Desert

Desert is a three-place property uniting a subject, a thing or treatment, and a fact. When certain facts are true of certain subjects, they have the property of being deserving of certain things. Thus, claims that subjects deserve things (or, desert-claims) have the form, “P has the property of being deserving of (or deserves) T in virtue of F,” where P is a subject, T is a thing, and F is a fact about P, also known as a “desert base.” It is [Page 572]widely believed that people ought to get what they deserve—at least when other things are equal. There is less agreement about the conditions under which people come to be deserving, and hence about what in particular they deserve. After years of ...