Desert vs entitlement

A clarification is in order. In agreeing with Elizabeth Anderson in an earlier post, I was assuming a distinction which should be made explicit – between desert and entitlement.

To see it, consider chief executives’ pay. We can say a CEO is entitled to a £10 million salary, in the sense that relevant persons have freely agreed to pay him this.

To say he deserves such a salary is, though, a different and stronger claim. It usually implies that he has done something especially meritorious to warrant being paid 500 times as much as the average worker.

Desert usually brings with it all sorts of baggage about responsibility. Entitlement is a simpler notion, which makes far fewer demands upon our knowledge.

Indeed, surely only God can know what we all truly deserve. Any good Hayekian, who rightly recognizes the importance of bounded knowledge, would therefore want to avoid talk of desert, except in isolated instances.

This is why I'm not happy when Will Wilkinson says:

If S agreed to pay me x for completing my end of a contract, and I complete my end of the contract, then I deserve x from S. This is obvious and if an argument implies the contrary, then we have a ready reductio of the argument.

I'd rather say Will is entitled to x from S. He might or might not deserve it.

In Hayek’s thinking, of course, this does not in any way lessen Will’s claim to x. To Hayek, entitlements were sufficient for justice. As he said (Law Legislation and Liberty, volume II p94):

The idea that we have morally deserved what we have earned in the past is largely an illusion. What is true is only that it would have been unjust if anybody had taken from us what we have in fact acquired while observing the rules of the game.

Two other things. First, there’s a good discussion of desert at the superb Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Second, we should ask whether Hayek (and Nozick) were right. Are entitlements really as sacrosanct as they thought? But this is a job for another day, and, I hope, another person.

Comments

[Robert Schwartz]

I think the idea of desert without chocolate, whipped cream and cherries is ridiculous.

[Blimpish]

For Nozick, more difficult to disentangle than for Hayek.

Hayek was concerned with procedural liberty (most of all concerned with the rule of law, remember) and in large part for utilitarian purposes. He was not too far away from Rawls , and expresses his concern in "Fatal Conceit" in terms of wanting a society where a random person is most likely to achieve their ambitions. That's as far as he goes in terms of justice - he has an idea of what it involves rather than what it entails... And he regards it as dangerous, idle theorising to insist on what it entails (hence the title of the second volume of LL&L).

Nozick is more difficult because (as is fitting for a philosopher rather than a political theorist) his view links entitlement to justice. As I recall, justice in transfer would imply that the gains from trade are just, except for the fact that the original position (i.e., justice in holding) will not normally be correct/perfect.

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