Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:32:59.230Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Desert and Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Geoffrey Cupit
Geoffrey Cupit*
Affiliation:
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is often supposed that there is a relationship between desert and responsibility: that to be deserving we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving. Indeed, there seems little doubt that a supposed relationship between desert and responsibility, combined with a growing tendency to view less and less as the responsibility of the individual, contributed to the reluctance to appeal to desert which has been a feature of much recent moral and political philosophy. Certainly, if to be deserving we need to be responsible for that which makes us deserving ‘all the way down,’ it is not easy to see how anyone could ever be deserving of anything.

I will argue that the claim that we can deserve only on the basis of that for which we are responsible — the desert-responsibility thesis — is false. There is no conceptual connection between desert and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is true that many claims to deserve are undermined if there is a lack of responsibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 83 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For example, Sadurski writes: ‘It makes no sense to attribute desert, positive or negative, to persons for actions or facts over which they have no control’ (Sadurski, Wojciech Giving Desert Its Due [Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1985], 117)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and later: ‘If we cannot ascribe responsibility, we cannot talk of desert’ (Ibid., 131). Glover suggests that we call ‘desert-based’ those attitudes which are ‘linked to responsibility, such as pride, guilt, resentment, gratitude, and some sorts of regret’ Glover, Jonathan ‘Self-Creation,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 69 (1983), 466)Google Scholar; and Lamont claims that ‘one of the defining characteristics of desert … is that it does require some minimum degree of voluntariness’ (Lamont, Julian ‘The Concept of Desert in Distributive Justice,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 44 [1994], 53)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The alternative view is put by Galston, in a passage he describes as summarizing the ‘major findings’ of ‘recent scholarship’ on desert: ‘Desert-related facts need not themselves be deserved-earned, merited, achieved through effort. They may, to use Rawls's phrase, be “arbitrary from a moral point of view,” in that there is no moral reason why individual A rather than B should be characterized by a desertrelated fact. But this does not mean that these amoral facts cannot be the basis of moral claims’ (Galston, William A. Justice and the Human Good [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1980], 172)Google Scholar.

2 An impressive case for this claim is made by Samuel Scheffler who argues that ‘the reluctance of many contemporary political philosophers to rely on a pre-institutional notion of desert results in part from a widespread, though often implicit skepticism about individual agency, a form of skepticism which is the contemporary descendant of skepticism about freedom of the will’ (Scheffler, Samuel ‘Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics,’ Philosophy and Public affairs 21 (1992), 309-10)Google Scholar.

3 Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic Books 1974), 225Google Scholar

4 Nagel, Thomas Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 25Google Scholar

5 This account of desert is developed in Feinberg's ‘Justice and Personal Desert,’ reprinted in Feinberg, Joel Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1970), 54–94Google Scholar.

6 Nagel argues that, notwithstanding its intuitive plausibility, the denial of moral luck ‘seems to be wrong’ (24).

7 I do, however, take up the distinction between moral and non-moral uses of ‘desert,’ briefly, in Section III.

8 Notwithstanding his adoption of the desert-responsibility thesis, Sadurski claims that the ‘equal humanness of all human beings justifies the principle that no-one deserves less concern than anyone else’ (97). But it seems doubtful that possessing ‘equal humanness’ should be thought of as something over which we have any control.

9 Cf.: ‘When we say the prettiest girl deserves to win the beauty contest, the most skillful shot deserves to win at marbles, the ablest candidate deserves the scholarship, we look no further than the present qualities of the individuals concerned’ (Miller, David Social Justice [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976], 96-7)Google Scholar. Broadly speaking, this seems to be true, although, as we have seen, we would not say that the most skillful shot deserved to win if this skill was not exhibited in the particular game. (A similar point applies to the beauty contest, if beauty can wax and wane.) And if we are concerned with deserving to win the scholarship then again the abilities must be exhibited. It may be that the most able candidate deserves the scholarship, but if that candidate has an off day when the competitive examination is held then we should not say that that candidate deserved to win. It might also be suggested that we do ‘look further’ than present qualities, for the unfair acquisition of a putative desert basis will undermine the claim to deserve. (Cf. Lamont, 48). However, it may be that, rather than unfair acquisition undermining a desert basis, unfair acquisition generates a countervailing desert claim which simply outweighs the original: where we acquire an attribute unfairly we do not simply not deserve to benefit from it, we deserve not to benefit from it.

10 Cf. Feinberg, 55.

11 Cf. Richards, Norvin ‘Luck and Desert,’ Mind 95 (1986), 200Google Scholar: ‘it is scarcely radical to say that when we are concerned with what a person deserves, we are interested in his behaviour as a display of character.’

12 It has been suggested that an argument of this type is available to Rawls: ‘On Rawls’ conception, the characteristics I possess do not attach to the self but are only related to the self, standing always at a certain distance …. We can see in this light how Rawls’ argument from arbitrariness undermines desert not directly, by claiming I cannot deserve what is arbitrarily given, but indirectly, by showing I cannot possess what is arbitrarily given, that is, that “I,” qua subject of possession, cannot possess it in the undistanced, constitutive sense necessary to provide a desert base’ (Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982], 85)Google Scholar.

13 Cf. Sher, George Desert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1987), 157Google Scholar: ‘it is perfectly consistent to say that persons are not responsible for having certain characteristics, yet that precisely these characteristics make them the people they are.’

14 Cf.: ‘It would seem that there are some things like rewards and punishments which, to be deserved, presuppose the responsibility of the person concerned. However, we would not be justified in generalizing this to cover all deserts’ (Kleinig, John Punishment and Desart [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1973], 57-8)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Brian Barry writes: ‘we can only speak of “rewards” and “punishments” where there is voluntary effort involved at some point’ (Barry, Brian Political Argument [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1965], 108)Google Scholar. This puts the point too strongly. We may speak of a person being punished for their laziness, and laziness requires little in the way of effort-voluntary or otherwise. The issue is one of responsibility, not effort. And Rawls goes a step further, suggesting that desert itself, at least ‘in the ordinary Sense,’ presupposes effort: ‘Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in tile ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family circumstances’ (Rawls, John A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971], 74, emphasis added)Google Scholar.

16 Strawson, P.F. ‘Freedom and Resentment,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), 199Google Scholar

17 Cf.: ‘The musical or mathematical prodigy deserves to win the appropriate competition, even if the performance involves no will or choice. In this respect, there may well be an asymmetry between “positive desert” and punishment’ (Galston, 173). There is indeed an asymmetry, though it is not between punishment and (all) 'positive desert.’ There is a symmetry between punishing and rewarding, but not between punishing and being Victorious.

18 Here I disagree with Kleinig who claims that prizes (and honors), in so far as they are deserved, are ‘reducible to rewards’ (53).

19 Cf.: ‘when philosophers themselves make judgments about personal desert, the deserved modes of treatment they have in mind are almost invariably punishment and rewards’ (Feinberg, 55-6); and ‘Contrary to much philosophical opinion, reward and punishment are not the only proper objects of desert’ (Kleinig, 53).

20 Rachels argues: ‘Treating people as they deserve is one way of treating them ,as autonomous beings, responsible for their own conduct. A person who is punished for his misdeeds is held responsible for them in a concrete way’ (Rachels, James ‘What People Deserve,’ in Arthur, John and Shaw, William H. eds., Justice and Economic Distribution [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1978] 159)Google Scholar. But treating People as they deserve is only sometimes to treat them as autonomous beings. To impose deserved punishment may be to treat as responsible; but that does not show that treatment in accordance with deserts per se is to treat as responsible. It is, it seems, this exclusive association of desert with the reactive attitudes that led Glover to suggest ‘desert-based’ as an appropriate term for such attitudes. But the term is inappropriate: what the reactive attitudes share is not captured by the notion of desert.

21 That reward and punishment do have this function is consistent with Feinberg's claim that ‘punishment is a conventional device for the expression of attitudes of resentment and indignation’ (feinberg,98). As Strawson argued, an attitude of resentment or indignation is appropriate only towards those considered responsible.

22 We may, of course, take this view even if we would not subscribe to a retributive account of the justification of these practices.

23 I do not claim that this is the only wav by which the link between reward and punishment, and responsibility can be explained. If We understand reward and punishment as essentially attempts at behaviour modification, albeit as attempts which, unlike, say, incentives and penalties, treat the rewarded or punished person as a right-doer or wrong-doer, then the link to responsibility might be grounded on the familiar argument that, since rewarding or punishing people for what they cannot help is inappropriate because pointless, reward and punishment presuppose an ability to have done otherwise, and hence responsibility.

24 Rawls says of his own two principles of justice that they ‘publicly express men's respect for one another’ (Rawls, 179, emphasis added).

25 For their helpful comments I am grateful to Peter Morriss and Shane Stuart, participants at seminars at the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster, and Hong Kong, and at the Australasian Association of Philosophy (New Zealand Division) conference at the University of Waikato, where earlier versions of this paper were read, and an anonymous referee for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.