Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 288 pp.

Abstract

Review of Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 288 pp.One of the holy grails of political philosophy is creating a fully functioning theory of distributive justice based on the concept of desert. There are fairly comprehensive and sophisticated libertarian, egalitarian and prioritarian theories that claim to specify, with some degree of precision, how the burdens and benefits of social cooperation should, normatively speaking, be distributed. However, while there are many philosophers who have made impressive contributions to the study of the concept of desert, there is no integrated desert-based theory of justice that can give us some useful guidance on who should get what. This is, in some ways, surprising; as those who work on desert often note, the basic notion that justice requires giving people what they deserve has considerable intuitive plausibility. Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country seeks to take this basic idea and develop it into a theory of distributive justice that compares favorably with familiar theories of justice, such as luck-egalitarianism, sufficientism, libertarianism, and prioritarianism.Perhaps one reason why desert has not been particularly prominent in discussions about justice is that the basic concept, as it is generally used, is rather stretchable; people discuss it in very different ways. Sometimes saying that one deserves something is to say nothing more than that there is some reason why one should have it. On other occasions, claiming to deserve something involves making a very specific argument about how the virtuous nature of one's actions justifies some reward. Still others invoke desert to claim compensation for losses they might have incurred. These, and other, conceptions of desert mainly differ in three things: the goods or modes of treatment that people might deserve, the reasons why they might deserve them, and who should ensure that they receive them. This basic disagreement about the nature of the concept makes it difficult to develop it into an appealing theory of justice.Feldman is particularly aware of the need to settle on a specific conception of desert in order to construct a desert-based theory of justice. He distinguishes four main conceptions of desert, and concludes that the most viable candidate for grounding a theory of justice is what he calls political economic desert. In this conception of desert, members of a particular community deserve certain political and economic deserts, namely the goods, rights and obligations that they can only receive from their community and that they need in order to flourish as communal beings. These so-called community essential goods include security, opportunity, political rights, access to healthcare and the like. The reason why members of a community deserve these community essential goods, the political economic desert base, is that these individuals have community essential needs. By this Feldman means that they require these goods in order to live successful lives in a social context. The government, i.e., the political economic distributor, has the duty to make sure individuals have the goods they need to flourish, precisely because they need them in order to do so. This means that, according to Feldman, everyone living in a certain state deserves to have their community essential needs met. In this way, Feldman arrives at the flagship formulation of his theory of justice:There is perfect political economic distributive justice in a country if and only if in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political economic desert in virtue of having a political economic desert base, he or she receives that desert from the appropriate economic distributor (p. 72).With this theory of justice in hand, Feldman proceeds to demonstrate that it is superior to other, familiar theories of distributive justice. …