Justice for grasshoppers: reassessing the effort principle in distributive justice

According to the effort principle, those who expend much effort deserve to earn more than those who expend little. While accepted by some philosophers and popular outside academic philosophy, the effort principle, that rewards the industrious ants rather than the idle grasshoppers, has been criticized for being unfair and impractical. This paper develops a novel argument against this principle. It targets the claim, implied by advocates of the effort principle, that it can be derived from a more fundamental desert principle, one that identifies moral responsibility, economic contribution, or compensation as the fundamental desert bases for income. We argue that the effort principle cannot be derived from any such principle. Thus, even if one endorses these principles, one need not accept the effort principle. Furthermore, we show how intuitions that seem to support the effort principle can be vindicated without it. We conclude by endorsing skepticism about the effort principle and by gesturing at an alternative possible role that the notion of effort can play in a theory of distributive justice.