Deontological Desert

 If you feel like making your brain hurt, read this quote. If you want your eyes to bleed too, read the whole article.

On the other hand, people's shared intuitions about justice are not justice, in a transcendent sense.  People's shared intuitions can be wrong. In the end, however, the retributivist may find that an instrumentalist distributive principle of empirical desert will produce far more deontological desert than any other workable principle that could or would be adopted.

Paul Robinson from the Social Science Research Network