Unjust Deserts? Technology, Responsibility, and Collective Capability

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes that ‘hereditary nobility is a rank that is acquired before it has been merited’, and which ‘gives no occasion to think that it will be earned’ (Kant 2006, pp.126-7). Such remarks may seem suited to the late feudalism of Kant’s day, but they can also be taken to pertain to the inequalities of our own moment. They can then also afford a moral argument for equality of opportunity, and a desert-sensitive approach to social and distributive justice (as indicated by Baiasu 2021and 2024): one in which the recipient of a relevant social good ‘would have...to earn it for themselves’, to quote Kant again, rather than merely acquiring it through birth and background. Yet for this to be viable, the complexities and problems of the concept of desert itself would need to be addressed. One such problem concerns the intelligibility and force of desert claims. We are typically held to deserve on the basis of what we do; yet what we are able to do is shaped by accidents of birth and personal history. In this paper, I use Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly’s Unjust Deserts (2008) to set this issue within the context of our increasingly technologically mediated society. In their view, the economic wealth that individual actors produce derives not just from their own efforts, but also from the capabilities afforded by previous generations. Because this is a common, socially-derived inheritance, they hold that the vast majority of the wealth that it affords is deserved by society as a whole, and not just by those who are positioned in ways that enable privileged access to it. I begin by evaluating these contentions. I consider the viability of their view of wealth, how we might consider the temporality of desert in this connection, and whether society can be understood as a subject of desert. But having done so, I turn to an issue that is implied more indirectly by their claims, and which is, perhaps, rather more pressing. It is simply this: to what extent is it possible to separate the deserts of particular individuals from the social contexts and actions of others, whether historical or contemporary, in which those actions take place? Is it the case that whatever we do takes place within circumstances created by the actions of others? And if that is so, does it pose a problem for the largely individualistic notion of responsibility-based desert seemingly invited by a Kantian approach? • Alperovitz, Gar, and Daly, Lew, 2008, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back, New York: The New Press • Baiasu, Sorin, 2021, 'Distributive Justice and the Epistemological Argument Against Desert', in Academia Letters: https://www.academia.edu/48827099/Distributive_justice_and_the_epistemological_argument_against_desert (Last accessed: 30/12/2025) • Baiasu, Sorin, 2024, ‘Kant, Equal Opportunities and Merit’, in Belgrade Philosophical Annual, 37 (3): 51-70 • Kant, Immanuel, 2006, Towards Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, New Haven: Yale University Press