ABSTRACT
This chapter provides three separate attacks. One is essentially conceptual: The negative notion of the undeserved, rather than the positive notion of the deserved, constitutes the moralized core of the notion of desert. Two others are largely practical. One is that we can make only limited claims, if any at all, about positive entitlements to probabilistic outcomes. Another is that there are certain circumstances in which considerations of desert should be put into abeyance. These three arguments are independent of one another, in the sense that the success of any one is nowise contingent upon the success of any other. But they all converge toward the same conclusion: that notions of positive desert ought not play any important role in social policymaking. Knocking the props out from under the notion of positive desert doubly undercuts opponents of economic redistribution. The chapter concerns the proper role of considerations of personal desert in social policymaking.
