Meritarian axiologies and distributive justice

Abstract

Standard welfarist axiologies often fail to account for distributive justice because they remain indifferent to the specific allocation of goods among individuals. To rectify this, Meritarian axiologies incorporate merit or desert as a determinant of an outcome’s intrinsic value. This framework investigates Additively Separable Fit Meritarianism (ASFM), where the value of a life is defined as the sum of its welfare value and the “fit value” representing the correspondence between an individual’s actual welfare and their merit level. By formalizing specific constraints on the value function, ASFM demonstrates an ability to capture central intuitions about justice, such as the requirement that equal merit warrants equal distribution and the principle that the optimal distribution of a fixed sum occurs when everyone receives exactly what they merit. While certain interpretations of the “fit-idea” risk ignoring proportional justice or implying that reducing virtue could improve outcomes, a refined version of ASFM avoids these pitfalls. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that many distributive concerns traditionally classified as “comparative desert” can be adequately addressed through non-comparative, individualistic principles. Ultimately, this framework provides a rigorous basis for integrating distributive concerns into axiological evaluations while maintaining a consistent relationship between welfare and intrinsic value. – AI-generated abstract.