Just Desert Theory

Abstract

This essay reviews Kristján Kristjánsson's 'Justice and Desert-Based Emotions' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), a complex but engaging book about desert in the context of two other grand philosophical themes: justice and the emotions. The book's rigorous methodology argues that those desert-based emotions that are normally termed 'negative' (anger, for example, and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune) may be considered as potentially virtuous. Modern philosophers such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick have tended to view justice solely as a virtue of social institutions, and thus as relating dominantly and almost exclusively to institutional decisions and public policy, rather than, as much classical theory would have it, as a virtue of individuals and their decision-making. Kristjánsson insists on the older view and also rejects the idea that justice is of a higher order than the other moral virtues. His analysis of desert builds on a 'pre-reflective, primordial notion of desert [that] seems to be grounded in every known culture and religion namely, that in an ideal world everyone would, other things being equal, reap as he has sown'. The review places this book in the context of the author's previous work, 'Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy' (2002) and his subsequent, 'Aristotle, Emotions, and Education' (2007).

Keywords: justice theory, just desert, emotions, negative emotions