Although in popular moral thinking the appeal of desert remains very high, within political philosophy desert has been out of favour for much of this century. There has been something of a 'revolt against desert'. This hostile mood towards desert has a number sources [sic] of varying degrees of sophistication. The most significant objection is probably that based on the claim that desert presupposes a responsibility we simply do not have.
(Geoffrey Cupit, Justice as Fittingness [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 55 [footnote omitted])
