criteria of justice: desert, needs and equality

RICHARD NORMAN

CRITERIA OF JUSTICE: DESERT, NEEDS AND EQUALITY

ABSTRACT. The conception of social justice as equality is defended in this paper byexamining what may appear to be two inegalitarian conceptions of justice, as distributionaccording to desert and as distribution according to need. It is argued that claims of justentitlement arise within a context of reciprocal co-operation for mutual benefit. Withinsuch a context there are special cases where it can be said that those who contribute moredeserve more, and that those who need more should get more, but those claims themselvespresuppose a norm of equal contribution and equal benefit.

KEY WORDS: compensation, contribution, co-operation, desert, equality, justice, need,reciprocity, reward

The philosophical account of social justice to which I am committed is anegalitarian one: that the benefits and burdens of social co-operation shouldbe shared in such a way that everyone benefits equally overall. I would addthat this is not all there is to social justice and to the idea of equality; morefundamental still is the application of equality to the relations betweenpersons – that everyone should share equally overall in the exercise ofpower. However, it is on equality in respect of benefits and burdens that Iwish to focus here. I have attempted to formulate arguments in defence ofthis conception elsewhere.1 The most that such general arguments can do,however, is justify a prima facie requirement of equality. That requirementcan in principle be overridden in particular cases, and we cannot rule outthe possibility that such cases may arise, for example in emergencies ortimes of great hardship. What the egalitarian can do at the general level,however, is to examine rival conceptions of social justice and attempt toshow that these do not in any general way override the requirement ofequality. The two most likely candidates for that role of inegalitarian rivalsare the idea of justice as desert and the idea of justice as meeting people’sneeds. Both seem on the face of it to be essentially inegalitarian ideas:that some people should get more than others because they deserve more

1 Richard Norman, Free and Equal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Studies inEquality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); “The Social Basis of Equality”, in Andrew Mason,ed., Ideals of Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 37–51; “Equality, Priority and SocialJustice”, Ratio XII (1999), 178–94.

Res Publica 7: 115–136, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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than others; and that some people should get more than others becausethey need more than others. Do these ideas, then, undermine the claims ofequality? My aim in this paper is to show that they do not.

Both ideas do feature prominently in the popular discourse ofdistributive justice. In February 1999, for example, the British govern-ment’s public sector pay review generated debate about the pay of teachers,nurses and doctors, and much of that debate was couched in the languageof desert. In view of the demanding nature of their work and the impor-tance of their contribution to society, what do teachers, or nurses, deserve?“They deserve more”, many people suggested, meaning not just that theydeserve more than they get, but also, I would guess, that they deserve morethan the holders of many other kinds of job. Here then we seem to havea popular conception of justice which entails that it is just for some tobe rewarded more highly than others. As one example of the role of theconcept of needs in talk about justice, consider the increasingly emphas-ised issue of disability, and the widely held view that the disabled shouldhave, as a matter not of charity but of justice, provision to meet their needsin the form of access and other kinds of facility. Because they have specialneeds, they are entitled to special provision, and this requires more socialresources to be devoted to them than to most other members of society.What are we to make of these ideas, and do they show the idea of equalityto be either unfounded or insufficient?

I shall look first at the case of desert, and concentrate on this for mostof the paper, returning later and rather briefly to the case of needs. Mystrategy in discussing “desert” will be to show that it is in fact a collectionof distinct though related notions, and that when this complex set of ideasis unpacked and its various components analysed, none of them turns outto be a successful rival to equality. Some of them will be found on exami-nation not to be conceptions of social justice at all, and those which do turnout to be linked to the idea of justice can best be understood in egalitarianterms.

PRAISING AND GRADING

I start with what I want to call “the pure idea of desert”: that people’sactions deserve praise or blame, gratitude or resentment. I call this “thepure idea of desert” because the link between the desert base and thedeserved treatment is paradigmatic and uncontroversial. It is an internalconnection. People who are responsible for acting well deserve praisebecause that is what praise is: the acknowledgement of someone’s havingdeliberately performed well in some respect or other. Likewise gratitude

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is deserved because it just is the recognition of the favour which someonehas done us. The same applies to the negative reactive responses of blameand resentment. These positive and negative reactive responses seem to lieat the heart of our understanding of the distinctive idea of desert. Nowclearly there is a sense in which we can say that these are not egali-tarian ideas. If everyone were, on principle, praised or blamed equally,this would make nonsense of the reactions of praise and blame. These areresponses to what people have done, and if they were on principle to beallocated equally to everyone, then they would cease to be those kinds ofresponse.

Though they are in that sense inegalitarian, however, they are not rivalsto the egalitarian conception of social justice, since they do not raise ques-tions of distributive justice at all. Praising and blaming, and expressinggratitude and resentment, do not invoke criteria of social distribution.There is no fixed pool of praise or gratitude to be shared out among poten-tial recipients. Praise or gratitude is a direct interpersonal response, elicitedby the qualities or behaviour of the person to whom it is directed. We canperhaps imagine social contexts in which accusations of unfairness in thedistribution of praise or blame might be made. A child may complain, “It’snot fair, you didn’t blame Harriet yesterday when she spilt the milk, whyare you going on at me now when I’ve done it?” The accusation here isof inconsistency, but that is not an accusation of unfairness in the distri-bution of blame. The inconsistency highlights the fact that either Harrietshould have been blamed or her brother should not have been blamed, butwhichever it is, the attribution of blame would have been right or wrongeven without the comparison. If blaming the child is wrong, that is becauseit is inappropriate to what has been done, and the comparison does notmake it wrong: it simply highlights the wrongness.

Something similar can be said about a closely related, though notidentical, kind of case where the language of desert is properly used: thecase of grading. If an essay shows a thorough understanding of the materialand presents an original argument which is cogently defended, it deservesa First. If another essay provides no evidence of serious study, shows nounderstanding of the material and no attempt to think logically about it,then it deserves to fail. Now again, as in the case of praise and blame, thelanguage of justice does have some application here. A good essay whichgets a mark of only 40% is getting less than it deserves, and in that sensethe writer is being treated unjustly. He or she could appropriately complain,“It’s not fair – I did a really good essay and got a lousy mark.” Questionsof fairness or justice might especially arise in connection with accusationsof bias or of applying arbitrarily different standards, but even without such

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a suggestion it could appropriately be seen as unjust if a good essay getsa bad mark or vice versa. Though talk of justice may have a place here,however, it is not a matter of distributive justice. It is not a question ofgetting your share of the marks that are going. Desert does indeed requirethat your essay should get as good a mark as someone else’s essay whichis equally good, and a better mark than someone else’s which is weak, but,as in the case of praise and blame, the comparisons with others are hereillustrative only. Your essay, if it is a good essay, would deserve a goodmark even if it were the only essay and there were no other essays withwhich it was being compared. So again, with grading as with praise andblame, we have an authentic application of the language of desert to justifyunequal treatment, and some connection with the language of justice, butno rival to the egalitarian conception of social justice, since the context isnot one where questions of distributive justice arise.

Consider now a possible way in which the case of praise and blame,gratitude and resentment, might be brought closer to that of social justice.Though the allocation of praise or gratitude is not itself a matter ofdistributive justice, it might be said that distributive justice is a way ofexpressing praise or gratitude, blame or resentment. In particular, it mightbe suggested that the social distribution of material goods is just if itappropriately expresses socially institutionalised attitudes of gratitude andresentment. Sidgwick identified the distinctive element in the idea of socialjustice as that of “universalised gratitude”:

. . . [W]e have not only a natural impulse to requite benefits, but also a conviction that suchrequital is a duty. . . . When we, so to say, universalise this impulse and conviction, we getthe element in the common view of Justice which we are trying to define. For if we take theproposition “that good done to any individual ought to be requited by him”, and leave outthe relation to the individual in either term of the proposition, we seem to have an equallystrong conviction of the truth of the more general statement “that good deeds ought to berequited”. And if we take into consideration all the different kinds and degrees of services,upon the mutual exchange of which society is based, we get the proposition “that menought to be rewarded in proportion to their deserts”. And this would be commonly held tobe the true and simple principle of distribution.2

Sidgwick thus attempts to move from the natural response of gratitude tothe social distribution of rewards on the basis of desert, and thereby tojustify the latter practice by grounding it in the former.

If this move is going to work, then the question we have to consideris this: can material rewards be regarded as the “natural” or “appropriate”

2 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, quoted in Louis P. Pojman and OwenMcLeod, eds, What Do We Deserve? (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 50.


expression of gratitude or praise? Consider an example. Suppose you hero-ically save a millionaire from drowning, and he politely thanks you butoffers you no financial reward. Does this show that he was not reallygrateful? And if you deserve his gratitude, does it then follow that youdeserve the financial reward? And that you have been treated unjustly ifyou do not receive it? Well, it is true that if he were to give you a largefinancial reward, you would have deserved it, and deserved it in just thesame respect in which you would have deserved his gratitude – the finan-cial reward would have been his way of showing his gratitude. We mightalso consider him mean if, being so wealthy, he failed to show his gratitudein such a way. Given the convention of expressing gratitude with materialrewards, his failure to give when it would have been so easy for him todo so suggests that he is not as grateful as he ought to be – that he hasthoughtlessly failed to appreciate what you have done for him, and thedanger you risked in order to save him. What is missing in such a case,however, is the idea of entitlement which is characteristic of the discourseof social justice. He may be mean not to reward you, but you cannot claimsuch a reward as your entitlement. If you were to say to him, “Okay,where’s my reward then?”, you would be claiming something to whichyou had no entitlement. Though there may be, therefore, some intelligiblelink between the idea of gratitude and the idea of material reward, the linkis not yet such as to ground a conception of justice. As I shall try to show,any satisfactory theory of justice as desert will have to be able to accountfor this idea that justice confers some kind of entitlement.

COMPETITIONS AND INCENTIVES

Now it may be said that I have ignored the institutional context of desert-based justice. What Sidgwick’s account asserts, it may be said, is not thatgiving people their just deserts is the direct expression of individuals’ feel-ings of gratitude, but that those feelings are objectified into an impersonalinstitutional structure of just rewards, and that it is within that institutionalstructure that people are entitled to their reward. What then are the kinds ofinstitution which can embody the idea that institutionalised desert carriesentitlements with it? An obvious case is that of competitions and prizes.If I enter a race and cross the line first, then I deserve the prize, and if theprize is then given to the person in second place I have been deprived ofwhat I am entitled to and I can properly object. If I submit the best essayin a prize essay competition, then I deserve the prize and I am entitled toit. Formalised competitions can be seen as building on the pre-institutionalactivities of praising and grading, but the setting up of formal rules intro-

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duces a clearer element of entitlement. Does this provide us with a bettermodel for desert as a conception of social justice?

The race or the essay competition are of course trivial small-scaleexamples, but similar competitive structures do indeed extensively governthe social distribution of rewards such as pay. What we are talking abouthere, of course, are differential pay structures of the kind which are familiarin all professions and walks of life. Much of the debate about pay in theteaching and health care professions to which I have already referred wasabout performance-related pay, and about controversial ways of measuringthis, but the general principle is one which is widely accepted. To referparochially to the case of my own profession, it is one in which somepeople are paid much more than others. There is a scale of incrementsreflecting the number of years for which someone has been employed ona particular scale, but there are also of course different scales to whichpeople can be promoted – for instance, from Lecturer A to Lecturer B, toSenior Lecturer, Reader and Professor. The structure is a competitive one,the competition is one in which some win and some lose, and to that extentthe allocation of differential rewards is analogous to the award of prizes inother competititive activities such as games. On the strength of the analogy,then, can we say that we have here a case where the rewarding of desert isa matter of entitlements, and where the conception of distributive justicewhich is at work is a desert-based, non-egalitarian conception?

Notice first that the analogy with other competitive structures cangenerate a notion of entitlement which is only internal to the competition.If I win the 400-metre race, I am entitled to the gold medal because thatis the reward prescribed by the rules of the institution. Likewise if thereare criteria for promotion from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer, and if I havesatisfied the criteria, then I can claim (or at least I can try to claim) that Iam entitled to Senior Lecturer status and to the higher salary which goeswith it. That is only a limited notion of entitlement and of justice. I amentitled to the reward because I have done what the rules specify. So wecan distinguish between internal and external judgements about the justiceof differential pay. They are internally just if the people who are paid moreare the people who have in fact satisfied the appropriate criteria laid downin the rules. But that is different from the external question: is it just thatsuch competitive pay structures should operate and should reward somepeople more than others?

As we know, the defence of such structures very often appeals not towider considerations of justice, but to those of efficiency and effective-ness. The idea is that if people have to compete for greater rewards, theywill be motivated to work harder and better, the institution will flourish


and the wider society will benefit. I want to interject a strictly empiricalpoint here – again a parochial one, but one which can, I suspect, be widelygeneralised. In my experience the benefits of increased motivation in sucha structure are massively outweighed by the demotivation of those whohave competed unsuccessfully and not been rewarded. Possibly my ownprofession is unique, but for every colleague I know who is encouragedby the prospect of promotion, there are four or five who feel thoroughlydemoralised because their efforts have not been rewarded. They see otherspromoted where they have not been, and they see no justice in this stateof affairs. The significance of this empirical point for my argument isits relevance to the relation between the internal justice and the externaljustice of schemes of incentives. They are internally just if the people whoare rewarded more are the people who have satisfied the criteria specifiedin the rules of the system. The system itself may be justified by appeal tothe benefits which flow from it. In practice, however, the intended benefitsof better motivation are unlikely to be achieved unless the participantsin the system feel that the outcomes are not only internally just but alsoexternally just. Unless they believe that those who have been most highlyrewarded in the system are those whom it is just to reward from an externalpoint of view, they are likely to be demotivated by their sense of grievanceand their resentment at their unjust treatment.

We have now arrived at the question which seems to me to lie at theheart of the discussion of desert. Can the material rewards allocated tosome members of society in the form of higher salaries and the like beregarded as just, in a sense which can give substance to the idea of desertas a criterion of distributive social justice? What has to be defended goesbeyond the unexceptionable idea that people may deserve praise or blame,gratitude or resentment. The stronger claim being made is that people maydeserve material rewards. These will need to be justified as more thansimply the natural expression of praise or reward, since that does not yetcarry with it the idea of entitlement to such rewards. We can make senseof the idea of entitlement from within competitive systems of differentialrewards, but can those systems themselves be regarded as just from anexternal point of view? Can the allocation of greater material rewardsto some than to others be regarded as inherently just in a way whichtranscends the internal rules of particular institutions?

INTUITIONS AND INSTITUTIONS

I shall return shortly to the idea that justice is to be located in certainkinds of institution, and to the question of what the relevant institutions

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are and how they can be assessed as just from an external point of view,but I want to do so by way of what may at first look like a detour. I havebeen considering the possibility that the conception of justice as desert canbe derived from more basic ideas of desert grounded in human responsessuch as praise and blame, gratitude and resentment, or in practices suchas competitions and the awarding of prizes. Some defenders of desert-based justice, however, attempt to short-cut such attempts to derive it fromanything more basic, by appealing directly to self-evident intuitions. I wantto illustrate this approach by considering at some length an article by LouisPojman in which he defends the claims of desert against those of equality.3

He writes:

[The] primordial desert-based idea of justice has two parts. Every action in the universe hasa fitting response in terms of creating a duty to punish or reward, and that response must beappropriate in measure to the original action. It follows that evil deeds must be followedby evil outcomes and good deeds by good outcomes, exactly equal to or in proportion tothe vice or virtue in question. This is the basis of a primordial meritocracy, recognizedin all cultures and religions but denied or undermined by much of contemporary politicalphilosophy.

I cannot prove this principle to you. It is a basic principle, more certain to me than anyof the proofs that would support it. I can only ask you to reflect on the nature of desert anddetermine whether you see it in the same way. (DETD, 290; ED, 564)

It may be that this is all that can in the end be said for any conceptionof justice, since all justifications have to come to an end somewhere, butwe nevertheless have to be wary of premature appeals to intuition or self-evidence. Nowhere is such caution more needed, I suggest, than in thesphere of distributive justice, where supposed intuitions that it is right forsome people to enjoy greater benefits than others are especially liable tobe no more than ideological rationalisations of privilege. Pojman links hisappeal to intuition with a historical claim:

[I]t is interesting to observe how deeply the notion of justice as desert or merit is embeddedin human history. It seems a prereflective, basic idea of primordial or Ur-justice. One findsit grounded in every known culture or religion. (DETD, 289; ED, 559)

Maybe one does, but this historical fact is readily accounted for. Thosewho do well in any society, those who hold power and enjoy the materialgoods which typically accompany power, are strongly motivated to assumesome ethical justification for why they deserve their advantages – hence

3 Louis Pojman, “Equality and Desert”, Philosophy 72 (1997), reprinted with somechanges as “Does Equality Trump Desert?”, in Louis P. Pojman and Owen McLeod, eds,What Do We Deserve?, op. cit., 283–97. Where the two texts differ, I shall quote from thelater version. References in the text are to both versions where possible, abbreviated as EDand DETD respectively.


the unsurprising fact that every culture and every society seems to havesome notion of merit or desert. What is equally significant is the greatvariety of views in different societies as to what actually constitutes meritor desert. Military prowess, noble birth, moral virtue, work and effort –the variety reflects the historical diversity in the character of the socialgroups and classes which have actually enjoyed success, power and wealthin particular societies. The diversity suggests that the idea of desert andmerit can more plausibly be seen as a rationalisation of the privileges ofthe better-off, rather than as a genuine justification for them.

I want to look more closely at some of the examples which Pojmanprovides to illustrate his intuitions. By unpacking them we may be ableto see more clearly what is driving the intuitions, and therefore whatthey really show. One of his examples is the biblical story of the GoodSamaritan:

[H]e finds a Jew, lying wounded and bleeding on the side of the road, a victim of assaultand robbery. He takes the victim to an inn, heals his wounds, restores him to health, anddoes it all at his own expense. Does he not deserve gratitude from the Jew? (DETD, 290;cf. ED, 565)

This is an instance of what I have called “the pure idea of desert”, and Ihave no problem with Pojman’s intuition thus far – it is likely to be sharedby anyone who understands what gratitude is. Consider now Pojman’sfurther question:

[B]ut suppose that the Jew was wealthy and the Samaritan poor, needing money to payfor his daughter’s leukemia treatment. Would it not be fitting for the Jew to contribute tothe Samaritan’s needs? Would the Samaritan not deserve it in these circumstances – evenwithout any formal institutional ties? (ibid.)

Here the example is extended to illustrate the question I raised earlier, ofwhether, if gratitude is deserved, it follows that material rewards can bedeserved as a natural expression of gratitude. As I suggested previously,there is a sense in which we can indeed make such judgements. If theSamaritan were materially rewarded in this way, he would have deservedit in the same way that he would have deserved the gratitude which thereward expresses, and in that sense the reward would be “fitting”. Thisdoes not itself, however, raise questions of distributive justice, and theSamaritan would not be entitled to any material reward, nor could he claimto have been unjustly treated, if he received no such reward. I suggest thatPojman’s remarks about the absence of any institutional context are verymuch to the point here. Referring to the Rawlsian version of the idea thatjustice belongs in an institutional context, Pojman comments that the GoodSamaritan and the Jew

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. . . didn’t belong to the same political community. There was no preestablished institutiongranting the Samaritan any entitlement to any reward. And where there is no institutionalentitlement, the doctrine goes, there is no obligation, no desert. (ibid.)

This is the doctrine Pojman wants to contest, but he is running togethertwo questions: whether the institutional context is needed to make sense ofthe idea of “desert”, and whether it is needed to make sense of the idea of“justice”. A more precise appeal to intuitions would yield the likely resultthat the Good Samaritan deserves the reward but is not treated unjustly ifhe fails to receive it, precisely because there is no institutional entitlement.At least that is the way my intuitions go.

The relevance of an institutional context is illustrated by a telling phrasein a passage which Pojman quotes from W.D.Ross. Defending the idea thatwe have a prima facie duty of justice, Ross says:

[I]f we compare two imaginary states of the universe, alike in the total amounts of virtueand vice and of pleasure and pain present in the two, but in one of which the virtuous wereall happy and the vicious miserable, while in the other the virtuous were miserable and thevicious happy, very few people would hesitate to say that the first was a much better stateof the universe than the second.4

Pojman agrees that it is intuitively obvious that the appropriate distribu-tion of happiness and unhappiness should be according to virtue and vice,but he fails to ask why questions of distribution should even arise here.I am highly suspicious of these ethical thought-experiments which askus to assess the comparative value of alternative states of the universe;I find it difficult to see how any moral concepts can get a meaningfulpurchase on such abstract examples, and I am especially doubtful whetheranything meaningful can be said about what distributive justice requiresin such a case. We are not responsible for the “state of the universe”,or for the distribution of happiness and misery over the whole sentientcreation, past, present and future. I want to defend the view which Pojmanattacks, that questions of just distribution arise in an institutional conext, ina community or society, where people are concerned with the social rela-tions in which they live and co-operate with one another. My intuitions maydiffer from Ross’s or Pojman’s, but what I see as intuitively unacceptable,because unjust, is not a world in which, at some point in space and time,there may be people who are virtuous but miserable, but rather a worldin which the vicious prosper at the expense of the virtuous – or, to usea more appropriate vocabulary, a situation where free-riders exploit thosewho in good faith make a positive contribution to their shared endeavour.

4 Quoted from W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1930), 138: in DETD, 291; ED, 566.


This, I want to suggest, is an essentially egalitarian idea, and I want towork round to the defence of that counter-claim by looking at another ofPojman’s examples.

He asks us to consider the following story:

Jane is a devoted wife who puts her husband Jack through medical school, working longhours and sacrificing her education for him. Jack is fully caught up in his medical studies,so he fails to be grateful to Jane for all she is doing. Upon graduating with his M.D., with alucrative practice in hand, Jack announces to Jane that he has found a younger woman andwill be divorcing her. Doesn’t Jane deserve an ample alimony, and doesn’t Jack deservenot only our censure but to have some of his earnings transferred to Jane? Doesn’t Janehave a moral claim on Jack that society in general should help enforce? (DETD, 290; ED,565)

There is more than one consideration at work in this example, as Pojman’sown list of questions indicates. That Jack deserves our censure illustratesthe legitimate use of the concept of “desert” with which I began, but haslittle bearing on the questions of whether Jack has treated Jane unjustly andwhether Jane deserves compensation for this. On those questions, what isdoing the work of prompting our intuitions is surely the recognition thatJack and Jane were supposed to be working together to create a sharedlife for themselves, that Jane has been making her essential contribution,and that now that Jack is in a position to make his own more substantialcontribution he has betrayed her by abandoning her and opting out ofthe relationship. Notice the crucial difference from the Good Samaritanexample. It is not that Jane has helped Jack simply out of the blue, as an actof spontaneous generosity. The point is that they have been co-operating ina shared endeavour. Granted, it is not an “institutional” context in a strongsense of the word, and although the institution of marriage comes into thestory, I do not think that this is the essential point, since the story wouldhave the same implications without that detail. But what is essential is thatJack and Jane are a mini-community. They are supposed to be workingin partnership with one another, sharing their efforts and achievements.Consequently, when Jack gets all the advantages after Jane has made allthe sacrifices, she is being treated unjustly by him. She has been exploitedby Jack, in a situation where they should share equally in the benefits oftheir co-operation.

This is a key example for my own positive argument. Here is the kind ofcase where what Jane deserves can be expressed as an entitlement, and thuswhere, according to my argument, there is a genuine idea of distributivejustice at work. But what creates the entitlement is not the idea of “desert”in isolation, but the idea of social co-operation, the idea that those whocontribute to a common enterprise should share equally in the fruits of thatendeavour. Jane, unlike the Good Samaritan, is entitled to her just reward,

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because she is engaged with Jack in a joint activity in which she is entitledto her share.

It would be misleading to try to understand such cases on the modelsuggested by the earlier quotations from Ross or from Sidgwick. TheRossian model suggests that Jack’s obligation to Jane is simply the obli-gation which anyone else might have to her, to acknowledge her virtuousactions and ensure that her virtue is rewarded. The Sidgwickian modelsuggests that Jack’s obligation to Jane is the extension of an obligationof gratitude for a kindness which could have come from anyone. In eachcase Jane’s contribution would be treated as an isolated and adventitious“good deed”, to be matched with another good deed in return. This wayof looking at it fails to capture the essential feature of the Jack and Janecase, as an example of an on-going co-operative relationship to which eachmember is committed, and which carries the expectation that each memberis to make his or her fair contribution and to receive his or her fair shareof benefits. Jack and Jane are a very small-scale example of an on-goingco-operative practice, but that is the feature of it which, I suggest, drivesour intuitions about justice in such a case.

I want also to suggest that it is this kind of social context that is essen-tial for understanding the distinctive motivational structure of the ideas of“distributive justice” and “just entitlement”. Jane does not make her contri-bution to the shared life with Jack solely for the sake of maximising thebenefits which she herself gets from it – it would be a pretty poor relation-ship if that were the character of her involvement in it. On the other hand,her involvement in the relationship is not pure self-sacrificing altruism. Itoccupies this distinctive moral ground which is neither egoistic nor altru-istic, which is distinctively the terrain of social co-operation and whichhas its distinctive motivation. When you are committed to co-operationwith others, you genuinely share with them, you pool your efforts withthem in the common cause, and you think of the benefits at which you areaiming as collective benefits. You do not co-operate with them simply inorder to get as much out of the activity for yourself as possible: you donot claim more than your share, but neither do you claim less than yourshare. If you are deprived of your share by your fellow co-operators, thenthe distinctive motivational structure of social co-operation is called intoquestion. You thought that you were genuinely sharing with them, but if itturns out that you are being exploited and “taken for a ride”, then the co-operation is being abused, you are being deprived of your share and youcan justly claim it as your entitlement. This, I am claiming, is the way inwhich the idea of “just entitlement” enters into the account of distributivejustice, as a feature of relations of social co-operation. The story of Jack


and Jane is a small-scale example, but it can be extended into an accountof distributive social justice at the level of a complex national society orindeed a supra-national co-operative community. Unlike Ross’s intuitionsabout “states of the universe”, this is a context in which talk about justdistribution is at home. But the version of distributive justice which wehave here is an egalitarian one. If you are co-operating with others in ajoint activity, the share of the benefits which you are entitled to claim isnot a greater or a lesser share than others, but an equal share.5

RECIPROCITY AND CONTRIBUTION

In order to provide further defence of this claim, and to elaborate thecontrast with the desert-based conception of distributive justice, I wantto look at the role of two other important concepts in this account, theconcepts of “reciprocity” and of “contribution”.

The idea of reciprocity provides one way of bringing out why the prin-ciple of justice appropriate to social co-operation is an egalitarian one. Wecan see this in the “Jane and Jack” case. Their relationship involves co-operation for mutual benefit. I presume that there is more to the story thanthis, that love and affection also come into the picture, but what is broughtout by the story and millions of other comparable stories we could all tellis that the love is itself liable to be destroyed if one party to the relation-ship exploits the other. The mutuality of the co-operation constitutes theelement of reciprocity: Jane works to pay Jack’s college fees and sacrificesher own education, on the understanding that when he has qualified as adoctor they will both benefit from his success and the high salary he willearn. Jack has benefited from her contribution and justice requires that sheshould benefit correspondingly from his contribution.

It is clear how the idea of reciprocity applies to such cases of bilateralco-operation, but what about its extension beyond bilateral cases to larger-scale multilateral co-operation? Here I want to refer again to Pojman’stext. He argues that the idea of desert can be found in animal behaviour,and that a plausible evolutionary account can be given of this: “[T]hechimpanzee who is groomed by another chimpanzee will come to theaid of his benefactor. Wolves will kill unreliable members of their packwho threaten their well-being.”6 In contrast to a community of Cheatersand Suckers, a community of Reciprocators will survive. Pojman then

5 I defend this linking of equality and co-operation against criticisms by Pojman in“Cooperation and Equality: a Reply to Pojman”, Philosophy 72 (1997), 137–42.

6 DETD, 291; ED, 565.

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attempts to characterise this relationship of reciprocity in terms of desert.Reciprocators are

. . . those who live by the principle of “justice as desert”, for they return good for goodand evil for evil. A society of Reciprocators seems fair. If no selfish Cheaters threatenedour existence, perhaps a world of altruistic Suckers would be wonderful. But Cheaters doexist, so a world governed by principles of justice as desert, the principles of Reciprocators,seems the best we can hope for. (DETD, 291, not in ED)

Pojman, then, is making similar claims to my own about reciprocal co-operation as the basis of justice, but he uses this to support a desert-basedconception of justice rather than an egalitarian conception. Which is themore satisfactory understanding of reciprocity?

I suggested earlier that the “desert” interpretation, insofar as it assimi-lates reciprocal benefit to something like an obligation of gratitude,returning one good deed for another, fails to capture the on-going characterof co-operative arrangements in which each participant makes a fair contri-bution and receives a fair share of the benefits. What is interesting aboutPojman’s animal examples is that they blur this important distinction. Ifchimpanzee A grooms chimpanzee B, and B in turn grooms A, is B’saction a direct response to A’s previous conferring of a benefit on B, or isthere an on-going arrangement, an understanding that each will take theirturn at grooming and being groomed? The point is that there is no wayof making the distinction. All that we have here are instinctive responses.The existence of these has a survival value for the species, and it may bethat we can tell some evolutionary story about the origin of human justicein instinctive reciprocal behaviour of this kind, but since the chimpanzeesdo not possess language (or at any rate a sufficiently complex language)it makes no sense to attribute to them a conception of justice of one sortor the other, either as the rewarding of desert or the equal distribution ofbenefits and burdens.

But what about human reciprocity? Why, it might be asked, can we notcharacterise on-going reciprocal arrangements in terms of a principle ofdesert – that each participant is entitled to a benefit which matches theircontribution? It may be that in the end we have to accept that we cancharacterise reciprocity in either way. We can understand it in egalitarianterms, or we can treat the idea of equal benefits as a special case of thedesert principle, where participants who contribute equally deserve equalbenefits. Perhaps there is in the end no way of choosing between these twoways of putting it. At the end of this paper I shall give a reason for treatingthe egalitarian conception as the more fundamental.7 For the moment I

7 Other difficulties for the desert-based account of contribution are explored in anunpublished paper by Bruce Landesman on “The Weakness of Desert” which he has kindly


want simply to suggest that the language of desert, even if it can be madeto fit the idea of reciprocity, carries with it a misleading emphasis. As Ihave already indicated, it seems to me to suggest too individualistic andatomistic a picture. It recognises an entitlement to benefit only insofar asthis can be matched to a specific contribution, rather than as stemmingfrom participation in the common enterprise as such. It plays down theelement of commitment to the on-going co-operation. It therefore failsto explain why the individual participants have any obligation to makea contribution in the first place, and suggests that they should benefit ifand only if they choose to make a contribution. The picture is of indi-viduals who are, as it were, owed a return on their investment, but whochoose from time to time whether or not to invest. This is a familiar wayof looking at social co-operation, and it is one whose shortcomings arealso familiar. What it fails to capture is the nature of co-operative rela-tions as those of a community. Consider again the relationship of Jack andJane – a mini-community. We may presume that, though a preconditionof the relationship is that each should recognise their reciprocal claims,what underpinned their commitment to the relationship was more thanjust a desire to get out of it what they put into it – that it was a part-nership, that they saw themselves as “in it together” and as doing morethan just expressing gratitude for, and rewarding, the good behaviour ofthe other. So likewise with a larger-scale community: it is held togethernot just by each participant’s claim to a reward commensurate with theircontribution, but by such things as common ideals, a common culture andtraditions, and by a complex network of criss-crossing and interconnectingties. For it to be a genuinely co-operative community, there must be thefeature of reciprocity, but this is not a feature simply of individual bilateralrelationships in which each individual gets back the equivalent of whatthey put in. Rather, the relationship of reciprocity is, so to speak, general-ised across the community as a whole, so that each shares equally in theresponsibility to contribute to the best of their ability, and is entitled to anequal share in the benefits of co-operation. That is how the idea of reci-

made available to me. Landesman argues that judgements about desert for contribution aredamagingly inconclusive insofar as they reflect varying motives for making the contribu-tion and varying degrees of agents’ responsibility for making the contribution. He suggeststhat our multiple intuitions about the relation of desert to such considerations typically leadus to say of such cases that “In a way he deserves it and in a way he doesn’t”, so that thereis no right answer to the question, “What does he deserve?” I suspect that the egalitarianaccount of contribution is less vulnerable to such difficulties, because the idea of equalityis less closely linked than is the intuitive idea of desert with considerations of motive andresponsibility. I am very grateful for the stimulus of Landesman’s paper.

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procity translates into that of equality when it is applied to a whole com-munity.

We can perhaps see more clearly the force of this way of putting it ifwe note that the obligation to make equal contributions is present even ifthere are not matching individual benefits. It may be that the benefits ofthe common enterprise are fully shared benefits which cannot be brokendown into benefits accruing to particular individuals. Suppose that Janeand Jack’s partnership were for the sake of the shared good of raising afamily. This cannot be split into “what Jane gets out of it” and “what Jackgets out of it”. It is irreducibly a common good. The aspect of reciprocityis there; each contributes on the understanding that the other does like-wise, and this is appropriately expressed in the principle that each owes anequal contribution. The contribution of each, however, is not matched tothe individualised benefits of each, and the idea of “desert” seems to havelittle work to do here.

What about cases of differential contribution, however? Even if, as Ihave argued, we should see each individual’s entitlement to their share inthe benefits of co-operation as more than just their direct reward for theirindividual contribution, should we not at any rate recognise that if somemake a greater contribution than others, they are entitled to correspond-ingly greater benefits – and does this not take us back to the distinctiveidea of justice as desert rather than equality? I want to set aside for themoment the case where some members of a community are unable to makean equal contribution to social co-operation – I shall come back to thisshortly. Having said that, I am inclined to think that there is plausibility inthe idea that where social responsibilities are allocated so that some peoplecontribute more, they do deserve more – and that this can be accounted forin egalitarian terms.

Suppose that, instead of his shoddy behaviour, Jack had said to Jane,“You have had to contribute more than your share so far, so now it’s yourturn to benefit”, and had suggested that now was the time to take thatspecial holiday she had always wanted, or to take her turn at pursuingher educational interests. Here it is clear, I think, that the underlyingprinciple is an egalitarian one. It is because they co-operate as equals,and should benefit equally overall, that Jane, who has made the greatercontribution, now deserves greater benefits. So likewise, to return to myoriginal example at the beginning of this paper, if teachers or nurses haveto work harder than most people in most jobs, then perhaps they deservecorrespondingly greater rewards; and if so, that is again on the strength ofthe principle that all should benefit equally overall.


In my own previous attempts to deal with this question, I have tried todeal with such cases under the idea of “compensation”.8 The idea is that ifbenefits and burdens are to be so arranged that everyone benefits equallyoverall, then those who carry greater burdens have, so to speak, a deficitwhich has to be compensated for with correspondingly greater benefits toachieve overall equality. In some cases the idea of compensation does seemto have clear application. Some kinds of work are especially unpleasantor dangerous or demanding, and it seems appropriate to describe theseas cases of additional burdens. So one might say, “Who would want tohave to spend every day trying to control a class of thirty adolescent kids?Teachers deserve everything they can get”, and mean thereby that theexhausting nature of the work is an additional burden for which teachersshould be compensated, for the sake of overall equality. I am not sure,however, whether every case of differential benefits for differential contri-butions can be assimilated to the case of compensation. Take the caseof working longer hours. Suppose we accept that the person who workslonger hours makes a greater contribution and so is entitled to a larger shareof benefits, in the form of higher pay or some other reward. Is she being“compensated” for the additional hours? Maybe this is an appropriate wayof putting it, but it perhaps sounds rather forced. Are the additional hoursa greater burden? One problem with this way of putting it is that peoplemay like their work, they may enjoy working more. Whether or not theyenjoy it, their entitlement to higher pay for longer hours should surely notdepend on whether they have enjoyed it or disliked it, and on whetheror not it is a “burden” in that sense. One might try to argue that thoughfrom the point of view of subjective psychology the longer hours may bemore burdensome for some than for others, nevertheless objectively, fromthe point of view of what is socially demanded of particular groups ofpeople, those who work longer hours are carrying a greater burden thanthose who work shorter hours and should therefore be compensated for itfor the sake of equal overall benefit. However, I am not entirely sure ofthis way of putting it, and it may simply be that the vocabulary of “greatercontributions” is preferable and sufficient.

What about cases where people work the same hours but one doesmore work in that time than the other? Suppose we are apple-picking forfive hours but I pick twice as many apples as you. I have made a greatercontribution, so am I entitled to a greater reward? Maybe I am, but again itsounds strained to say that I am being compensated for my greater contri-bution. This could have an application – perhaps I have worked so hard thatI am exhausted, whereas you have taken it easy and have not even broken

8 Free and Equal, op. cit., 80–2, Studies in Equality, op. cit., 111–3.

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into a sweat, so I am being compensated for the effort and exhaustion – butthat does not seem to get to the heart of why I might be entitled to more,which is simply that I have contributed more. We should probably thereforedistinguish between the idea of “greater benefits for greater contributions”and that of “greater benefits to compensate for greater burdens”, ratherthan insist on assimilating the former to the latter. Nevertheless I wantto maintain that both ideas are linked by the underpinning idea of equaloverall benefit. It is still from the baseline of equal benefits and burdens –the conception of social co-operation as reciprocal contributions for mutualbenefit – that we can understand why it is appropriate for departures fromsimple equality in respect of contributions to be balanced by departuresfrom equality in respect of rewards.

One way of bringing this out is to remind ourselves that the idea ofco-operation as equal overall benefit incorporates the idea of “equal contri-bution” as the norm. As I have suggested, it is not that if you happento contribute you are entitled to the corresponding benefit, but that, aspart of the idea of reciprocity, participants have each an obligation tomake an equal contribution. Suppose then that it turns out to be mutuallyadvantageous that some participants should make a greater than averagecontribution, and that they are in a position to do so. If you happen tobe a fast apple-picker and can pick more than the rest of us, it is inall our interests that you should do so. How then is this departure fromthe norm of equal contributions to be recognised from the standpoint ofoverall justice? We might simply choose to say that if your picking moreapples has cost you nothing, it is not really a departure from the normat all. We might also say that your greater contribution can be balancedby greater contributions from others on other occasions. But if that is notpossible, and if we do want to treat your picking more apples as a greatercontribution which has implications for overall justice, then it is surely anappropriately egalitarian way of recognising your greater contribution togive you a greater benefit. Which of these we might do seems to me to beessentially a pragmatic question, but looking at the matter in this way wecan see how the idea of “greater benefits for greater contributions” can haveits place within an egalitarian conception, without necessarily reducing tothe idea of compensation.

These are cases of quantitative contribution. What now of the qualita-tive idea that one person’s contribution is “more important” than another?Could that be a reason for just entitlement to greater rewards? Let usfirst ask what might count as a measure of greater importance. Perhaps itmight be greater contribution to social good. It might be said that teachersand nurses meet vital needs for health and education, which are essential


requirements for any civilised society, whereas the Spice Girls, or DavidBeckham, contribute things which are much less important but earn astro-nomically greater sums. We might say that the pop-singers and footballersdo not deserve to earn so much more than nurses and teachers, but that ofcourse can be backed simply by a principle of equality and does not needthe backing of any more complex principle of contribution. The tougherquestion is whether the nurses and teachers deserve to earn more thanPosh Spice or David Beckham because they make a “more important”contribution. I am not sure in what sense such a claim might be sustained.Health and education may from some obvious points of view be moreimportant than entertainment, but if a society needs entertainment as wellas health and education, then even though it needs it less, the entertainersare contributing their share as much as the nurses and teachers, and it isnot clear why they should not at any rate benefit equally. There may be anexpressivist argument at work here: by paying its nurses and teachers somuch less than high-earning entertainers, society is saying it values themless, when it ought to value them vastly more. Here we are back to theidea of material rewards as a natural expression of praise or gratitude, butas I argued previously, this does not create an entitlement. We may wantto find ways of expressing the recognition that nurses and teachers makea more vital contribution, but that does not mean that they are entitled togreater material rewards. (Maybe this is where an honours system is useful– though the entertainers seem to do pretty well in that too.)

What about the idea that some contributions are more important in thesense of having greater scarcity value? Anyone can clean the streets, it maybe said, but not everyone can be a teacher. Is that a reason why teachersshould earn more? It may be a reason why they can earn more. If a societyneeds large numbers of teachers and they are in limited supply, it mayneed to pay teachers more than street cleaners in order to get the teachersit needs. This, however, simply takes us back to the market argument, thathigher pay is the necessary incentive to get enough qualified people to docertain jobs. It does not by itself mean that the teachers are, in any strongsense, making a more important contribution than the street cleaners. Itis not clear that it establishes a case for paying them more because, ongrounds of justice, their contribution is more important in virtue of itsscarcity value.

I conclude that the idea that those who make greater contributionsdeserve greater rewards is an acceptable one, but that it has limited applic-ation. And though it may be a mistake to try to assimilate it entirely tothe idea of compensation, both ideas, that of “reward for contribution”and that of “compensation”, derive from the fundamental idea that justice

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requires that all participants in a scheme of social co-operation shouldbenefit equally overall.

NEEDS

I said that I would return to the case of those who cannot contribute, orare unable to make an equal contribution. My route back is via the ideaof “need”. I began by saying that this, like the idea of “desert”, seems onthe face of it to be an anti-egalitarian idea: some people need more thanothers, and justice therefore decrees that they should receive more thanothers. I do not have time for an extended analysis of this idea, but I wantto make one basic distinction, corresponding to the fundamental distinctionin my account of “desert”. There is, on the one hand, a notion of a moralrequirement to meet people’s needs which is not egalitarian but, by thesame token, is not a conception of social justice. Conversely, the notionof meeting people’s needs does have a role to play in our understandingof justice, but it is best understood within an egalitarian conception ofjustice.

Consider the idea that we ought to try to meet people’s needs, and thattherefore, the greater their needs are, the more demanding is the moralrequirement that we should try to meet them. This has been formulatedas the principle of giving priority to the worst off, and some writers, suchas Derek Parfit and Joseph Raz, have contrasted it with the principle ofequality.9 Though the two may appear the same, and though in many casesthey may have the same practical outcome, they are essentially different.The principle of “priority”, unlike the principle of equality, is not a compar-ative one. It requires us to give priority to those whose needs are greatest,not because they are worse off than others, and not therefore with the aimof equalising their condition to that of others, but simply because thatdegree of need makes that degree of moral demand on us. Their needswould have the same moral priority regardless of how many other peoplewere better off, and how much better off they were.

As I have argued elsewhere, we can indeed recognise an authenticmoral requirement here.10 It is grounded in a direct personal response tothe condition of other human beings. Recognising the plight of those whoare starving, we may thereby recognise that we ought to do what we canto help them simply because they are starving. This is not based on any

9 Derek Parfit, “Equality and Priority”, in Andrew Mason, ed., Ideals of Equality, op.cit., 1–20; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986),ch. 9.

10 Richard Norman, “Equality, Priority and Social Justice”, op. cit.


appeal to equality, or any judgement that we owe them this because theyare worse off than others. But, by the same token, it is not a requirement ofjustice. Though we ought to help them because they are starving, it cannotbe said that they have a just entitlement to our help simply because they arestarving.

Conversely, we can identify a place for the idea of “needs” within aconception of justice, but the most plausible conception within which tolocate it is an egalitarian one. Egalitarian justice requires not that everyonebe treated the same, but that everyone benefit equally overall. Those whoseneeds are especially great may require more help and more resourcesdevoted to them in order even to stand a chance of enjoying equal levelsof benefit. So, for example, justice may imply that special social resourcesshould be devoted to providing lifts, ramps, and other means of accessin public buildings so that those who are wheelchair-bound can benefitequally with others from the life of the community.

Let me in conclusion try to link this back to the idea of “contribution”.What is striking is that those whose needs are greatest may, just for thatreason, be unable to make an equal contribution to social co-operation.That is not necessarily the case, of course, and part of the point of devotingspecial resources to their needs may be to enable them to contribute. Thefact remains, however, that some kinds of disability, for instance, mayinescapably rule out the possibility of contributing to the shared work ofthe community to the same degree as others do. Consequently, the ideaof “justice as desert”, if it means rewarding people for their contribution,seems to pull in the opposite direction from the idea of “justice as meetingpeople’s needs” if their needs prevent them from contributing. In the onecase their entitlement seems to rest on their contribution; in the other casetheir entitlement seems to be tied directly to the fact that they cannotcontribute. How can a coherent conception of justice account for both theseideas?

Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that the idea of“justice as reward for contribution” and the idea of “justice as meetingneeds” are two quite distinct ideas, resting on different moral bases, andthat it is a mistake to try to bring them both within a single unifyingconception of justice. That would nevertheless be puzzling, and a theory ofjustice which could account for both would have that at least to recommendit. I believe that the egalitarian conception of justice can achieve this. Itcan explain both why those who make greater contributions should at leastin some cases receive greater benefits, and why greater social resourcesshould be devoted to those with greater needs, and it can explain both asegalitarian departures from simple equality. It can derive both from the

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underlying principle that all should benefit equally overall from socialco-operation, without implying that the benefit is tied directly to theircontribution via an individualistic conception of desert. That egalitarianunderstanding of justice is the position I have been trying to defend.

Department of PhilosophySchool of European Culture and LanguagesUniversity of KentCanterbury CT2 7NFUKE-mail: [email protected]

criteria of justice: desert, needs and equality

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