Moderate examples might be that after working at a job, the employee is paid, or after a well-done concert, the musician receives a round of applause.
However, Rawls was careful to explain that, even though he dismissed the concept of moral Desert, people can still legitimately expect to receive the benefits of their efforts and/or talents.
Nozick claimed that to treat peoples' natural talents as collective assets is to contradict the very basis of the deontological liberalism Rawls wishes to defend, i.e., respect for the individual and the distinction between persons.
So denigrating a person's autonomy and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line to take for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the dignity and self-respect of autonomous beings.
The conventional understanding of it is as a libertarian assessment of procedural justice, which maintains that while it might be true that people's actions are wholly or partly determined by factors that are morally arbitrary, this is irrelevant to assignments of distributive shares.
We then either have an infinite regress of bases of desert or arrive at some basis, some beginning point, which the individual cannot claim to have deserved or to be responsible for, but only to have or have been given by nature.
[citation needed] The many debates over justice in political life and in philosophy concern the actual substantive question of what are the proper bases of desert.
She points out that there seems to be a subterranean assumption in Nozick's rejection of Rawls' account of natural endowments as collective assets.
People who do not work hard and invest imprudently should be held responsible for those choices and not receive assistance from an egalitarian welfare state.
[11] Sometimes the claim is that the redistributive systems often favored by egalitarian political theorists might have disastrous consequences in that they promote sloth and allow free riding on the productive by the lazy.
[12] For example, the charge against Rawls is that people actually might deserve the gains flowing from their natural endowments, or at least those they achieve by striving conscientiously.
At its extremes, the converse can lead to victim blaming, where when a terrible event happens to someone, an observer concludes that it is merely just retribution for some misdeed in the past.
The just-world hypothesis is the worldview that "everything happens for a reason", and that seemingly random events are actually morally fitting, if perhaps on a delayed timescale.
Various explanations for the remaining 25% to 40% have been suggested, including women's lower willingness and ability to negotiate salary and sexual discrimination.
[25]A study by the Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy which followed the same sets of families for 25 years found that there are vast differences in wealth across racial groups in the United States.
The study concluded that factors contributing to the inequality included years of home ownership (27%), household income (20%), education (5%), and familial financial support and/or inheritance (5%).
[28] According to a 2020 report by the UNEP, overconsumption by the rich is a significant driver of the climate crisis, and the wealthiest 1% of the world's population are responsible for more than double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest 50% combined.
Inger Andersen, in the foreword to the report, said "this elite will need to reduce their footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line with the Paris Agreement targets.
"[29] A 2022 report by Oxfam found that the business investments of the wealthiest 125 billionaires emit 393 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually.