Justice, Desert, and Ideal Theory.

This article focuses on the concept of justice and its relationship to desert and the ideal theory in philosophy. Justice requires that a person get what he or she deserves. It is a widely accepted claim, although the exact nature of the relationship between justice and desert becomes controversial as these concepts are specified in greater detail. John Rawls's rejection of desert as a basis for the just distribution of social resources is well known. According to Rawls, there is a tendency for common sense to suppose that the good things in life should be distributed according to moral desert. According to virtue, justice is happiness and justice as fairness rejects this conception. It is also crucial to remember that Rawls is interested in the principles of justice with which the basic structure of society can be evaluated. This structure consists of a society's political, social and economic institutions. It also considers how the social institutions fit together into one unified system of social cooperation. Therefore, when he asserts that the concept of moral worth does not provide a first principle of distributive justice, implicit is the addendum, for the purpose of evaluating the basic structure.