ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Joel Feinberg's influential essay Justice and Personal Desert, whose publication preceded by eight years the appearance of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and on which Rawls relies at several points in his discussion. It explains why purely institutional theories of desert appear radically revisionary of our ordinary beliefs and why they have seemed objectionable to many people. The chapter reviews Rawls's own treatment of desert, including his account of the differences between the role of desert in distributive justice and its role in retributive justice. It outlines an alternative theory, the Liberal Theory that seems to capture Rawls's most important claims while avoiding some of the major objections to institutional accounts. The chapter also explains why, notwithstanding his explicit claims about the asymmetry between distributive and retributive justice, Rawls's view of distributive desert has appeared to be generalizable to the retributive case as well.
