The Geometry of Desert

Desert claims are common enough in our moral and political discourse. But do people really deserve things? If so, what do they deserve, and in virtue of what? Is desert part of the right or the good, a primarily normative or evaluative concept? How strong a consideration is desert in determining who should have what? Should our political institutions (which to a large extent determine who gets what) pay any attention to desert?Before I read this book, these were the questions that I assumed that any book on moral desert would have to tackle. Yet Shelly Kagan sweeps these central questions aside through a mixture of stipulation, tacit and explicit assumption, neutrality, and neglect. Kagan puts these more familiar questions to one side in order to expose and explore some less familiar ones. And exploration really is the right term here. Kagan sets out, above all, to identify underinvestigated questions about moral desert and to map the potential positions we might take on them. He is happy to inform us of his beliefs, hunches, intuitions, and uncertainties, and occasionally to argue for this position over that, but above all he wants to lay before us puzzles about the nature of desert and the range of positions we might take on them. This makes reading the book an enjoyable but unusual experience—less sustained argument, more a guided tour of unexplored terrain. And Kagan is an excellent guide: the issues, puzzles, and potential solutions are laid out with the analytical clarity, and explored with the insight, rigor, and inventiveness, that anyone familiar with his work would expect. The experience is unusual because philosophers tend to traffic in arguments, and here we have a book that is, in general, not trying to convince you to think something in particular but rather is constantly asking you what you think.Many of the issues that Kagan tackles concern the (dis)value of people not getting what they deserve. In explaining the puzzles and the possible positions, Kagan makes extensive use of “desert graphs.” In many of these graphs, the x axis represents well-being, while the y axis represents goodness from the point of view of desert (to be contrasted with goodness all things considered). A person's desert can then be plotted on this graph, with the “peak” being the level of well-being he or she actually deserves, with lines sloping away on either side, representing the drop off in value when he or she gets more or less than he or she deserves. Kagan claims that, in part, the book is intended as “an extended argument for the value of this graphic approach” (xiv). I am inclined to view the book as a qualified success on this front. It is a success because the graphs do indeed depict issues or positions in a way that makes them immediately clear and easily grasped: you can literally see the question or issue, or how this position differs from that one, and Kagan comes up with a wonderful array of evocative and intuitive terminology inspired by the graphs to help you keep track of the different issues and positions (“desert mountains,” “peaks,” “eastern slopes,” “skylines,” “sea level,” “bell motion”). Indeed, the qualification is that the graphs are so successful in this regard that Kagan could have made this (very long) book quite a bit shorter—for he often also describes the graphs, and the positions they depict, in great detail. Yet, for me at least, the graphs rendered much of this explanation unnecessary.One danger of using these graphs is that they work only insofar as desert is a phenomenon that lends itself to being understood in terms of only two variables. Restricting ourselves to using two-dimensional graphs to depict issues may not only restrict the possibilities that we can depict but also those that we are able to imagine. Once we start thinking of desert simply as a matter of how much we deserve (x axis) and how good it is if we get it (y axis), we potentially close ourselves off to other ways of thinking about desert.1For example, Kagan's graphs make vivid a distinction between two desert comparisons that we can make between two persons. There are in fact two ways in which one may be “more deserving” than another. One is that person A deserves more well-being than person B (that is, A should be placed further along the x axis). The other is that person A's getting what she deserves is better (from the point of view of desert) than person B's getting what she deserves (that is, A should be placed higher up on the y axis). But while Kagan's graphs help us to appreciate the distinction between these two comparisons, they seem to lock us into thinking of these two questions as related: most of Kagan's discussion simply presupposes that if it turns out that there is variance in the goodness of people getting what they deserve, this must be because they deserve different amounts of well-being. In other words, any variance between persons on the y axis must track variance on the x axis. Although Kagan eventually acknowledges this assumption, which has silently underpinned much of the first half of the book (332–34), his discussion of the alternatives is brief and only envisages “disaggregated” virtue and vice as providing any competing basis for how much we deserve or how good it would be for us to get it.Another assumption that is not flagged at the beginning of the book but that underpins the entire discussion is the way in which Kagan conceives of desert as first and foremost a noncomparative concept. This is interesting, because the basic intuitions that the book takes as its launching pad and lodestar (see 627) are that “some people deserve more than others. And...it is a good thing if people get what they deserve” (xii). Note that the first thought is an avowedly comparative one. Yet Kagan then proceeds to discuss desert in noncomparative terms for the first two parts of the book. That is, he imagines throughout the book that there is some truth concerning precisely how much well-being you deserve that is wholly independent of what anyone else has and, indeed, that would hold in a one-person world. Of course, such an approach is consistent with the thought that some deserve more than others, but it doesn't seem to do the same justice to the basic comparative intuition as the alternative understanding in which desert is understood to be foundationally comparative, such that the truth about what I deserve is dependent on what you have. Kagan later turns his attention to comparative desert, but comparative desert is analyzed in terms of the (logically prior) concept of noncomparative desert, and so, as Kagan acknowledges (391), that discussion will not satisfy anyone who, while gripped by Kagan's opening intuitions, denies that there is any sense to be made of desert in a one-person world.Which position to take on a given issue is, in general, left to our own intuitions, and Kagan apparently relies on us having relatively stable and accessible intuitions not about what we should do, or about which state of affairs is better than another, but about which state of affairs is better than another from the perspective of desert. Indeed, later in the book, we are required to further separate our intuitions into those about noncomparative and comparative desert, something that Kagan himself appears to struggle to do (497–500). Of course, such problems are familiar to pluralists wanting to make claims about individual values, and this is why they usually try to design cases that isolate the issue or value we are interested in by leaving all else equal, as well as provoking a strong intuitive response. Yet (perhaps because convincing us of particular views is not his primary aim) Kagan does very little of this sort of work—he does not present carefully constructed cases to help us isolate the particular issues; he just presumes that people have reasonably robust and reliable “pure desert” intuitions that will make themselves known on being presented with the general issue (635–40).The Geometry of Desert is an inventive, intelligent, and exciting book. For those who do not buy Kagan's explicit and implicit assumptions, the book remains an impressive tour de force, but it will no doubt seem like one of Tolkien's maps: a painstakingly detailed plan of a fictional world. For those that do, however, it contains many interesting puzzles, a wealth of different positions one might take on them, and some guidance on what might be said for a variety of those views. One's understanding of desert cannot but be deepened by engagement with this book

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