Response to “Skepticism about desert”

Swartzer concludes the paper with the claim that desert is not a basic normative notion. It cannot “supply first principles of justice.” (p. 1) In other words, desert is to be defined in terms of justice, not the other way around. What we deserve just is what we are to receive according to the demands of justice. On this view, to say that a just distribution of goods is such that everyone receives what they deserve is—not wrong, but—tautological. In other words, to state what people deserve is but one of the ways in which we express claims of justice. It is not to be understood as evincing a prior realm of moral facts that could ground these claims.