Can Incomes in Financial Markets Be Deserved? A Justice-Based Critique

This chapter explores whether the notion of desert can be applied to labor incomes earned in financial markets, a claim sometimes made in order to justify the extraordinarily high labor incomes generated there. I draw on the philosophical debate about desert in order to defend an institutional notion of desert that is related to the justice of institutions, and argue that it can be applied to markets, but does not exclude redistributive taxation. To apply this notion to markets, however, markets have to fulfil a certain role within a broader set of just institutions. I therefore ask whether today’s financial markets fulfil this role, and argue that problems of market failure and of social dysfunctionality undermine the idea that incomes generated in today’s financial markets could be called deserved, even on a modest, institutional notion of desert.