Against the Desertist Case for Minimal Thresholds

Does everyone deserve to have their basic needs satisfied? Or to get what they need to have a flourishing life? Several philosophers have recently defended minimal desertism and have answered yes to one or both of these questions. They argue that minimal desertism can alleviate common concerns about desert in distributive justice, in particular the basic needs objection, according to which desert does not require the satisfaction of basic needs, and the responsibility objection, according to which people cannot be held responsible in the way that is required to deserve objects of distributive justice. In this paper, we argue that minimal desertism fails to live up to its promise. Seemingly minimal desertist views either use desert to rubber stamp the demands of some other principle of justice (the faux desert objection) or they do not justify a minimal threshold for all human beings and hence don’t qualify as a genuine minimal desertist view (the faux minimal desertism objection). In a few cases, these views are subject to both objections. We conclude that the case for minimal desertism is weak and that it cannot alleviate common concerns about desertism in distributive justice.