For a long time, the Rawls-via-Daniels view that health care should be distributed according to patients' needs but not to deserts or responsibility has been dominant [ 3].
In the same decade, responsibility for desert locust forecasting and control co-ordination passed from Britain to FAO – and the ALRC became the UK government's Centre for Overseas Pest Research with a broadened remit to cover more general aspects of pest management in developing countries.
Consequently, we are reluctant to abandon notions of responsibility and desert, and religious systems which, we believe, maintain social order – even if, like Edward Gibbon, we believe they are "considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful".
Accounts of responsibility or desert affect how much luck there is in the world.
The view that everything is a matter of responsibility (and desert) luck obviously flies in the face of our everyday ascriptions of responsibility.
In principle, one could also care about choice and control luck independently of how these relate to thin luck, e.g., responsibility and desert.
It can be maintained that justice is concerned with this notion of luck independently of how it relates to responsibility and desert.
However, philosophers who think that justice is a matter of eliminating differential luck have studied choice and control mainly because they assume that the absence of choice and control nullifies responsibility or desert.
Al Mourabitoun, an Islamist group that has branded itself as Al Qaeda in West Africa and is based in the desert of northern Mali, claimed responsibility for the siege.
An additional serious problem with any welfare-centered concept of equality is that it cannot take account of either desert (Feinberg 1970) or personal responsibility for one's own well-being, to the extent this is possible and reasonable.
Other thin notions of luck can be described, but thin desert luck and (especially) thin responsibility luck have received the lion's share of attention in the literature on distributive justice.
