1 Liberalism , Desert and Responsibility A Response to

In recent years, a number of critics of liberalism have focused on its supposed dependence on a voluntaristic and impoverished conception of the self and its inability in consequence to recognise and do justice to those moral phenomena – ideas regarding allegiance, desert and responsibility in particular – that are connected to the situatedness of embodied selves. Samuel Scheffler’s strategy in Boundaries and Allegiances is to acknowledge the force behind the intuitions that motivate such critics without abandoning the basic framework of liberalism. Although Scheffler takes the Rawlsian theory as his guideline, inasmuch as it represents the most powerful and best articulated form of modern liberalism, his purpose is constructive, not exegetical: the interpretations he gives are aimed principally at providing a defensible version of liberal theory, not necessarily at following Rawls’s own conception of it. Of the family of questions that Scheffler addresses, one stands out in interest and importance in my view, namely, the place of desert in liberal theory, and it is on this that I shall concentrate in the remarks that follow. Desert is obviously a central issue for Scheffler, since he devotes two major essays to it in his book. Moreover, it is an issue on which his ideas have been in flux: the position that he takes in Chapter 10 (“Justice and Desert in Liberal Theory”) is sharply at variance with what is presented in Chapter 1 (“Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics”). Where the two conflict I shall (like Scheffler himself) treat the later essay as authoritative. In what follows I too will seek to give an account of desert along broadly Rawlsian lines without being overly concerned whether that account corresponds