Desert and Economic Interdependence

This paper develops what I believe to be the deepest problem with the Contribution Principle, the common-sense idea that workers deserve income commensurate with their contribution to the economy, where “contribution” is defined such that some workers contribute much more, and so deserve much more, than others. Its central claim is that what mostly explains the size of any individual worker’s contribution is what many workers only together do: how much any worker contributes is mostly a function of the gains that result from cooperation, gains that are an essentially collective achievement and so, from the perspective of an individual worker, manna from heaven. The Contribution Principle thus violates a conceptual constraint on claims of desert due to Joel Feinberg, the Aboutness Principle: because workers’ contributions are mostly not about them, what they deserve on their basis is, contra the Contribution Principle, at most a small portion of their value. This shows that the Contribution Principle fails to vindicate seriously inegalitarian distributive outcomes, and it does so without assuming any premises that the defender of that principle does not already accept.