But is desert really inegalitarian? And should the very notion of desert be rejected by egalitarians? The fact that desert is often used to defend unequal distribution does not, of course, show that there is anything inegalitarian about desert itself. Desert may be used in both inegalitarian and egalitarian arguments. If the ground or grounds on which people deserve to be treated—the desert bases—vary from one person to another, then different people may deserve different treatment. But where a relevant desert base is possessed in equal measure people do not merely not deserve different treatment, but deserve not to be treated differently.
Indeed I want to suggest that for egalitarians to eschew the notion of desert is perverse, for there is good reason to view desert as the most appropriate notion for expressing what egalitarianism is. Egalitarianism is not simply a view of how people should be treated (namely, as equals), but a view about why they should be treated in a particular way. The egalitarian holds that people should be treated as equals because they are equal. But, as we have seen, such a relation between the status of a being and treatment which expresses that status is precisely the relation embodied in desert. It may be that egalitarians also hold that all have a right to treatment as an equal; but we should not identify an egalitarian with someone who holds such a view, for we may believe that people have a right to be treated as equals without holding that they are equals.
(Geoffrey Cupit, Justice as Fittingness [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 58-9 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])
