Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis

11Moralising Economic Desert

Alexander Andersson and Joakim Sandberg

Introduction

A prominent set of intuitions concerning the just distribution of work-related incomes, such as wages and bonuses, invokes the notion of desert (Freiman & Nichols, 2011; Goya-Tocchetto et al., 2016; Miller, 1992). For example, many people hold that employees who work harder than their peers, or who contribute more to their company’s profit, thereby come to deserve a higher level of pay. The justification here is not about the consequences of such pay arrangements—for example, that wage differentiation may spur employees to work harder for increased rewards. Instead it concerns a basic form of justice: The general claim of economic desert, we may say, is that ...