ABSTRACT
I am very grateful to anonymous reviewers and to Maureen Sie for helpful comments on this article.
Notes 1. However, the claim that this is the interesting sense of “desert” is not uncontested. According to
Vargas, it’s not obvious that desert is most fundamentally “basic” in the sense that it cannot be justified only on the basis of broadly consequentialist considerations (Vargas 2007a, 210). But the question of whether this notion is most “fundamental” appears misplaced. It’s the sort of desert that’s at issue, since other notions do not appear, even prima facie, to conflict with determinism or to be anchored in concerns about free will (Pereboom 2007, 86).
