Negating Positive Desert Claims

Bibliographic Data

ID6350289
AuthorsRobert E Goodin (0000-0002-1704-5817, University of Essex, corresponding author)
Year1985
Volume13
Issue4
Pages575-598
Publication date1985-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591785013004005
OpenAlexW1987947586
LanguageEN
Citations received17

L. AUSTIN'S famous paper on Ifs and Cans opens with the immortal question, Are cans constitutionally iffy?' By that, he means to query whether every statement about what someone can do must, analytically, contain implicitly within it certain if' clauses (if one wants to, if one really tries, if the gods are willing, etc.). If so, then a large part of what we really mean by saying that someone can do something lies in unpacking these suppressed if' clauses. Here I want to raise an analogous question about the notion of personal deserts. To embody my thesis in a similarly catchy maxim, I shall be claiming that deserts are constitutionally wouldy. Or, to unpack that phrase, when we say x deserves we are really saying x would receive y in the course of events. Or, to unpack it further still, x would receive y, in the absence of certain interventions z. The message of this article is that, just as we must excavate the ifs to get at the cans, so too must we focus clearly on the untoward intervening factors upsetting the normal course of events in order to fix our notion of personal desert. The upshot of my argument will be that that notion is essentially negative in character. The core notion is not that of the deserved but rather that of the undeserved, of those intervening factors upsetting the normal course of events.2 In Austin's phrase, undeserved wears the trousers. To show that this is so, simply recall that desert is an inherently moralized notion: To be a notion of desert at all, it must imply that

Desert (philosophy · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Free Will and Agency · Law · Legal principles and applications · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy

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