Neither Rawls’s account nor Nozick’s allows this central place, or indeed any kind of place, for desert in claims about justice and injustice. Rawls (p. 310) allows that common sense views of justice connect it with desert, but argues first that we do not know what anyone deserves until we have already formulated the rules of justice (and hence we cannot base our understanding of justice upon desert), and secondly that when we have formulated the rules of justice it turns out that it is not desert that is in question anyway, but only legitimate expectations. He also argues that to attempt to
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