A commonplace in modern discourse is to hear people make statements like, “So-and-so definitely doesn’t deserve a woman like her!”; or, “Sean Combs deserves to go to prison for life”; or “Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to be President”; or even “Everyone deserves access to clean drinking water and overnight shelter.” These invocations of the language of ‘deserving’ express the concept of desert. That’s ‘desert’ with one ‘s’, not two. Deserts are punishments/rewards or consequences that you somehow merit/earn, either by your deeds or by your nature. Desserts with two ‘s’ are those delicious repasts that add joy to our lives and inches to our waistlines!

Like most hegemonic concepts (concepts that are ubiquitous in social thought and life), deserts are presumed to be self-evident and obvious. As a philosopher I assume nothing is self-evident and obvious. There are things we must for the moment assume, but everything can and should eventually be subjected to scrutiny. So while we all live and breathe deserts—blaming and shaming and praising and ass-kissing—I argue that we shouldn’t.

It is my position that the concept of desert is metaphysically false, ethically harmful, and theoretically unnecessary. That is, I believe that in reality no one deserves anything, that believing people do deserve consequences or rewards is ethically harmful, and that a virtuous realist theory of ethical norms does not need the concept of deserts.

My preferred alternative to talk of deserts is to talk in terms of responsibilities and ideals. That should be unsurprising since my work develops Plato’s idealism. Instead of saying, “Pete Hegseth doesn’t deserve to be Secretary of Defense,” I will say, “Pete Hegseth lacks the required virtue and competence as a person to bear the responsibilities of Secretary of Defense.” If asked whether that is just another way of saying he doesn’t deserve to be SecDef, I would reply that he is being judged according to the ideal of Justice and, subordinately, the ideal of a fitting SecDef. Since he fails those standards, the responsibility of SecDef should not fall to him.

Responsibilities and ideals provide a better foundation than deserts for ethical judgments. That said, not all ethical judgments are worth making. One such claim was included in my opening paragraph: “Sean Combs deserves to go to prison for life.”

A sentence like “Sean Combs deserves to go to prison for life” assumes a theory of retribution, that the moral universe is such that some people should be rewarded for doing good and other people should be punished for doing evil. On my view, you should be good for goodness’ sake, not for some further reward. Goodness is its own reward. Being rewarded for doing good is like being rewarded for having a healthy respiratory system. Health is its own reward. Likewise, doing evil is its own punishment. Sean Combs’ soul is much like a cancer-ridden body – it already reflects the approbation of its malady.

Of course, we might have other reasons for rewarding or punishing behavior that are not retributive. We might find that rewarding good behavior or punishing bad behavior helps to reinforce virtue and break habits of vice, which is a formative, not retributive motivation. We might find that rewarding good behavior or punishing bad behavior encourages others to virtue and deters them from vice, which is a social engineering, not retributive motivation. We also might give good folk greater social freedom to enjoy the company of goodness and limit the freedom of bad folk to protect ourselves from those who would do us harm, reflective of a government’s responsibility be good guardians of the common good.

By contrast, retribution is an end-in-itself. Whereas these other motivations impart consequences for some further good, under a retributive motivation a person is punished because that is what they deserve, even if doing so adds no further good to the world (and I would argue it adds more evil).

So my framework of responsibility and ideals does not attempt to explain retributive judgments, because on my view there are no true retributive judgments. Goodness does not involve meritorious transactions of rewarding good deeds and punishing evil ones.

Like most themes explored here at Plato For The Masses, I’ll unspool my position fully over future essays. For now, I want to develop an argument, not for my position on responsibility and idealism (except in the periphery), but against the belief that ethical judgments cannot be explained without recourse to the concept of deserts.

I.

As a student of Plato, I think that the best arguments emerge in dialectic; that is, in dialogue with others speaking with good will and without envy. A dear friend of mine, Andrew Lavin (host of the Reductio Podcast), recently sparked up a conversation on deserts in a social media post. He expressed a position of anti-realism about deserts similar to mine (‘anti-realism’ just means he doesn’t think there is anything in reality described by the concept of desert). One of our mutual former professors, Troy Jollimore, offered a robust and concise defense of realism about deserts. Rather than sketch an argument in the abstract, I’m going to make my case in response to Troy.

Andrew Lavin posted that we should dispense with the concept of deserts altogether, in part because it has led to so much abuse and misuse in politics. Troy Jollimore gave the following response, in part to Andrew and in part to me when I asked Troy for some elaboration and after I suggested that the concept of deserts is a kind of superstition. Troy’s comments have been lightly edited for clarity given the social media context.

While I will grant that the concept of deserts is very frequently co-opted and put to very bad ends, it is a necessary concept, so we're going to have to find a way to use it responsibly.

It's necessary, in part, to explain why certain ways of treating people are wrong – because we don't deserve to be treated that way. Suppose I am accused of a crime. During the trial, evidence is produced that fully exonerates me; but the judge, jury etc. decide to punish me anyway, for various utilitarian reasons. (They feel it in their gut that I do pose some sort of danger to society, and so are protecting society, etc.) The clearest and most straightforward explanation of what is wrong with their doing that is that I don't deserve it – in contrast with some other people (who, let's say, receive the same punishment being inflicted on me), who do deserve it.

I'm willing to hear an attempt to translate the explanation purely into responsibility talk. But I suspect (again, I'm willing to be wrong) that such a translation will either miss something essential (the responsibility part is part, to be sure, but only part, and I suspect it's not the most important part) or else it will just turn the idea of responsibility into desert, and will talk about desert but cleverly avoid using the word.

I don't think that's the only kind of case, either. I can't understand my own grading practices except in terms of desert; I do my best to give the students the grades they deserve. Sometimes it would make them (and me) happy to give them grades better than they deserve; and with some kids, I'd really like to give them a grade worse than they deserve. But I don't do it. Do I have a responsibility to grade according to such a policy? Sure; but the reason I do comes down to the value of giving people what they deserve. And I don't see anything at all superstitious about the idea that some student essays, for instance, are better than others, and deserve higher grades.

If I understand Troy’s argument correctly, his position is that the concept of moral desert is necessary because there are certain moral phenomena that cannot be explained without appeal to deserts, and any explanations which explain the phenomena without deserts are explanations which can be translated into deserts, which implies that we’re using the concept of deserts disguised in other words.

Before I develop my response to Troy’s argument, I want to add that he has separately acknowledged that deserts are troubled by the notion of luck. Most of us think we deserve our good fortune, when in reality we are just luckier than other people. Troy writes,

The promising argument, I think, is the one about luck. That's a huge one, way too big to be settled on social media. At the end of the day I think an understandable concept of desert still stands, despite luck. But I do think that if we were to reform our practices of punishment, resource distribution, etc. in line with what we know about luck, they would look radically different, and be a whole lot nicer.

Let’s leave luck aside for now and focus on Troy’s main argument that deserts are necessary for explaining why certain ways of treating people are wrong, such as punishing innocent people.

I label the concept of desert ‘superstitious’ because it postulates that for every act by a moral agent there is a function mapping it to an invisible scale of required social responses. Pinching Troy Jollimore's office stapler deserves one lash with a whip, while pinching Troy's wallet merits five lashes, etc. The superstition is the presupposition of a kind of pre-established harmony between an indefinite number of moral acts and a scale of proportional rewards or punishments that increase and decrease arithmetically. This is a scale of socially required responses, not of moral judgments. It’s not a scale of “this is bad,” “this is more bad,” etc., but of “this action deserves a reprimand,” “this action deserves suspension,” “this action deserves expulsion,” etc. The scale of merit allows for generalizations of the kind Troy proposed, e.g. “Innocent people should not receive anything from the punishment end of the scale, while guilty people should.”

Beliefs in desert seem superstitious to me because they appear akin to astrological beliefs that for every movement of the stars, there’s a comparable fate for each individual person’s life. I cannot think of any good reasons to believe that the stars above bear any correlation to events on the earth. Likewise, I cannot think of any good reasons why moral deeds correspond to an invisible scale of predetermined social responses to those deeds.

The aura of superstition only grows brighter if we zoom in on the scale: does pinching Troy Jollimore's stapler temporarily and returning it in short order deserve a half a lash? Or a much gentler lash? A ruler to the hand? A stern talking to? When we contemplate the full range of possible punishments and rewards, any particular determination of punishment or reward looks as arbitrary as an astrologer’s predictions.

The implausibility increases when we contemplate the extremes of egregious wrongs and heroic acts. What does a person who sacrifices their life to save a whole city deserve? Nothing, they're dead! Imagine they survive with catastrophic injuries, what then? Paid healthcare? 70 virgin lovers? A billion dollars? A French chateau? The thanks of a grateful people? Should someone choose a particular social response, it only reveals their preferences on social behaviors, not some eternal proportional law of desert.

Likewise with egregious wrongs. Suppose a person rapes and then murders an innocent victim, and a theory of desert says they deserve the death penalty. What then does someone who rapes and murders two innocent victims deserve? Or someone who gives a genocidal order? No further proportional response seems available. Even if we double-down and insist that such heinous acts still deserve a specific punishment even though we, with our finite capacities, can never administer them (say, to die a thousand deaths), any specific punishment we imagine will nonetheless be arbitrary. We could say such a person should die once over for each person murdered, but others would object that the punishment should be worse than the crime. Five deaths for every one. No, ten! Is it really a truth of desert that a génocidaire deserves to die exactly a thousand deaths, and not 999 or 1001?

I propose that when people assign punishment or reward to an act, they are expressing their personal disgust or praise towards those actions. Rewards and punishments are social practices equivalent to saying, “I strongly approve of this action” or “I strongly disapprove of this action.” The reward or punishment in itself has no moral value.

I'm a moral realist – I think there is a real difference between good and evil. I just don't think deserts are among the realities of moral life. Advocates of desert are really offering an arbitrary expression of their personal attraction or revulsion to certain moral acts.

II.

There's a stronger argument to disbelieve in deserts. The whole idea that evil acts deserve punishment and good acts deserve reward seems itself morally wrong. Punishments are themselves evil acts, and it seems wrong to repay evil for evil. Moreover, rewards do not make good acts good, and a system that requires rewards for good deeds makes impossible the hidden life and the humble hero. While there may be social engineering or formational reasons to reward a particular good deed, insisting that every good deed requires a due recompense contradicts the intrinsic value of right actions. One thinks of the firefighter who responds, “Just doing my job.” They would almost find it offensive to receive a reward for doing their duty.

Many theories of desert in human history have held that a death deserves a death, that if someone commits murder then they deserve to be murdered. It seems such theories should also think that a rapist deserves to be raped. But rape is always evil. No one ever deserves to be raped; therefore no rapist ever deserves to be raped. I suspect most readers will find that argument compelling. I contend that the same goes for all other punishments. Flogging is always evil, forced solitary confinement is always evil, etc. If no person ever deserves evil being done to them, and punishments are evils, then no person ever deserves to be punished. Evil does not justify evil.

Likewise for rewards. If you do a good act to get the reward, then it wasn't a good act. If we are required to reward every good act, then we end up corrupting our society, because we want people to practice the good for its own sake. We praise good acts not because they deserve praise but because we need to emulate those acts ourselves and inculcate them in others.

Troy suggested that an innocent person should not be punished because they don’t deserve to be punished. I fully agree. But Troy overlooks a crucial ambiguity in the word ‘don’t.’ It could mean that the concept of deserts applies generally, just not in that case. But it could also mean that the concept of desert doesn’t apply at all – the innocent person doesn’t deserve to be punished because no one deserves to be punished because no one deserves anything. Troy argues, “The clearest and most straightforward explanation [as to why an innocent person should not be punished] is that I don't deserve it – in contrast with some other people . . . who do deserve it.” That is an invalid inference, because the innocent would also not deserve punishment if they don’t deserve anything.

Deserts are a social fiction much like the divine right of kings. The divine right of kings is an invention created to induce social acquiescence to the rule of those already in power or laying claim to a throne. I’m an anti-realist about the divine right of kings – no one has a divine right of kingship because there is no such right. Which is the more straightforward explanation that King Henry VIII has no divine right to the throne: that Henry does not have a divine right to rule because he lacks the divine right, in contrast to one who actually has it; or that there is no such thing as a divine right to rule in the first place?

Like the divine rights of monarchies, deserts are a social fiction invented to justify facially objectionable practices like flogging, exile, cutting off somebody’s hand, etc. The real motivation for these practices is vengeance: X harms Y, and Y wants revenge. X stole their sheep, so Y wants to destroy X’s whole village in retaliation. But that’s a horrible thing to do! What could justify it? Solution: deserts! Y is justified in destroying X’s village if they tell a compelling story about how Y deserves it. Now it’s a good act, righteous in the eyes of the gods and esteemed by the people in Y’s community.

Since good acts are intrinsically good and evil acts are intrinsically evil, we don’t need deserts to justify or condemn them. The only non-redundant application of deserts is to justify acts that are intrinsically evil or to condemn acts that are intrinsically good.

Deserts are not the only possible explanation for why it is wrong to treat some people badly. There are other explanations that have less philosophical baggage.

The obvious one is the old “golden rule,” the utility explanation that says if a person does not want to be punished when the evidence has fully exonerated them at trial, then they should not punish others when the evidence has fully exonerated them. While not my preferred explanation, it seems reasonably adequate as an explanation, and fully explains Troy’s scenario without depending on deserts explicitly or tacitly.

My preferred explanation involves a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect explains that it is wrong to punish the innocent because it is always wrong to punish – I reject retributive theories of justice. The positive aspect explains how we should behave towards one another purely in terms of responsibility. The ideal of a relationship determines what my responsibilities are in that relationship. Here's three examples: friendship, parenting and civic duty.

If we are friends, I have a responsibility according to the ideal of Friendship to be a good friend to you. I don't treat you as you deserve or as you don't deserve. I treat you according to what it means to be a good friend, often even when you have not been a good friend to me.

If I am a parent, I have a responsibility according to the ideal of Parental Care to be a good parent to those children in my care. I don't treat them as they deserve or don't deserve. I treat them according to what it means to be a good parent, even when they behave quite atrociously.

If I am a citizen, I have a responsibility to the ideal of the Just Society to be a good citizen towards my neighbors in general, and with special responsibilities if I am called to public service through leadership or administration. I don't treat my neighbors as they deserve or don't deserve. I treat them according to justice, often even when they are being unjust towards me. I judge and sentence the accused according to the truth about their innocence or guilt, and not otherwise.

A theory of responsibility as I've outlined can be fully fleshed out without recourse to deserts, and without tacitly relying on deserts as background assumptions. Therefore it is false that deserts are necessary to explain the rightness or wrongness of how we treat others. There are other competing explanations.

III.

My friend Andrew’s point was that when we look at the history of the concept of deserts in practice, most applications of the concept are contrary to the good. The Nazi’s are justified in gassing the Jews because they deserve it; black folk are justifiably excluded from residential zones because white folk deserve a pure neighborhood; the rich deserve their wealth because they worked hard for it; tenured professors at universities deserve their job security because of their brilliance. These kinds of judgments depend on the availability of a concept of desert that gives permission to make these judgments in the first place.

A moratorium on arguments from desert would be an extension of the moratorium on arguments from racial supremacy or inferiority of sex (whites deserve better jobs, women don’t deserve certain jobs, etc.). They remove certain kinds of bad faith reasons from the social discourse. Excluding desert-talk wholesale would encourage people to argue for the rightness and wrongness of deeds in terms of their goodness and badness. More importantly, it would free us from the whole economy of social reprisals legitimated by a judicial system more invested in promoting recidivism among criminals than it is in achieving repentance and reconciliation between members of society.

Nor would anything be lost. We’d still have all the power of our moral language. The oppressed don't deserve oppression because no one deserves oppression because no one deserves anything. We can still say in the next breath that the oppressed need freedom from their oppression; or that the oppressed should participate in the common good because it is good for all to participate in the common good.

If anything, I would argue we have lost something in our reliance on deserts. We have lost an intelligible place for repentance followed by mercy. The scale of desert says that for each bad deed, there is a required social response that must be meted out. Each person must get what they deserve. But all of us have been in situations where we committed a wrong and then, upon recognizing our wrong, repented of it. If we were forgiven, we were not given what we deserve. It seems praiseworthy in many cases to not give people what the social fiction says they deserve. Jesus says to love our enemies. Isn’t that a case of showing my enemy a love they don’t deserve? There are many good deeds we do that others do not deserve. The very existence of such deeds gives the lie to the existence of deserts.

IV.

In closing, I want to address the last part of Troy’s argument, the grading example, because it reveals a crucial and important conflation of concepts that is probably the source of our instinct that deserts are necessary to our moral fabric.

Troy argues that he cannot explain his own grading practices as a teacher without appeal to deserts. He writes, “I do my best to give the students the grades they deserve.” When teachers like myself or Troy assign grades, are we doing something more akin to moral judgments, which aim at accurate assessments of goodness or badness; or are we doing something more akin to deserts, meting out required social rewards and punishments? I think Troy has conflated these two into a single notion, whereas I would say that grading practices, at their best, only involve the former.

When I grade a student’s work, I am not rewarding or punishing them for their work – I am trying to accurately measure the quality of their work. Grades are like meter sticks – they are a standardized measurement tool devised to facilitate more accurate measurements. When Troy gives his students “the grades they deserve,” we can deflate this talk of deserts into the language of measurement: Troy is accurately measuring how much his students’ work approximates the learning standard of the class. Making accurate judgments has nothing to do with meting out deserts. A sprinter who wins a heat does not ‘deserve’ to be ranked 1st; they are ranked 1st because that is an accurate representation of their position at the completion of the race. Likewise, a student who meets the standards of learning for a class does not ‘deserve’ an A; they are measured with an A because that is an accurate representation of their learning.

The concepts of truth and accuracy are sufficient to explain the grading practices of teachers, attended by the epistemic responsibilities to care about the truth and strive for accuracy.

The entirety of our moral lives can be explained and practiced with the following components:

• An attentiveness to judging our actions truthfully as to their goodness or badness.

• A science of ideals relevant to the relationships that constitute our lives.

• An acceptance of the responsibilities we have in each relationship to approximate their respective ideals.

• Educational and formational social practices that promote virtue and discourage vice.

• Judicial systems that facilitate reparation, not retribution.

My position is that these five elements—jointly sufficient and exhaustive for a robust moral practice in society—do not presuppose or entail the concept of desert. Maybe there is one desert after all: the concept of desert deserves to be removed from our collective mental economy. Perhaps also the stars have aligned to say that we should stop reading our fate in the stars.