In a theory of justice, Rawls observes that “There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed according to moral desert. Justice is happiness according to virtue.” However, he continues, “justice as fairness rejects this conception” (TJ 273).While Rawls’s so-called “rejection of desert” is well known, what exactly he is rejecting and why is often misunderstood.

The first thing to note is that Rawls uses the term “desert” more narrowly than is common. Ordinarily, the grounds on which we might say that someone deserves something are very wide: a worker deserves a raise for her hard work and loyalty, a student deserves an A because he answered all of the questions correctly, a team deserves to win for playing well, a criminal deserves to be punished for breaking the law, etc. But Rawls is interested in a single, narrow use: the idea that as a matter of justice, individuals’ entitlements should be determined by their degree of moral virtue. He signals this narrow use by typically using the term “moral desert” (as above) and associating it with the idea of “virtue” (as above), and by contrasting it with the broader idea of “deserving in the ordinary sense” (TJ 64; cf. 276).