Jan Narveson

Getting on the road to peace: A modest proposal

The worlds superpowers and their allies currently maintain military establishments of utterly unprecedented destructive power and costliness; and, notoriously, they add daily to their armaments. If we were to ask either of them what the purpose of all this activity is, we would be sure to get the same reply, Defense, or, Security. If we were further to ask, Security from what? each would unhesitatingly cite as the overwhelmingly major object of concern the other party. Neither has much to fear from anyone else, especially if the other possible threateners are taken individually. Even Russian concern about China seems scarcely of a kind to call for the assembling of thousands of megatons of nuclear warheads to secure the situation. And certainly both the United States and the Soviet Union would strongly disclaim any aggressive intentions. The whole thing is for defense, both would insist. Its the other partys fault! Thus, for example, what was once known as the War Department in the United States has for decades been called the Department of Defense. On the face of it, this situation is anomalous, if not downright absurd. How could two states each go to enormous trouble and expense to arm themselves to the teeth against each other if each really believed that the sole reason the other was taking up arms was for defense against itself and no one else? Evidently there is some serious misunderstanding or mistrust on the part of at least one. But of both, actually-it can hardly be asymmetric. Imagine that Jones seriously mistrusts Smith, to the point where he equips himself with a revolver, but that Smith does not mistrust Jones at all, feeling in fact perfectly confident that Jones will never use the weapon in question. In that case, Smith will not arm himself in response, one would suppose; and one would further suppose that his

Book ReviewsSerena Olsaretti, , ed.Desert and Justice.New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 288.

That this collection reflects a subject in which there is considerable interest of late is suggested by the fact that the Oxford University Press published another collection on the same subject a few years earlier (Louis Pojman and Owen McLeod, eds., What Do We Deserve? A Reader on Justice and Desert [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]; one of its coeditors is a contributor to the current volume). The eleven essays in this volume have in common not much more than that they are all, in one way or another, about desert. The title is misleading in that not many of them really address the question of desert’s general relation to justice (some tentatively assert it, but do not argue for it). Plato’s character Polemarchus suggested that justice is “giving every man his due,” and he ran into heavy weather at the hands of Socrates for his suggestion; since then, the idea has not had front-page billing very often. Is there a reason for this? One possibility is that the claim is trivial in any sense in which it is true. When justice requires that Jones be given x by Smith, there has to be something about Jones, and his relation to Smith, such that it is why Smith ought to give x to Jones. Whatever this fact about Jones may be, can we, then, simply identify it with Jones’s desert? (Some of the contributors, and the editor, explicitly deny this—as well they might, since they would scarcely have a subject otherwise.) Or is desert a genuinely explanatory intervening variable? Might there be other things about Jones than, specifically, desert-factors, which underwrite the claim that Smith as a matter of justice owes x to Jones? Is it ever true that the specific reason why Smith, as a matter of justice, is required to give x to Jones is that Jones deserves x from Smith, in some nontrivial sense of ‘deserves’? A good deal of this book may be viewed as, in one way or another, concerned with that question. None of the chapters, however, offers either a general theory of justice or even a general theory of desert to answer it— prospective readers be warned. Almost all of the authors are concerned, as we might put it, with the micro-logic of desert: where, in the landscape of morals, is desert specifically located? Serena Olsaretti, the volume’s editor, identifies two main questions about desert and justice: How does desert relate to equality? Can we identify what individual A deserves independently of all others, or do comparisons with others play an essential role? (p. 3). But she first discusses desert more generally, and an opening observation suggests what seems to me a serious lacuna. There is, she says, general agreement among desert theorists that desert is “a three-place relation between a person, the grounds on which she is said to be deserving (the desert basis), and the treatment or good which she is said to deserve (the deserved good)” (p. 4). Now, for one thing, by no means all applications of desert are to persons: animals, trees, works of art, and much else might be, and