Fred Feldman's engaging book presents a novel desertist theory of distributive justice, and it does so in a remarkably clear and well-organized manner. The view that justice is a matter of receipt in accord with desert is not a new idea, of course, but Feldman succeeds in both reviving the desertist tradition of political thought and defending an original, attractive version of it.

Depending on the reader, Feldman's book will be useful in three distinct ways – ways which make it attractive not only to political and moral philosophers and theorists, but also to college students and philosophically inclined members of the general public. The book functions primarily, of course, as the venue for Feldman's political economic desertism (PED). In addition, however, it serves the role of a brief overview of desertism in moral and political philosophy (chapter 3), and – even more broadly – as an overview of some of the most important contemporary theories of justice: egalitarianism, sufficientism, the Difference Principle, libertarianism, and prioritarianism (chapters 1, 5, and 6).

Feldman begins with a broad sketch of the landscape of theories of distributive justice (chapter 1). He then proceeds to a philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘desert’, identifying the types of philosophical justifications of this concept and the three key components of desert claims: (i) the deserver or the subject who is to receive a desert, (ii) the desert as such, (iii) the desert base or the basis in virtue of which the subject is to receive a desert (chapter 2). What follows is a summary of a variety of desertist theories of distributive justice: cosmic desertism, divine desertism, and Feldman's own political economic desertism or PED (chapter 3). Toward the end of chapter 3 and throughout chapter 4 we are presented with the full exposition of Feldman's view (which I reconstruct below). Chapters 5–7 (somewhat reiterating the material from chapter 1) once again summarize a number of theories of distributive justice which the author identifies as the main competitors for his view, and present an engaging and elaborate defense of the merits of PED over these alternative theories. Rawlsians will be content with the thoroughness with which Feldman reconstructs and discusses Rawls's (1971) four different arguments against desertism in chapter 7. Chapter 8, which could well be read on its own, is dedicated to an interpretation of Joel Feinberg's (1973, 1974) work on the distinction between comparative and noncomparative claims about justice/injustice. The concluding chapter 9 contains thoughtful, albeit fairly brief and sketchy, remarks about what PED could say about the political economic deserts of non-resident aliens and illegal immigrants. It also includes a preliminary take at a substantive theory of human flourishing and its place in PED.

The aim of Feldman's desertist theory of political economic distributive justice is “to offer a system for the evaluation of the distribution of political and economic items in a sufficiently unified political entity such as a country” (p. 70). PED is presented in two variations: PEDa, which states the necessary and sufficient conditions for claiming that a political community has perfect political economic distributive justice, and PEDc, which is a comparative principle aiming to tell us which of the two political communities in question have a higher degree of political economic distributive justice. According to PEDa – the main view defended by the author –

Feldman arrives at PED by specifying what he takes to be the appropriate (i) deserts, (ii) desert bases, and (iii) the desert distributor (the state government). What he understands by a “political economic desert base” is a special kind of need, namely, a community essential need. A need is a community essential need if and only if it is necessary for one's flourishing and it cannot be secured on one's own but rather requires a community. In broad terms, the overarching political economic desert base of PED is being a human being with community essential needs. Feldman believes that some specific forms of such a need are: the need for security (against, for example, criminals and natural disasters), the need for the opportunity to flourish as a human being (by being embedded, for example, in an educational system and an appropriate infrastructure), and the need for certain political rights. Correspondingly, what he understands by a “political economic desert” is a thing that is necessary for one's flourishing as a human being. In particular, Feldman points to the assurance of protection (readily available police-like security and medical assistance), opportunities (to education, infrastructure), political rights (to vote, to have in place governmental institutions that generate and grant legal entitlement), and ‘negative’ political economic deserts such as paying taxes. In broad terms, the overarching political economic desert of PED is being a human being who is part of a community that strives to ensure that one's community essential needs are met. Feldman emphatically asserts that a unique feature of his desertist view is that the level of welfare or happiness of the deserving citizens in a given country is of no importance for it, since welfare or happiness largely depend on the satisfaction of deserts in virtue of desert bases that are not strictly political economic.

According to Feldman's PED, the appropriate political economic desert bases are community essential needs. One such need, he claims, is the need for security against, inter alia, invaders and criminals (pp. 80–84). There seems to be a slight inconsistency in the characterization of this conceptual aspect of PED. Feldman claims that what we deserve is not the actual presence of police officers around us, but merely that they are readily available to help us should we need their help. This is because the need for security against crime is sometimes fulfilled by some private means, such as a self-organized neighbourhood watch team or a private security guard. So long as one's need for protection has been met (even by means other than through the actions of the state), the government does not have any additional responsibility toward protecting the citizen in question. However, later on in the book Feldman characterises the appropriate political economic deserts as “deserts [received] from the government (or suitable agencies overseen by the government)” (p. 179, my emphasis). So, must the bodies or agencies that secure our receipt of things we deserve (in virtue of PED) be overseen by the government, or not? It is not clear to me how much turns on this question for the theory itself. But one can certainly think of many examples of political situations whose level of justice PED would assess differently depending on whether the agencies protecting a citizen have to be actually overseen by the government or have to merely be in place and known to the government.

Another point I want to make concerns Feldman's discussion of Rawls. One of Feldman's defences of desertist theories of distributive justice as such (not just PED) in chapter 7 takes the form of an answer to Rawls's (1971) circularity/priority argument against desertism. Feldman reconstructs Rawls's said criticism by attributing to him the claim that desertists are entangled in definitional circularity: they endorse a definition of justice which makes use of the concept of moral worth while also endorsing a definition of moral worth which makes use of the concept of justice. One way in which Feldman engages with Rawls here is by criticising Rawls's claim that moral worth can be defined as having a sense of justice. For Feldman, this definition of moral worth “is implausible in part because it seems to identify moral worthiness with the possession of just one of the moral virtues – justice. What about all the other virtues? Surely they too are components of moral virtue” (p. 190). Feldman seems to identify Rawls's sense of justice with the possession of one specific virtue: justice. But this is a misunderstanding of the breadth of Rawls's conception of a sense of justice. As Rawls makes clear in chapter 8 of the Theory, the acquisition of a sense of justice consists in a successful passage through the three stages of moral development: the morality of authority, of association, and of principles. In particular, the acquisition of a sense of justice is synonymous with the arrival at the last stage – the morality of principles – which (Rawls explicitly states) includes the previous two stages (p. 419). But the previous two stages of moral development involve the learning and endorsement of other moral virtues than the virtue of justice. In the case of the morality of authority, the virtues one learns are obedience, humility, and fidelity to authoritative persons (p. 408); in the case of the morality of association, these virtues are justice, fairness, trust, integrity, and impartiality (p. 413). Thus, Rawls's sense of justice is substantively broader than Feldman makes it to be; the list of the moral virtues of a person having a sense of justice extends far beyond a single moral virtue of justice.

Finally, a minor critical point I want to make concerns the book's title, which does not give justice (so to speak) to its content. When seeing a book titled Distributive Justice, one might get the wrong impression that it contains merely one more summary of the vast field of distributive theories in political philosophy. The current title does not fully convey the main ambitions of the book and its core focus. Something like A Desertist Theory of Political Economic Justice would have been, in my view, more appropriate and adequate.

Much in the book is to be applauded. First, its content is organized in a transparent way which makes it easy to navigate the book, no matter whether one wants to jump straight to the core of Feldman's view (chapter 4) or read it in its entirety, thus also benefitting from the author's engagement with a number of competing views and arguments. The variations of Feldman's view and the formulations of other views reconstructed by him can be located and followed without trouble. (I found myself wishing that all philosophy was written in such a clear and systematized manner.) Second, the book's aims are not overstated. The author is explicit both about the limitations of his view as presented in this book (see esp. chapter 9) and about the potential similarities between his view and certain aspects of competing views, in particular luck egalitarianism. Third, when Feldman engages with views he ends up rejecting, he reconstructs them charitably and admits that his reconstructions often depart from their original presentations in order to make the comparisons intelligible. Overall, Feldman's book is a welcome and engaging contribution to contemporary political philosophy which will be useful to anyone interested in distributive theories of justice.