Desert

Desert is a three-place property uniting (1) a subject, (2) a thing or treatment, and (3) 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 or treatment, and F is a fact about P, also known as a “desert base.” Desert is a moralized concept in the sense that, necessarily, if P deserves T, then there is a reason for P to have T. There is disagreement, however, about the conditions for desert and hence about what people ...