| Summary: | This article explores, comparatively and critically, Sidgwick’s and Rawls’s reasons for
rejecting desert as a principle of distributive justice. Their ethical methods, though not
identical, each require giving weight to common sense convictions about justice as well as
higher-level principles. Both men, therefore, need to find a substitute for desert that
captures some of its content – in Sidgwick’s case ‘quasi-desert’ takes the form of an
incentive principle, and in Rawls’s case a principle of legitimate entitlement. However their
reasons for rejecting desert are unclear, and at points appear to rest on contestable
conceptual or metaphysical claims that their methodological commitments are meant to
rule out. To clarify matters, the article distinguishes between three levels at which antidesert arguments may operate: 1) Those purporting to reveal some fundamental defect in
the idea of desert itself; 2) Those purporting to show that we cannot find a coherent basis
for desert, at least for purposes of social justice; 3) Those purporting to show that it is
impossible for social institutions to reward people according to their deserts, no matter
which basis is chosen. At each level, the arguments put forward by Sidgwick and by Rawls
are shown to be unsound.
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