5 Do the Skilled and Hardworking Deserve More Than Others?

Obliged to submit to the law of the majority, the classes that call themselves superior can preserve their political hegemony only by invoking the law of the most capable. Because the walls of their prerogatives and tradition are crumbling, the democratic tide must be held back by a second rampart made up of brilliant and useful merits, of superiority whose prestige command obedience, of capacities of which it would be folly for society to deprive itself.

—Émile Boutmy, founder of Sciences Po, in 1872

Democratic modernity is founded on the belief that inequalities based on individual talent and effort are more justified than other inequalities.

—Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.

—John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

In the previous chapter we saw that individuals do not deserve their income—and society is not a meritocracy—because there is nothing like a level playing field in contemporary capitalism.¹Close But this raises a difficult question: What if society were to become more equal? What if there really were equal opportunity between people, so that everyone had access to similar educational opportunities, there was far less class hierarchy, much reduced racism and sexism, and so on? Should we, in this case, embrace meritocracy and affirm that those who are more successful in the market competition rightly deserve their income on the grounds that it is the result not of privilege but of merit? And similarly, that the poor deserve their poverty because it is the result not of unfortunate circumstance but their own failures? If there truly were a level playing field, then would we want to say that those who have more skill or work harder or make better choices deserve more than the untalented, lazy, or weak-willed?

Some on the left seem to think so. For instance, the most famous book from the left in recent years—Thomas Piketty’s (2014)  Capital in the Twenty-First Century—assumes that the income earned in a fair market is morally deserved; Piketty’s powerful critique of contemporary society is not that there is anything wrong with desert or meritocracy per se, but that inheritance and inequality have become so great as to “radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based” (1). Piketty reflects the conventional social democratic wisdom when he says that “democratic modernity is founded on the belief that inequalities based on individual talent and effort are more justified than other inequalities” (241). Indeed, he seems to believe that insofar as deservingness is concerned, there is a fundamental distinction to be made between “self-made wealth (for which individuals can be held responsible, at least in part)” and “inherited wealth (for which individuals can hardly be held responsible)” (Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2013, 6–7, emphasis added). In other words, inequality stemming from “self-made wealth” is morally acceptable.²Close This kind of belief in what we might call “genuine meritocracy” is widespread among prominent social democrats. For instance, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (2012, 266, emphasis added) believes that “the bottom 99% by and large are not jealous of the social contributions that some of those among the 1 percent have made, of their well-deserved incomes.” Likewise, Robert Reich (2015, xi–xii) reminisces about what he sees as the golden age of US capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, when CEOs made only 20 times more than their workers and “hard work paid off . . . [and] those who contributed most reaped the largest rewards.” Indeed, the typical opinion of meritocracy from social democrats is not “We oppose” but “It doesn’t yet exist,” which appears to reinforce the notion that the ideal itself is a good and valuable one.

Socialists too often support a version of desert, though their position is more complicated. While there is clearly a long history of socialist thought that is adamantly needs-based (rejecting desert),³Close there’s an equally long tradition that is firmly desertist. This is the tradition which emphasizes the exploitation of workers and the parasitism of capitalists. The problem with capitalism from this perspective is that workers do not receive what they rightly deserve from their toil (whereas bosses, and particularly rentiers, receive far more than they rightly deserve for their relative lack of work). Indeed, the basic socialist concepts of “exploitation” and “parasitism” are, arguably, deeply interwoven with, and animated by, the notion of deservingness (Cohen 2000).⁴Close

In other words, while many are rightly skeptical of the claim that meritocracy currently exists today, most people, including many on the left, continue to believe that the ideal of meritocracy is valid. In particular, many people (including on the left) share the core meritocratic intuitions: first, that people should be rewarded for the fruits of their skills; second, that people have control over their efforts and choices, and therefore hard work and good choices deserve greater rewards than laziness and poor choices. Indeed, these core meritocratic intuitions are interwoven with some of the foundational notions of Western (and other) culture that stretch back hundreds, if not thousands of years, such as the belief that individuals make their own choices, criminals deserve punishment, hard work deserves reward, and underlying them all, the conviction that individuals inherently possess “free will,” which is what differentiates them from the beasts and allows them to be rightly held responsible—that is, praised or blamed, rewarded or punished—for the free choices they make.

In this chapter my aim is to challenge these common intuitions, with the hope that the reader will be persuaded to take a second look at their allegiance to ideas of deservingness and meritocracy. I will argue that even if circumstances were more equal, we should still reject meritocracy. The problem is not simply that meritocracy is not yet realized (as many on the left seem to think) but rather that the idea itself is inherently unjust and should be abandoned. I defend the admittedly radical position that we should be extremely skeptical of the idea that certain individuals ethically deserve more or less income from their work than others. True, some are more talented, some are more able to exert effort, and some are better able to shape their personality in productive ways—but all of this is ultimately due to luck. Rewarding people with significantly greater means to live a good life due to luckily possessing more talent or effort or self-cultivating skill than others is akin to rewarding people for having white skin or blue eyes: it is arbitrary and unfair.⁵Close  At its heart, meritocracy is a doctrine of ableism (by which I mean that it discriminates and disadvantages people on the basis of their bodily abilities [Kristiansen, Vehmas, and Shakespeare 2009]). Like racism, meritocracy ranks people in a social hierarchy on the basis of characteristics that are arbitrary from a moral point of view. It should therefore be firmly rejected.⁶Close

I admit from the outset that this is a radical position, and one which clashes with many people’s deep intuitions about deservingness, free will, and moral responsibility. But even if you, dear reader, are not willing to go all the way with me in abandoning desert altogether, I hope that by the end of this chapter you are at least more suspicious of it.

To reiterate, the central argument in the previous chapter was that desert is undermined because there is nothing like a level playing field in terms of opportunities. This chapter argues that even if there were a level playing field in terms of class and economic opportunity, individuals would still not deserve their income because of the luck of possessing uneven mental resources and capacities. The playing field of internal capacities, in other words, is inevitably unlevel all the way down, and so the competition that exists between people is inherently unfair. I agree that people do have the ability to make choices, exert effort, and improve their capacities; what they do not have is anything like equal ability to do such things. (There is no magical capacity of “autonomy” or “will power” that all humans equally possess.) People differ in their abilities to exert effort or self-improve just as dramatically and just as arbitrarily as they do in their ability to run fast or sing in perfect pitch. Since there is no level playing field, we should be deeply skeptical of the notions of desert and meritocracy. Ultimately, the aim should be to distribute essential economic goods as equally as possible (or perhaps according to need). Practically, of course, it will often be necessary for there to remain a certain level of income inequality in order for a market system to function well (because we want to create appropriate incentives for people to work hard, innovate, shift to working in jobs that are in high demand, etc.). Nevertheless, the justification of such inequalities is that of social usefulness; they are not ethically deserved.

To develop these arguments, the first section examines the question of whether we deserve rewards on the basis of skills; the second section examines whether effort is an appropriate basis for desert; the third section addresses whether individual choice legitimately grounds desert. In every case my answer will be no. The fourth section considers some objections, and the final section steps back to look at the big picture.

Before beginning, let us clear some conceptual ground. Even though this chapter is critical of desert, there are many areas of social life where it is perfectly reasonable, and even important, to talk about what people “deserve,” as long as we’re very clear about what precisely we mean. The crucial distinction to keep in mind is that of institutional entitlement versus moral desert (Olsaretti 2003). Entitlement means that one “deserves” a reward simply because that is what the rules of the game or institution in question dictates. So it makes sense to talk about someone “deserving” the gold medal because they won the race, or the worker “deserving” a promotion because they put in the required two years of service, or the politician “deserving” the powers of prime minister because they won the election. Entitlements play all kinds of roles in society, often highly useful ones, because setting up institutions to grant entitlements for abiding by specific rules can have highly beneficially consequences (e.g., entitling people to promotions for achieving certain results can be a good way to motivate them to strive to obtain such results).

Entitlement aside, most people believe that there is a different and more fundamental kind of desert, which is not institutional but moral (sometimes called “pre-institutional desert”). Here desert refers to the idea that it is morally right (or intrinsically good) for someone to receive a reward based on their performance of an activity, regardless of whether or not the performance exists within any set of institutional rules. Whereas entitlement is a purely sociological or empirical matter (about what the institution in question dictates), desert is a normative notion; it is about an appropriate fittingness between the individual and the action. Sometimes entitlements and desert can come apart. For instance, if a society institutionalizes a rule whereby men are legally paid more than women, then even if a man is “entitled” to such payment, one may well say that it is not truly deserved because men do not actually work harder or perform better than women. Desert advocates, like David Miller (1999), typically argue that the way we judge the validity of entitlements is by viewing them through the lens of moral desert.

Now my argument will be that there is no problem, in general, with desert in the sense of entitlement (since entitlements are often very useful). It is fine to say, loosely and colloquially, that those who pass the bar exam “deserve” to be lawyers and that the winners of the race “deserve” the prizes.

Likewise, there are good practical reasons for allowing a certain amount of inequality. There are good reasons for allowing jobs and offices to be allocated on the basis of skills and effort (i.e., “merit”) because we want jobs to be done by people who are well-qualified for them. Similarly, it is fine for there to be a small amount of inequality in wages, since these are useful for providing motivation. However, where I differ from the mainstream is in denying that such differences are morally deserved (even if they are practically necessary)—that kind of desert does not exist. The upshot is that while small inequalities in income may be necessary, large ones are not. What is unacceptable is for different jobs to have great differences in pay. As much as possible, incomes should be highly compressed, and the essential elements necessary for people to live good and flourishing lives (such as having economic security), should be guaranteed to all.

Consider two individuals, Mark and Jada. Mark grew up in a loving, stable family, where he was exposed to chess at a very early age and developed an obsession with it. His family supported his devotion—buying him countless chess books, hiring coaches, taking him to tournaments. He became a chess prodigy by the age of five. Mark was loved and nurtured through secure attachments; he attended schools where teachers fostered his confidence, taught him how to diligently complete tasks, and praised him for doing so. He frequently won chess tournaments as a teen, which fueled his ambition and single-mindedness. He entered adulthood as an enthusiastic and optimistic young man, with significant self-confidence, obsessive interest in chess, and extreme ability to concentrate on chess problems for many hours at a time without fatigue, distraction, or disinterest. Mark went on to become a Grand Master in his early 20s, earning many millions of dollars per year from winnings and sponsorships.

On the other side of town, Jada grows up in a household that is just as well-off materially as Mark’s but is significantly worse off in terms of emotional and psychological well-being. Her single mother is frequently absent, short-tempered, and emotionally detached. As a child Jada experienced the profound trauma of sexual abuse from an uncle. She also has cerebral palsy; she has typical cognitive functioning but uses a wheelchair and can speak only slowly and with difficulty. She also suffers from chronic pain, which leads to bouts of depression and low self-confidence.⁷Close

Due to the brute luck of her bodily impairments it is difficult for Jada to compete in the marketplace for many jobs. As a result, she ends up earning a typical income for disabled people, say, $25,000.⁸Close The key point, which should go without saying, is that Jada is fully and completely a human being. She experiences the full range of human joys and fears, of existential terrors and delights. She dreams about loving relationships and fulfilling work, worries about insecurity, illness, and climate change. Her life is precious and has just as much moral worth as that of Mark or any other human being. However, in any market system (even a more egalitarian social democratic one), Mark will earn much more than Jada (in this case, 100 times more), and so society is essentially rewarding Mark for the luck of being immensely skilled while simultaneously punishing Jada for the misfortune of being impaired.⁹Close Mark is rewarded with the material conditions to live a full and rich life—he owns a mansion and multiple cars, eats delicious exotic foods, has top-notch healthcare and complete economic security, and is able to fulfill practically any and every desire. Jada, on the other hand, is deprived by society. In the social democratic society we are imagining, she would not starve or go homeless, but she would still face considerably more hardship than Mark: living in a small, dilapidated apartment, surviving off cheap food, stressed from long hours of work and little leisure time, and suffering the stigma of being poor.

My claim is that it is wrong—unfair and unjust—for such differences in life to be due to luck. Mark doesn’t deserve his skills. Jada doesn’t deserve her impairments. Such differences are the result of mere brute and brutal luck. To allow Jada to live a significantly worse life than Mark due to differences in luck is to manifestly fail to treat her with equal respect and equal concern. In effect, society is saying to her, “We regard you as less worthy. We see no problem with you suffering due to arbitrary reasons which are no fault of your own.” This lack of equal respect is the essence of ableism, which is just as noxious as racism or any other system of institutionalized arbitrary prejudice. Indeed, remunerating people on the basis of skills is morally equivalent to rewarding people for having white skin. Of course, rewarding people for the lucky possession of skills is not exactly the same as rewarding people for skin color, since there may well be instrumental and pragmatic reasons as to why society would want to set up entitlements to reward skill or productivity in ways that do not apply in the case of skin color. Nevertheless, the point remains that from a noninstrumental, purely moral point of view, distributing income on the basis of luck—whether of skin tone or natural talents—is morally egregious.

While many can agree that natural talents are innate and arbitrary, most people strongly believe that skills are not because they have to be developed through hard work. For many, the major reason that some are more deserving than others is that they have exerted more effort.¹⁰Close Hasn’t Mark worked hard to develop his genetic potential? Didn’t he make the hard choice day after day to painstakingly cultivate his skills? Hasn’t he put in enormous effort to get where he is? Although people frequently recognize the arbitrariness of ability when it comes to their own failings, when it comes to their successes, suddenly everyone becomes a meritocrat, proudly proclaiming personal responsibility for their achievements.

Yet such arguments are often quite disingenuous. The astronomical paychecks of the rich and famous—LeBron James, J. K. Rowling, Lionel Messi, Bill Gates, etc.—are often defended on the ground that these people work hard. But no one can seriously claim that such people work harder than many, many others who earn far less. I have no doubt that LeBron James works hard at his basketball training. But surely he works less hard than very many working-class people who are driving trucks or flipping burgers, who work not only longer hours than James but in worse conditions and at less pleasant jobs. (James’s effort, after all, consists in playing a game that he loves, for immense financial reward, as well as iconic status and celebrity.) If James had a brother who trained twice as hard as he but had no basketball talent whatsoever, would desert advocates say that the brother should get paid more? Most would not. Insofar as that is the case, they’re not genuinely advocating desert on the basis of effort, just using the rhetoric of “effort” as a veil to justify rewards on the basis of (morally arbitrary) genetic predispositions.

Nevertheless, let us take the idea of effort seriously. It is undeniably true that some individuals work harder than others. Should they therefore deserve greater rewards? Many will want to say yes. It is a widely held intuition in Western culture that everyone can choose how much effort to exert, and so those who choose to work harder are more deserving.

Yet although this intuition is common, it is wrong. The fundamental problem is that effort is not something that lies within one’s control. There is no level playing field in terms of effortability—in fact, different people have very different abilities to exert effort, and such differences are infused with luck and arbitrariness.

This is so for two reasons. First, the total amount of energy at any individual’s disposal is significantly outside their control. Some people have bodies capable of exerting tremendous amounts of physical energy, while others do not. Mark is healthy, fit, and energetic, finding it easy to work long days and requiring only a few hours of sleep. Jada, in contrast, is easily fatigued and frequently depleted by chronic pain. More generally, consider people undergoing chemotherapy or those with chronic fatigue or severe depression; they have very limited amounts of effort at their disposal—even getting out of bed in the morning might be exhausting. It would be preposterous to assume that such people have the same amount of effort at their disposal as others.

Second, one’s psychological temperament, one’s ability to choose to exert conscientious effort is also significantly outside one’s control. Some people, like Mark, are blessed with temperaments that make it easy to exert effort for long periods of time, such as enthusiasm, excitement, self-confidence, self-efficacy,¹¹Close pride in their work, self-discipline, tenacity, and the ability to focus without getting distracted or bored. Indeed, many prolific academics and other successful professionals are lucky in just this regard: they are filled with energy, enthusiasm, and self-confidence, so that their work is enjoyable and their effort often effortless.¹²Close Those who benefit from such things are frequently uncomfortable to admit it, but if they are honest with themselves it is hard to deny that possessing such personality traits is not generally planned or cultivated but is largely a matter of luck.¹³Close On the other hand, many people, like Jada, have very different attributes. Through no fault of their own they have personalities that suffer from low self-confidence, from being easily discouraged and demoralized, or from chronic pain, making every activity difficult and making it hard to concentrate for long stretches at a time. At the extreme some individuals develop “learned helplessness,” believing that they are entirely powerless to change things (Miller and Seligman 1975). All bodies and temperaments are different; there is no level playing field of effortability.

The key point is that one’s ability to put in effort—one’s “effortability” or “perseverance,” “concentration,” “discipline,” or other such characteristic—is just a different kind of skill; we might call such higher order self-improvement skills “metaskills.” Just like any other skill, metaskills originate from people’s specific developmental trajectory and unique combination of genes and social environment. Therefore, they are just as arbitrarily possessed as other skills, be they LeBron James’s ability to shoot baskets or Mozart’s ability to play the piano. Mark happens to have significant ability in terms of perseverance, whereas Jada’s skill is limited in that area. But neither of them are morally responsible for possessing those attributes—they are just differentially lucky. To say that Jada, whose perseverance skill is arbitrarily lower, deserves lower income (and therefore less ability to live a flourishing life) than Mark, who arbitrarily has great skill in this regard, is no different from saying that people who arbitrarily possess black skin deserve worse lives than those with white. There is no level playing field: we human beings differ in our abilities all the way down, including in our ability to exert effort. The seemingly progressive approach of saying “Let’s reward people according to the amount of effort they exert” actually invisibilizes, and thereby naturalizes, the arbitrary advantages of some and the disadvantages of others. In saying this I’m disagreeing with mainstream proponents of meritocracy, and also with that meritocratic strain of socialism which sees effort as a legitimate basis for differentiating people’s rewards (e.g., Albert 2003; Roemer 1998).¹⁴Close

At this point the only path left open to the advocate of desert is to insist that Mark truly does deserve more than Jada because his effortability is not, in fact, arbitrary, but is due to his own “good choices.” Mark chose to become the kind of person who has great perseverance and concentration; he exercised his autonomy; he self-cultivated and shaped, at least partially, his own personality. Jada, on the other hand, did not. She failed to shape herself into a hardworking person and therefore must take responsibility for her character flaws and resultant life failures. It is thoughts like this which lead to the common (though I think incorrect) clichés that “Winners make their own luck” and “It’s not the cards you’re dealt that matter, but how you play your hand.”

This line of thought is both empirically false and conceptually flawed. Empirically, the notion that we create our own personality and character is false or at least highly exaggerated. Does anyone really believe that Mark, as a five-year old, chose to have a personality that was obsessed with chess? The reality is that we human beings do not, generally speaking, choose our temperament, the things that give us pleasure or pain, our visceral reactions of shame and disgust, our degree of introversion or extroversion, our emotional responses to stimuli, nor a multitude of other characteristics that make each of us who we are.

Even our abilities to make “good choices” (to work hard, study diligently, reason well, avoid conflict, engage in healthy activities, etc.) are hugely variable, and arbitrarily so. The scientific evidence for this is abundant and growing stronger every day. Indeed, part of my claim here is that as scientific and psychological understanding progresses, the grounds for believing that we are in control of our personality correspondingly shrinks. To see this, let’s consider some of the psychological factors which impact all of our abilities to make so-called good choices and engage in good actions.

The empirical evidence is clear and becoming clearer every day: human beings differ markedly in their cognitive capacities. (And the source for much of the difference is arbitrary in the sense that it is due to factors beyond anyone’s control.)

Taking a step back, it should come as no surprise that autonomous capacity is not a level playing field between people. What really is autonomy or self-cultivation? It is, just like effortability or perseverance or any other metaskill, simply another kind of skill (one might call it a meta-metaskill) that some arbitrarily possess more of than others. There is no fundamental difference between the skill of making good choices to cultivate parts of oneself and the skill of playing piano. They are both just skills that some individuals are better and some are worse at. Due to all kinds of arbitrary reasons relating to his genetics and social history, Mark has more ability to “self-cultivate” than Jada. But so what? He didn’t choose to have such abilities; they were just there. Why should he be rewarded for such luck? Likewise, it’s not Jada’s fault that she has fewer skills of self-cultivation, so why should she be punished for it? To believe that everyone, deep in the recesses of their soul, has the same innate capacity—whether it’s called “autonomous choice” or “self-cultivation” or “effort exertion”—as everybody else, regardless of the specificity of their genes and particular historical trajectory, is to abandon naturalistic accounts of how human bodies and minds actually develop and is to fall into a kind of transcendental mysticism. It is apotheosis aspiration: the desire to see a flickering of the divine in the mundane (socially and historically constituted) human shell (Waller 2020).

The only way out for the desert advocate is to insist that the bedrock of one’s deservingness is one’s “autonomous choice”—that below every personality trait, there is, somehow, a pure choosing entity that willed it into being. But this is absurd. It cannot be choice all the way down. We do not choose to become choosers. As naturalistic creatures, we do not will ourselves into being. We do not (to use Nietzsche’s evocative phrase) pull ourselves “up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness” (quoted in Martinez 2016, 13). At some point—most conspicuously in the years leading up to adulthood—our vastly different abilities to engage in reflective choice, higher-order self-improvement, and even higher order self-cultivation, like every other ability, simply emerge. They develop from the normal human processes of learning and development; such abilities to think and choose are not themselves the result of choice. At bottom, the bedrock of “autonomous choice” which desert advocates require, turns out to be distributed no more evenly than any other human capability—indeed, how could it be otherwise, given that autonomy is no magic thing but simply another kind of human capacity like any other?

In sum, there is no level playing field between human beings. Human performance, in every regard and along every axis, is ultimately due to the arbitrary luck of genetics and social history that together shape one’s personality, providing different people with more or less ability to self-improve or self-cultivate.¹⁶Close

Now, none of this is to imply that individuals are unable to make choices. Most people do have (varying) capacities to reflect, deliberate, and make choices. Indeed, many people have wonderful abilities to learn new things, change their opinions, act differently, develop new sides of themselves, and become strikingly different people. I do not dispute that. What I do dispute is the notion that being “autonomous” in this everyday sense of the word makes one morally deserving.

While it’s true that most people do indeed have the capacity to reflect, make choices, and exert effort in specific directions, the key point is that they manifestly do not have anything like the  same  capacities in these regards. There is no level playing field. Some people have vastly more of these skills and mental resources than others. Moreover, people have different amounts of these skills for entirely arbitrary reasons—ultimately due to the brute luck of their genes and social history. Desert is undermined not by the absence of choice-making ability but by the absence of a level playing field. The reason why it is wrong to reward Mark so much more than Jada is not that Jada lacks autonomy, but that Mark’s possession of advanced skills of reflection (and other mental resources) and Jada’s relative lack of such skills are ultimately due to luck. Doling out rewards or punishments on the basis of luck—as the system of desert does—is inherently unfair. At the end of the day, one can value desert or value fairness, but not both.

This is a crucial point, so let me say it differently. The heart of most people’s belief in desert, I suspect, is the strong feeling that “I am autonomous! I can make choices!” and therefore “I deserve something in the light of my choices.” The problem is that this conflates autonomy and desert, which are not the same thing. Autonomy is a feature of the individual—one’s contingent abilities to reflect, deliberate, and so on. But deservingness is not about whether the individual can make choices; deservingness is about how one person performs in relation to others. Autonomy is grounded in features of the individual, whereas desert is grounded in features of the competition. So the reason that we should reject desert is because when we closely examine the competitions between people, we see that they are never truly fair: some individuals inevitably have arbitrary advantages over others. What undermines desert, therefore, is the fact that there is never a genuinely level playing field, never a truly fair competition between human beings who arbitrarily differ in their capacities all the way down. That is why it is perfectly reasonable to agree that people by and large are autonomous (though variably so), yet also insist that that fact has no bearing on their deservingness. When we reject desert we are not rejecting autonomy; we’re rejecting unfair competitions.

The bottom line is that we human beings do not choose our personalities, proclivities, or mental capacities in large part. We are largely the outcome of unchosen genetic, social, and historical forces. We are not responsible for who we are. Even our varying ability to self-cultivate and partially shape our own personality does not rescue desert, because such higher-order skills, like every other skill, are themselves determined by forces outside our control. Individuals can take no more credit for their higher-order skills than for their ability to run fast or sing well or for having white skin. Autonomous abilities are not things that everyone possesses in equal measure—they are not some innate imprint of human essence—but simply naturalistic skills like any other, which some arbitrarily possess to a greater extent than others. The system of desert is thus a system of rewarding and punishing on the basis of arbitrary luck, and is therefore inherently unfair. From a moral point of view there is no fundamental difference between inheriting a fortune from a parent, inheriting talent from one’s genes, or inheriting advantageous personality traits (like perseverance) from the complex interaction of genes and environment. To reward someone who is lucky in their possession of mental resources, and deprive another for being unlucky, is to reward the already fortunate and punish the already unfortunate. It is to reify the inevitable differences among human beings into institutional inequality.

The last point to emphasize here is that ideas of desert and meritocracy are, at root, fundamentally ableist (in the sense that they involve harming, discriminating against, or disadvantaging people due to arbitrary differences in their bodily abilities). To see this, imagine an egalitarian society with genuine equal opportunity for all: everyone has their material needs met, including adequate food, housing, and healthcare; everyone has access to high-quality schooling from daycare to university; everyone has caring teachers and safe neighborhoods, and so on. Even in such a society there would still inevitably be deep differences in people’s abilities. Humans will continue to exist in wonderfully diverse shapes, sizes, capabilities, and attributes. Some will be anxious, some energetic, some will have strong perseverance, some will have ADHD, some will be self-confident, some will be depressed, and on and on. For each and every skill imaginable, we will find that some people possess more of this skill and some less. The distribution may be that of a bell-shaped normal distribution, but in any case it will be a spectrum. And this is just as true whether we’re considering regular skills (like playing chess or singing in perfect pitch) or metaskills (like perseverance) or meta-metaskills of self-cultivation. The key point is that where a specific individual falls on this spectrum is due to luck (of genes, social environment, natural environment, etc.). Through no fault of their own, certain people will come to possess fewer physical or mental resources than others. (Perhaps one had a life partner pass away and becomes deeply depressed; perhaps someone else has a random serotonin deficiency in their brain.) Individuals with comparatively fewer physical or mental resources will tend to perform worse than others in all kinds of contests, and so desert-based theories like meritocracy will naturally conclude that they deserve less. For instance, desert advocates must hold that the way Jada’s life has turned out is her own fault, that despite her chronic pain and cerebral palsy she should have simply tried harder or made better choices. But this is precisely what makes meritocracy so noxious: it looks at those who have been disadvantaged by fortune, and instead of responding with compassion, declares it to be their own fault. By blaming the victim, the doctrine of meritocracy acts to heap disrespect onto already existing misfortune. For these reasons, desert and meritocracy are, at their core, inherently ableist. It is deeply unfair to provide some people with the economic means for a significantly better life than others due to the arbitrary luck of possessing more or less bodily ability. As disability activists have long insisted, biology (including the impacts of society and historical circumstance on biology) should not be destiny.

Of course, differences in bodily ability should, in some cases, lead to different outcomes. We wouldn’t want everyone to be licensed to perform brain surgery; obviously society benefits tremendously by allowing only certain people to do these jobs—those who have the specific skills, dexterity, etc. The key point, however, is that while only a small minority can be brain surgeons, these people, already blessed by fortune, should not be doubly blessed by society in being paid vastly more than anyone else, because their skills and talents are ultimately due to luck.¹⁷Close Many people, through no fault of their own, are not able to become brain surgeons, but they should not suffer deprivation because of that. Differences in ability should lead to different occupations, but not to differences in status or income. A meritocratic society is one in which arbitrary differences in bodily abilities lead some to be severely deprived and others to be extraordinarily rich. In contrast, a just society, I am suggesting, would be one that ensures that everyone, regardless of their bodily abilities, has secure access to the essential conditions for living a good life, and where all jobs pay roughly similar wages.

One way to frame the argument of this chapter is to use a straightforward syllogism:

The first premise is that comparative desert claims are valid only if there is a level playing field. To see this, call to mind any obvious example of when a reward or prize in a competition is clearly undeserved. For instance, a boxing match where A, a 300-pound heavyweight, defeats B, a 110-pound flyweight; or when C ends up much more successful than D because C inherited millions of dollars and lives off the accumulated interest, while D was born into deep family poverty from which they were never able to escape; or E, who ends up a rich lawyer due to inheriting family contacts which got them into Harvard, compared to F, who was unable to afford university and so ended up working a retail job for low wages. In such cases, rewards are not deserved because the playing field is not level. A, C, and E all possessed unfair advantages over B, D, and F, and it is precisely this fact—that the competition is unfair—that undermines desert; this is the crucial fulcrum around which the validity of desert turns.

Indeed, the first premise is essentially the definition of a fair competition. If there is no level playing field, then an individual’s performance will inevitably be skewed by morally arbitrary facts about the competition (in the above examples, arbitrary facts about weight, inherited capital, and educational opportunities), and so desert is rendered meaningless. The lack of a level playing field undermines desert because it is wrong for people to be rewarded for arbitrary advantages (or punished for arbitrary disadvantages).

The second premise is justified on straightforward empirical grounds: human beings are naturalistic creatures shaped by the confluence of genes and environment and so vary in every which way. There are no shared abilities—mental or physical—that all members of the species inherently possess to the exact same degree.

From these two premises the conclusion follows logically. So it is no accident that those who wish to defend moral desert tend to do so by denying one of these premises. In what follows we will look first at arguments denying P1 and then at arguments denying P2.

Probably the most common way that defenders of desert respond to the kind of argument that I have been advancing is to deny P1 and insist that people can be morally deserving even if there is no level playing field between them.

For instance, David Miller (2004) provides three arguments for why people can luckily possess very different internal abilities without that undermining their just deserts. The first is that the luck of possessing natural talents is irrelevant because talents are always interwoven with choice and effort, and so as long as choice and effort are involved, desert is valid.¹⁸Close

There are two problems with this. First, as we have already argued at length, choice and effort are themselves interwoven with luck. So Miller is wrong to simply assume that choice and effort unproblematically ground desert. Second, even assuming for the sake of argument that choice/effort really do ground desert, it is mysterious why mixing a deserving basis (choice/effort) with an arbitrary basis (natural talent) renders the final product wholly deserved. Consider a contest between X, who has immense talent but puts in little effort, and Y, who has very little talent but has put in lots of effort. Imagine that X wins the contest. Miller’s position is that X deserves the reward because at least some effort was involved. But that seems strange. Surely the fact that the outcome was determined more by arbitrary factors than nonarbitrary factors should matter. If I start life with millions of dollars of inheritance and live a life of luxurious indolence, but once a year work for 20 minutes updating my paperwork to purchase new mutual funds, then by Miller’s rationale I morally deserve all of the capital income that I accrue for the rest of my life, even if this is vastly more than my unlucky neighbors. That is hard to believe.

His second argument is that there is a significant difference between external luck and luck that is internal to the body. He gives the example of a mountain climber. If the climber fails to scale Everest because of bad external luck, such as poor weather or a broken rope, they deserve to have their achievement commemorated. However, if they fail to reach the top because of bad internal luck, such as being “physically weaker,” then they do not (Miller 2004, 194). However, this too is a weak argument. Why should the source of the luck matter? Whether it is inside or outside the body, it is still arbitrarily impacting one’s performance compared with that of other people. It seems bizarre and arbitrary to say that if a rope breaks randomly that really is bad luck, but if your genes are such that on the day you were climbing your body suddenly develops asthma, making the climb impossible, that is not bad luck; it’s just your fault. Miller seems to be assuming that whatever happens within a body is irrelevant for desert. But that is simply wrong. As we have seen, much of what goes on under our skin and inside our skull is beyond our control or responsibility yet deeply impacts our performance. True, internal bodily luck is often more subtle and harder to see than large external things like ropes breaking or lightning flashing, but it is just as real, and just as consequential all the same.¹⁹Close What really matters is not whether luck is internal or external but whether or not it arbitrarily advantages some over others.

Miller’s (2004, 193) final argument is that we shouldn’t try to disentangle arbitrary luck from performance, because this would “sabotage the whole notion of desert.” He points out that if we start allowing into our consideration all of the deeper kinds of luck that we have been discussing in this chapter (e.g., the ways that luck leads to differing levels of effortability, perseverance, self-improvement skills, etc.), then “desert shrinks to within a tiny fraction of its normal range” (195). If we nullify desert every time that luck is involved, this would mean that we can no longer talk as we conventionally do about athletes deserving medals, workers deserving wages, etc.—and that, he thinks, would be a disaster. “If we decide that we want to keep the concept in a form that captures most of the desert judgments people actually make, then we cannot hope to find a basis for desert that is untouched by contingency” (195).

Now it is true that my antidesert argument is radical, but it is not outlandish. Even if society were to cease making any claims of moral desert, it would still be possible to have all kinds of institutional entitlements (Olsaretti 2003). Athletes could still be entitled to gold medals; workers could be entitled to periodic raises. Likewise, society could still create all kinds of systems and institutions to incentivize (or disincentivize) various types of behavior, justified on consequentialist grounds. Hence there could still be income differentials to encourage work effort, and even prisons to discourage crime (though hopefully this would be minimized, as we discuss below). That said, a world without moral desert would indeed be significantly different from (and, I believe, significantly improved over) our current world. In particular, wealth and income differences would be very much more compressed. Income differences of 5:1 or even 10:1 may be practically necessary for the smooth functioning of a market system, but the current 351:1 differences existing between the average CEO and worker would be abolished (Mishel and Kandra 2021). Hence a society that abandons distributive desert would be much more equal, providing material resources to people on the grounds of what they need to live good, flourishing lives, as opposed to what they deserve.

The final response to Miller is to point out that radicalness in itself is hardly evidence of being wrong. Miller’s belief that we should hold on to conventional notions of desert simply because it complies with popular opinion is deeply conservative. The job of philosophy is to critically examine cultural beliefs, not defend them on the grounds that they’re popular. Miller is right to recognize that taking luck (and the idea of a level playing field) seriously does indeed sabotage desert. But the right response is not to dig in our heels and pretend that unfairness doesn’t matter for social life; the right response is to admit that if indeed conventional notions of desert are intrinsically unfair, then so much the worse for desert.

Another common objection to P1 is to point to the example of sports. Daniel Dennett (2015) points out that in sports certain players are going to be slightly better than others, due ultimately to luck. Nevertheless, that doesn’t negate our belief (he says) that the winning player rightfully deserves their victory (104–105).

I agree that there is no problem with saying that Usain Bolt “deserves” the gold medal for winning the 100-meter dash, as long as that is just an informal, colloquial way of saying that he is entitled to the medal. The competition in question has a set of rules, and the rules dictate that whoever wins is entitled to a gold medal. There’s no problem with that because sports are about fun and entertainment, and there’s no harm in having prizes of this sort.

However, matters are entirely different as soon as we shift from thinking about games to thinking about matters of real moral urgency. Imagine if a society, call it the society of True Merit, is constructed so that from the ages of 18 to 21 every individual is forced to compete in a number of tests in order to determine their place in society’s hierarchy for the rest of their lives. We can even imagine very high levels of equal opportunity up to the point of competition. One of the tests is the 100-meter dash. Unsurprisingly, some people do very well (those who have strong bodies and a love of training), while others do poorly (especially those who have bodily impairments that make it hard to run, and depression making it hard to train). In the society of True Merit winners are celebrated and guaranteed high levels of income, excellent healthcare, educational opportunities, and so on, while the losers are publicly humiliated and systematically denied housing, healthcare, good jobs, and opportunities of all kind; they are forcibly segregated into poor, dirty shantytowns at the margins of the cities and compelled to carry a passport proclaiming their inferior status. Now surely Dennett would not say that the barbaric results of this kind of sporting competition are morally deserved.

In such a circumstance we have clearly moved far away from the terrain of inconsequential entertainment to the terrain of deadly serious matters of social justice. And as soon as we are talking about real issues of social concern, then we absolutely should reject any talk of desert. We should insist that just because the competition is formally fair (in that all competitors start at the same point), there is no substantive fairness in this apartheid society because there neither is, nor ever could be, a genuine level playing field between people’s running abilities.

Some naturally suffer from muscular dystrophy, while others, such as virtuoso sprinters, luckily possess ACTN3 “sprinting genes,” amazing fast-twitch leg muscles, and obsessive personalities which allow them to train all day long, every day, as well as myriad other unchosen factors that contribute to their ability. Such luck nullifies their claim to distributive superiority. Allowing luck to play a significant role in determining who gets prizes in sports competitions is no big deal because unfairness doesn’t really matter in such cases. (The purpose, after all, is not fairness or justice, but fun and games.) But sports is not life. The appropriate metric of social and economic life is not entertainment, but fairness, which is why Dennett’s analogy is unpersuasive.

The bottom line is that positions which reject P1 boil down to saying that luck-based differences are legitimate grounds for differential rewards. But it is just wrong, and inherently unfair, to reward or punish people for arbitrary reasons. Allowing major life chances to be determined by arbitrary luck is, at the end of the day, the morality of feudalism.

Perhaps the most sophisticated objection to my critique of deservingness comes from John Roemer (1993, 1998, 2003). His position is complex, but the essential points are as follows. Although individuals do differ in the total amount of effort that they possess, as autonomous adults they nevertheless all share the capacity to exert more or less effort. In other words, he thinks that everyone has complete control over the degree of effort they exert. Hence Roemer is implicitly denying P2; he believes that there is a true level playing field between all human beings: the ability to control the degree of effort that they exert. One useful metaphor for this idea comes from David Alm (2011), who invites us to think of our effort as a fuel tank; although individuals possess different sizes of tank, we nevertheless all have the same autonomous ability (supposedly) to choose to use, say, a quarter, half, or all of our tank. Along these lines, Roemer tells us to conceive of effort not in absolute terms (which are out of our control and therefore unsuitable for desert), but in proportional terms (which he believes are within our control, and are therefore a suitable basis for desert).

This is an ingenious attempt to ground desert claims. However, it is not successful. The problem is that individuals are not in fact in control of the degree of effort that they exert. This is a sleight of hand; since it is true that all individuals can exert more or less effort, it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that we all do so with equal autonomy. But that is false. The decision to exert some, most, or all of one’s energy is itself a decision that will be largely influenced by one’s individual personality—one’s proclivities, desires, pain thresholds, temperament, etc. Does Roemer really believe that someone who is clinically depressed can “autonomously choose” to exert the exact same degree of effort as a healthy and happy person? That would be absurd. The truth is that different people have, contra Roemer, very different abilities to exert not just a total amount of effort but a degree of effort too. (It’s a sleight of hand because Roemer plasters over the different abilities to exert degrees of effort that different individuals possess by simply labeling all such abilities, great or small, as the same mystical thing: “autonomy.”)

If it were true that everyone, universally, shared the same ability to autonomously choose their degree of effort, then it would follow that everyone would be able to exert, say, 10% of their total effort one hour, and then 20% of their remaining effort for the second hour, then 30% of their remaining effort for the third hour, and so on, in this careful, disciplined, meticulous way. But that is clearly not equally possible for everyone. Being able to choose the precise degree of effort that one exerts on a particular activity, or for a particular amount of time, is itself a kind of skill that different people will possess to different degrees. This shows that even the “propensity to exert degrees of effort” is not a transcendental faculty that all humans magically possess but is simply a human character trait, which, like every other, some possess more than others due to luck, and therefore cannot serve as a basis for moral desert.

We can see the problem by reexamining Alm’s metaphor of the fuel tank. Alm (and Roemer) conceive of autonomy as the supposedly universal ability of each of us to use more or less of our “fuel tank.” But this raises the question, Who is driving the car?! Actual (empirically variable) human beings, or transcendent god-like beings? The purpose of the gas tank metaphor is to give a naturalistic account of our empirically differing capacities. But if everyone, universally, regardless of their individual personality, genes, or upbringing, is somehow equally capable of pushing the accelerator/brake of the car to the exact same degree as everyone else (as the metaphor implies), this brings a ghost into the machine through the back door.²⁰Close

The bottom line is that Roemer cannot escape the fundamental fact that effort-exerting abilities, like every other ability, differ arbitrarily between people. Therefore, rewarding or punishing someone due to their “propensity to exert effort” is still to reward or punish them for arbitrary features like inheriting a family fortune or white skin.

In sum, we have seen that there are two main avenues open to those who wish to uphold moral desert. The first is to deny that a level playing field between people is necessary; people can be deserving even if they are luckily advantaged over others. But that is to simply shrug and admit that unfairness is okay. It allows luck and arbitrariness to play a determining role in how people’s lives are allowed to go. Such a cavalier attitude may be appropriate in certain domains (such as sport), but it is unacceptable for matters of grave importance like income or access to pensions or quality child care. Such a position retains the feudal belief that an arbitrary fluke—such as the characteristics of birth, class, gender (and, I would add, bodily talent and effortability)—is a legitimate basis for determining one’s life prospects. The second approach is to deny P2 and insist that there really is a level playing field, such as a supposedly universal capacity to exert effort. But this is just empirically false and risks falling into a kind of religious mysticism. In other words, the defender of desert faces a fork in the road: one path leads to feudalist morality, the other to mysticism. Both avenues for defending desert are dead ends.

One concern with desert skepticism is whether it will demotivate people and lead to generalized apathy. One may ask, If I am just the product of my genes and environment, why should I bother trying to improve at anything?

The answer is that just because each of us is the product of our environment does not at all mean that we cannot learn, develop, and grow. Of course, some of us will be able to learn and change more than others (through no fault of our own), but none of us can ever know in advance what we’re capable of. Practically all human beings have at least some capacity to learn and develop; indeed, most brains and personalities have impressive amounts of plasticity and openness to change (Barker 2015; Doidge 2010), and furthermore, everyone is slowly being changed (whether they want to be or not) by their changing environment and social milieu. The crucial point is this: because the extent to which we can change is never known in advance, all one can ever do is try. As long as they are alive no person is entirely fixed or frozen. There are always new circumstances and new environments which may provide new possibilities for change and growth. Again, since no one can know in advance what they are capable of in each new circumstance, there is no reason not to try.

Another important objection is that of criminal responsibility. Are we no longer able to blame and punish a criminal for, say, stealing or committing physical assault? Are they no longer responsible for their choices?

The problem with the notion of criminal responsibility is the same as with economic desert: it’s inherently and inextricably unfair (Waller 2018). Although the legal system is based on a naïve binary threshold, whereby everyone who is neither a child nor insane is perceived as having the same amount of full legal responsibility, in fact real human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and the ability to make ethical decisions and follow the law, like any other human capability, exists on a spectrum, coming in vastly differing amounts, which different people possess arbitrarily. Some are mentally ill. Some find it very difficult to contain their anger. Some are less able to reason through the consequences of their actions. Some have been socialized into violence and rely on it habitually. Some have faced years of sexual or racial trauma that builds up to the point where it is liable to explode at the latest microaggression, and on and on. (Not to mention the most important source of crime, which is the vast deprivation of respect and resources and opportunities that some people routinely face.) If we simply shrug our shoulders and continue to punish heterogeneous people according to a homogeneous standard, we will be punishing them for things that are out of their control. (We might as well punish people for the color of their eyes or their sexual preferences.)

This is not to say that we should do nothing when crime occurs—far from it. In fact I think that we should do much more than we currently do. The point is that we should dramatically change our focus and respond to crime very differently. Instead of punishing people because it’s what criminals “deserve,” the overriding aim of the judicial system should be to restore and repair the community from harm (as well as to transform the conditions that cause crime in the first place, including, importantly, material deprivation and social inequality). If jails have to be used at all, they should be aimed at deterrence, quarantining dangerous people, and rehabilitation, and hence should be as infrequently used and as nonpunitive as possible. (Norway’s humane Halden prison, with its focus on reintegrating people into society through education, job training, and therapy—including access to nature, good food, and ceramics workshops—is an instructive example [Benko 2015].)²¹Close

The final objection to consider is the worry that my line of argument, which denies that all people have the same inherent capacity for autonomy, leads to problematic consequences in implying that not everyone has equal moral worth or dignity. If people have different levels of autonomy, doesn’t this mean that people must have different degrees of dignity—and doesn’t that then undermine much of the basis of democratic citizenship and human rights?

This conclusion follows only if moral equality depends on everyone possessing equal autonomy—but that is a problematic move. Of course, determining the ethical basis of human equality is an old and difficult question. The liberal tradition has tended to answer “autonomy” (or related ideas of “reason” or “will power”). But if autonomy is to ground human equality, it must be presupposed that all humans possess autonomy in equal measure. So in an honorable attempt to establish a foundation for human equality, the liberal tradition has been forced to defend a factual absurdity: that all actually existing human beings have the exact same capacity for choice and reflection—which is obviously false.

It is far more reasonable to presume that people have differing levels of autonomy, just as they differ in terms of every other human capacity. (How could it be otherwise for real, nonmythological, empirical beings?) But given differing levels of autonomy, how can we hold on to the notion that all human beings are of equal moral worth? There is no insurmountable problem here because there are other ways to buttress a belief in equal moral worth. One approach is to simply insist that equal moral worth is a nonnegotiable starting premise. It is a basic axiom of morality and so doesn’t require any further justification.

My preferred approach is to recognize that equal moral worth flows from the fact that all human beings share the same fundamental ontological and cosmological conditions: those of finitude and uniqueness. Each of us lives a short and finite existence. Given the extremely improbable conditions that must occur in the universe in order to sustain life in the first place, we are all incalculably lucky to have been born at all. We live on this ball of spinning rock in a remote corner of the Milky Way; we briefly experience consciousness—with the possibility of loving, creating, exploring, understanding, struggling, and enjoying—before our awareness is extinguished forever. Death is, as far as we know, a 100% certainty and is absolute, irrevocable, permanent, and forever; our bodies will all too soon die and rot. Each of us, therefore, has only this one momentary, fleeting chance at life. Yet not only do we all share this same fundamental finitude, but each of us is also wonderfully unique. Though we are all deeply shaped by circumstance, all forged in the caldron of social life, each and every individual emerges perfectly unique. No two individuals will ever share the same precise complex combination of genes and social environment; each of us is a unique swirl of fortune enfleshed. Each individual possesses a unique life that has never been lived by anyone before and never will be again. It is these facts of equal finitude and equal uniqueness which together constitute the moral fact that each and every human being is equally precious, or, if you prefer, of equal moral worth. It is this notion of equal moral worth that is the moral basis for insisting that each of us should be entitled to equally good lives (as much as possible); likewise, this is the basis for condemning as wrong the fact that some live significantly worse lives than others.

Few have described as powerfully as Bertrand Russell (1923, 22–26, emphasis added) this fundamental equality of the human condition:

We see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour . . . [u]nited with his fellow-men [sic] by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom. . . . One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need.

We have now reached the pinnacle of the ethical argument of this book. The ultimate and fundamental reason why economic inequality is wrong is that human beings are of equal moral worth and therefore should be equally entitled to access the material conditions necessary for living a good or flourishing life. An equivalent way of saying this is that we should abandon entirely the idea that some individuals deserve to possess significantly better or worse material conditions for their lives than others due to their contributions, even those stemming from skill or effort, because the ability to contribute is dependent on the arbitrary luck of genes and circumstance. The resources and opportunities that people receive in life should not be based on (morally arbitrary) empirical facts about what each of us is able to do, but on the moral fact of who each of us is: an equal member of the human family, precious and unique.

The conclusion is that equality should be the default position of social and economic affairs. That said, for a number of important practical reasons, complete equality is neither feasible nor desirable. Let us see why.

The central example of Mark and Jada is designed to highlight one crucial point: income differences are not morally deserved. Yet even if you accept this example, you may well wonder what such ethical arguments imply in the real world. In this final section I attempt to illuminate this by asking the question—really the central question that all egalitarians must answer—of what kinds of inequality are legitimate and what kinds are not.

The central thrust of this chapter has been that since people’s talents, skills, and efforts are arbitrary from a moral point of view, their economic rewards should be largely equalized. All people, regardless of their skill or effort, should be guaranteed the essential goods necessary to live a good and flourishing life. I call this position Good Life Egalitarianism (Malleson 2022).

What are these essential goods? That is a very difficult question, based as it is on one’s perspective of what constitutes good and valuable human lives. Here I will only suggest (but not defend) the proposal that we should recognize two main categories of essential goods. First, everyone should be assured good opportunity rights, that is, the means to self-determine, so that they can live the life that they autonomously value. The essential prerequisites for this include physical security, civil rights, education, economic security, and free time. The level at which these things can be provided will depend on the context, but in the rich countries of the Global North, they should include, above and beyond the standard package of liberal rights, universal healthcare, access to free (or heavily subsidized) postsecondary education, income security (such as through a Basic Income and extensive public services such as affordable housing, public transit, universal child care, and pensions), and rights to quality part-time work, all of which must be accessible to neurodivergent and differently abled bodies. Second, everyone should be assured good relationship rights, that is, the goods necessary for ensuring egalitarian social relationships (so that workplaces, families, and the state treat their members with equal respect, equal status, and, where appropriate, equal democratic rights).²²Close

The heart of Good Life Egalitarianism, in other words, is that because people’s capabilities are fundamentally arbitrary, what people receive should be based primarily not on what they as individuals do or deserve but on what they need. Providing the essential goods on the basis of need is thus a central pillar of distributive justice.

However, even though the moral aim is equality, practically speaking, complete equality is neither feasible nor appropriate. There are two reasons for this.

First, on straightforward consequentialist grounds, having some inequality is likely necessary to provide basic incentives. If everyone were guaranteed the same exact income regardless of whether they worked 40 hours per week or none, clearly most people would cease working. (Most jobs, after all, contain a substantial amount of drudgery.) Indeed, it seems likely that no realistic society could have completely equal income; there must also be monetary incentives to encourage people to expend effort on their work.²³Close Moreover, allowing some wage inequality can be useful to motivate people to seek work in areas of high demand, to work longer hours, and to upgrade their skills; allowing higher wages for such jobs can produce numerous positive benefits for society as a whole.

That said, although the scale of inequalities between people should not be totally extinguished, they can and should be significantly compressed. In the case of income, the market clearly requires some inequality to function. But it absolutely does not require the huge 351:1 pay differentials currently existing between American CEOs and their workers (Mishel and Kandra 2021). The goal should be to compress these differences as far as is possible without suffering too great losses in efficiency or productivity.

Similarly, there are good practical reasons for allowing some inequalities in terms of positions and offices. Basing job applications, promotions, grades, and so forth, on the possession of relevant skills and aptitudes is obviously socially sensible (as long as there is a baseline of robust equal opportunity). The important point to remember, however, is that the rewards that people acquire for holding such positions should be thought of as entitlements, not moral deserts. Their justification is that of social usefulness, not inherent rightness—indeed, they are not deserved. Therefore, differences in employment positions should not lead to marked differences in social status or life prospects. It is legitimate to prevent a person working as a janitor from performing brain surgery, but it is wrong for the janitor to be treated as inferior to the surgeon or denied the same essential goods to live a good and flourishing life or paid significantly less.²⁴Close

Second, it makes good sense to allow inequalities in nonessential goods so as to provide ample scope for individual preference and choice. For example, if X prefers to work more hours so as to go on expensive vacations, whereas Y prefers to work less and have more leisure at home, Y cannot complain that they deserve compensation for ending up less rich.²⁵Close As long as both are equally guaranteed robust economic security, no serious “inequality” results from individuals choosing to work different amounts or from spending their disposable income in different ways. Likewise, if Z chooses to live an ascetic life in a monastery, their relative poverty is not something that society need mitigate (as long as Z always has secure access to a Basic Income, jobs, housing, and educational opportunities should they desire them in the future). As long as these preferences are playing out in the realm of nonessential goods, we need not be overly worried about the differences that accrue.

Likewise, it is fine for there to be a range of noneconomic inequalities between people (as long as they too are inessential for a good life). For example, in any society people will differ in terms of their level of attractiveness, the amount of love they possess, the amount of charm, their height, etc. Such differences are ultimately derived from luck, and so, strictly speaking, are ethically undeserved. But should we care? The answer depends on two things. On the one hand, are such goods “essential” to individuals living a good and flourishing life? And on the other, would equalization impose such severe harms on people that the harms would dramatically outweigh the benefits of equalization? (It should go without saying that even though equality is a fundamental good, it is not the only thing we should care about.) For instance, any polity that tried to level the amount of attractiveness of its citizens through forced body modification would clearly be terrifying and tyrannical. While there is very little harm done to millionaires by forcing them to pay higher taxes (since they would still possess all the essential freedoms necessary to live good and flourishing lives), the harms of forced bodily modification would be horrific indeed (see Chapter 6).²⁶Close

With these two caveats in mind, we can now formulate the practical ideal of an egalitarian society. This would be one which guarantees to all the entitlements necessary to live a good and flourishing life; there would be a general expectation for all able-bodied adults to reciprocate by working at least part time;²⁷Close and annual market income should be highly compressed.

The society we are describing might be envisioned as a kind of democratic socialist society, where everyone is guaranteed the essential goods necessary to lead a flourishing life: hence there are extensive public services, a Basic Income, widespread workplace democracy, with typical employment being that of flexible, quality part-time work of, say, 15–30 hours per week. Annual wages are significantly compressed between people, and everyone is free to choose (within standard parameters) the number of hours they prefer to work. This could occur by implementing steeply progressive income taxes or by introducing maximal allowable pay ratios between the lowest and highest paid, so that, for instance, the highest paid are allowed to earn only 10 or 20 times the minimum wage, as well as introducing a general right of workers to adjust their hours. Substantial differences in the accumulation of wealth over the life course should be mitigated by a wealth tax, and inheritance taxes should be used to prevent parents from passing on significant advantages to their children. (Recall the upshot of the notion of the understructure from Chapter 4: the social inheritance provided by the understructure should be shared equally by all.) The details of such a vision are well beyond the scope of this book, but the important point here is that Good Life Egalitarianism envisions a robust social minimum, accessible to everyone—not merely a meager safety net, but a much more significant guarantee of the conditions for a comfortable, relatively affluent, flourishing life for all.

Though ambitious, I do not claim that this would be a perfectly just distributive system. As a market system it would still arbitrarily reward those with above-average talents and skills.²⁸Close It would also arbitrarily benefit those with above-average effortability (those who are lucky to possess large “fuel tanks,” energetic bodies, and enthusiastic dispositions). Nevertheless, such a system would be highly attractive. Most important, it would be far less arbitrary and unfair, with far smaller inequalities. We saw that in conventional market systems, Mark earns over 100 times more than Jada, due (among other things) to his immense natural talents and effortability. But in the system discussed here, their incomes would be much more equal. Such a society would be basically an egalitarian one, where the floor of guaranteed goods is high, and the ceiling of top incomes is significantly lowered. The default distributive position would be that of equality, and the dominant ethos would be provision according to need (not desert). If such a system were to be created, it would successfully expunge the greater part of arbitrariness, ableism, and inherent unfairness that plagues contemporary market systems. Yet such a system would retain the most desirable features of market systems. In particular, it would retain a sensible incentive structure to foster efficient production (encouraging people to work hard and develop their skills), as well as allowing wide scope for the expression of personal preferences. (People would be free to work as much or as little as they want in whatever line of work they desire and are able to find employment.)

Let us wrap up by taking note of a few illustrative contrasts between Good Life Egalitarianism and the now dominant theories of egalitarianism. Consider all of those who, for whatever reason, suffer a difficult period in their lives. Maya “chooses” to drop out of university due to depression. Luke, suffering from the trauma of residential schools and racial stigma, “chooses” to seek solace in drugs and alcohol, eventually ending up on the street unable to pay their rent. The logic of luck egalitarianism²⁹Close (though I suspect not the heart of many of the humane, really existing luck egalitarians) is to simply say “Too bad; you made your bed; you must lie in it.” Relational egalitarianism³⁰Close does somewhat better, but perhaps not much. The logic of this position is that such circumstances are only a problem—and support should only be offered—to the extent that such people risk disrespect and domination. Do they? Perhaps, but perhaps not. For instance, what Anderson (2007) says about education makes it seem that her version of relational egalitarianism would offer little support to Maya. And what Anderson (1999, 325) says elsewhere about poverty implies that as long as Luke can acquire “basic capabilities” and is not a “peon,” then no additional support is required. There are also cases, such as Jamila’s suffering a bodily impairment and being forced to quit her job, where relational egalitarianism appears even more cold-hearted than luck egalitarianism, as it is unattuned to misfortune, and so would seem to allow Jamila to live a life that is significantly worse off than her luckier colleagues as long as she is not disrespected or dominated.

By contrast, Good Life Egalitarianism performs significantly better. In guaranteeing such people perpetual access to the essential goods, regardless of their past “bad choices,” it insists that such choices should not define their future lives. It is thereby a theory of considerable warmth and compassion, even, if it is not too much to say, of structural love. All desert-based theories, be they luck egalitarian or neoliberal, tend to be moralistic and harsh, admonishing people for making mistakes and implying that their situation is their own fault. That is no accident; such moralism flows directly from the very DNA of a desert-based philosophy; indeed, it is the very point. The antidote to such moralism is compassion and loving kindness, since the primary impulse of compassion is its nonconditionality, its unconditional warmth, its desire to focus not on a person’s faults but on their humanity, emphasizing the flickering, all too brief existence of a human life and the overwhelming need for it to be as good as possible.

Good Life Egalitarianism is thus motivated at the deepest level by two primary impulses: an emotive sense of love and compassion (driven by the recognition that so many people today live lives of pain, suffering, and deprivation even though their finitude and uniqueness make them precious) with an analytical skepticism of desert (that such suffering could be attributed to their own fault or responsibility). These two impulses merge in the desire for a robust safety net, which says to all, “We have your back. If and when you fall in life, it’s okay, we will support you.” Like loving parents to their children, Good Life Egalitarianism says to its residents, “No matter what choices you make in your life, no matter what accidents or misfortunes befall you, you will be (nonpaternalistically) cared for and supported because your life is precious. Even if we dislike your choices, indeed, even if, in extremis, we must occasionally restrain your choices to prevent harm to others, you will still never be abandoned to the winds of fortune.”

To update the old Leveler slogan, Good Life Egalitarianism might say, “We believe that even the most wayward they have as much a life to live, as the greatest they.”³¹Close

If there were a more level playing field in society, would individuals then deserve the income that accrues as a result of their skills and efforts? I have argued no. Individuals cannot be said to morally deserve their income, because their talents and efforts and self-improvement abilities are all ultimately skills which some arbitrarily possess more than others due to luck. Since real, empirically variable human beings differ all the way down, the playing field can never be level, and the competition never truly fair. Disadvantaging people on the basis of arbitrary facts about their body and mind, as meritocracy does, is inherently ableist. We should, therefore, be highly skeptical of the twin notions of desert and meritocracy. Those who explicitly defend desert, merit, or personal responsibility are implicitly defending unfair advantage and sanctifying biocultural privilege.

Society should aim to distribute income and wealth not on the basis of what people “deserve” but equally (or on the basis of need). We should aim not for absolute equality of income but for a highly compressed income scale with robust guarantees for everyone to access the social and material conditions necessary for good and flourishing lives.

I grant that these are radical claims which conflict with many people’s deep-seated intuitions, and so I clearly cannot hope to convince everyone. Nevertheless, even if the reader rejects my wholesale attack on deservingness, I hope that they will at least be persuaded that the everyday claims about what people “deserve” must be much more modest than is generally the case. The more that society downplays the role of fortune in individual abilities, or overestimates the degree to which the playing field is truly level, the more that unfairness will reign.