ABSTRACT
Many people believe that equality has intrinsic moral significance, so that an outcome is better—in and of itself—if it leads to greater equality. So should philosophers believe in both equality and desert, or just one of the two? Shelly Kagan argues that the value of equality is at best conditional, since most of philosophers don't think that inequality is bad if it is truly deserved. Equality is a surprisingly complex notion, as philosophers discover when we try to measure the degree of inequality. This emerges especially clearly for cases involving more than two people, and more than two levels of well-being. Desert is also a complex notion, even if philosophers restrict their attention to moral desert—the notion of one person being more or less morally deserving than another. Some people find comparative desert attractive but deny that it has anything to do with desert.
