Should we partake in Adam Oliver's taste for desert?

Abstract

Brian Barry (1965, pp. 112–15) once suggested that the concept of desert flourishes in a liberal society in which each person’s worth can be ascertained by the market, a society like that of the late nineteenth century. He went onto to suggest that public policy in the twentieth century saw a ‘revolt against desert’, exemplified in a welfare state that catered for the underserving poor. By contrast, Hayek (1976, pp. 70–3) famously saw the idea of equating merit with returns in a market economy as a mirage. He saw the revolt against desert not as an abandonment of a liberal market order, but as a necessary condition for understanding how such an order could work well. The extremes touch: either way, desert is seen as a thing of the past. Oliver (2021) suggests a counter-revolution to this revolt against desert. He is motivated by a concern that public perceptions of the legitimacy of income transfer systems depend upon their respecting considerations of desert. The paying public are entitled to demand that those at the bottom of the income distribution genuinely deserve assistance. Although Oliver does not draw this implication, a demand to incorporate considerations of desert into income transfer programmes might come as much from net beneficiaries as from net contributors, since the beneficiaries who constituted the respectable poor might regard themselves as deserving, unlike those whose poverty was not due to unavoidable misfortune but to the lack of thrift. Oliver contrasts public perceptions with what he calls Rawls’s ‘transcendental proposition’, the principle of just distribution derivable from the original position. Oliver suggests that the view from the original position will lead decision makers to focus solely on the least well-off independently of their deserts, since behind the veil of ignorance those decision makers would focus their minds on how they would wish to be treated if they were in unfortunate circumstances. However, so the argument continues, this view from the original position is unaligned with the world in which we live, and the requirements of people living together will allow for knowledge of personal circumstances and, hence, for considerations of deservingness. Without getting side-tracked too much into questions of Rawlsian exegesis, there is a way of understanding the supposed reasoning of the parties in the original position that is closer than this interpretation suggests to the position that Oliver himself