has the
longest beard deserves to be in the Guinness Book of Recordsis a purely
institutional claim: if noGuinness Book of Recordsexisted, with its particular
rules and norms, there would be no injustice in failing to manifest a positive
evaluation of the longest beard. By contrast, the judgment that someone
deserves a particular medical treatment, while pre-institutional, is not inde-
pendent: this claim expresses the demands of the principle of need, rather
than some distinctive demand of desert. Institutional desert judgments and
desert judgments that express other demands of justice do not tell us what
institutions should look like in order to achieve desert-based justice. So, when
we ask whether a view of desert-based justice is defensible, we must ask
whether the notion of desert it uses is a notion that has pre-institutional
and independent normative force, in the senses just outlined.
The answer is negative in the case of the laissez-faire view. For consider:
why should the fact that others positively appraise certain features be a
sufficient condition for someone who displays that feature to deserve, and
be owed, anything at all? If the laissez-faire view suggests that those who
display the positively appraised feature are owed a benefit because those
who appraise that feature have announced that they will reward it, then the
desert claim in question is institutional, akin to the desert in theGuinness
Book of Records. If, by contrast, the fact that the positively appraised feature is,
for example, something that it is fitting to respond to because it is a need, or a
right, then the desert claim in question is not independent, as in the medical
treatment case. In short: unless some reason is adduced for why those
who display certain positively appraised features areowedsomething, the
claims of desert identified by the laissez-faire view do not have any normative
force; but the reasons the laissez-faire view can adduce in support of the
normative force of desert claims do not point to a pre-institutional and
justice, luck, and desert 443