Do We Deserve the Advantages That Come from Talent?

Two athletes train with equal seriousness, but one runs faster partly because of more favourable physical traits. Under public competition rules, that athlete should receive the medal. Yet does this also show that every advantage produced by talent is morally “deserved”?

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls stresses that people choose neither their social starting point nor their place in the distribution of natural abilities. He therefore rejects talent itself as the final moral basis for distribution. This does not deny training, discipline or achievement, and it does not require every outcome to be identical. Rawls distinguishes legitimate expectations under institutional rules from the stronger idea of moral desert. A society may use rewards to attract scarce work or encourage contribution, but it must still explain whether those arrangements treat everyone in the cooperative system fairly, especially those who are worse off.

Effort does not fully settle the issue, because persistence, family support and available training time are also shaped by luck. But attributing everything to luck would erase agency. My view is that people should receive recognition for genuine choices and effort without converting fortunate advantages into a claim that they are simply worth more than others. A medal may belong to the winner; education, health care and basic dignity should not be ranked by talent. Desert may justify a reward within a practice, but it cannot by itself determine the whole distribution of social goods.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/