That's a fine way to think about desert, but then you still have to answer the question of 'given the world we have, with limited resources and where specific people use those resources to create wealth, who should get which resources?'
(You could then use the term 'moral claim' rather than 'desert' to denote the answer to that question.)
I don't think I have ever encountered a single author or politician who accepted the deontological argument against redistributive taxation without also opposing said taxation on utilitarian grounds. In other words, virtually nobody believes both:
a) the most efficient and reliable method of improving society (reducing poverty and crime, increasing happiness, etc.) in the long term involves a significant amount of redistributive taxation,
b) but we still shouldn't do it because it's inherently immoral.
I think that most conservatives and libertarians, if they woke up in a universe where social democracy worked just as well as intended, would become social democrats pretty much immediately. They would not walk among the friendly residents of the shining streets of Bernie City while lamenting the horrific moral cost (high taxes on the rich) that was required to build that society; they would just change their minds on just deserts and property rights.
(and vice versa for leftists waking up in a right-libertarian utopia)
If this is true, then we should have just been arguing about the utilitarian thing the whole time.
This sometimes makes me think whether moral philosophy might sometimes be a kind of escape from doing the hard work. Arguing about moral intuitions, even very rigorously, will never be anywhere near as difficult as running economic cost-benefit analyses. (Or will it? I admit I'm not certain about this last part at all)
Is there any particular reason to think that the total amount of money that people "deserve" matches up with the amount of money in existence?
What if everyone deserves infinite money?
That's a fine way to think about desert, but then you still have to answer the question of 'given the world we have, with limited resources and where specific people use those resources to create wealth, who should get which resources?'
(You could then use the term 'moral claim' rather than 'desert' to denote the answer to that question.)
I don't think I have ever encountered a single author or politician who accepted the deontological argument against redistributive taxation without also opposing said taxation on utilitarian grounds. In other words, virtually nobody believes both:
a) the most efficient and reliable method of improving society (reducing poverty and crime, increasing happiness, etc.) in the long term involves a significant amount of redistributive taxation,
b) but we still shouldn't do it because it's inherently immoral.
I think that most conservatives and libertarians, if they woke up in a universe where social democracy worked just as well as intended, would become social democrats pretty much immediately. They would not walk among the friendly residents of the shining streets of Bernie City while lamenting the horrific moral cost (high taxes on the rich) that was required to build that society; they would just change their minds on just deserts and property rights.
(and vice versa for leftists waking up in a right-libertarian utopia)
If this is true, then we should have just been arguing about the utilitarian thing the whole time.
This sometimes makes me think whether moral philosophy might sometimes be a kind of escape from doing the hard work. Arguing about moral intuitions, even very rigorously, will never be anywhere near as difficult as running economic cost-benefit analyses. (Or will it? I admit I'm not certain about this last part at all)