Introduction

Summary

My aim in this book is to provide a conceptual analysis of desert. For various reasons, desert has not been a central feature within the frameworks of most moral and political philosophers. Writing in 1971, John Kleinig observed that “the notion of desert seems by and large to have been consigned to the philosophical scrap heap” (Kleinig 1971, 71). And this was just as, as Thomas Mulligan describes it, “That scrap heap was promptly set ablaze by the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice” (Mulligan 2018, 12).