PER UN'IDEA DI MERITO: UNA RICOSTRUZIONE CONCETTUALE E UNA PROPOSTA TEORICA

The research intends to contribute to the debate on desert, a controversial, problematic with unclear borders, but equally diffused and used both historically and currently. The aim of the thesis is to clarify the uses, meanings and contexts in which the attribution of merit is appropriate. The work maintains a scientific approach of analysis, supporting the usefulness as well as the necessity of the concept of desert for communities: the result is a framework for which desert is useful as a principle of justice and necessary as a mode of relation. Structured in three chapters, the work deals with the historical and conceptual reconstruction of merit, the relationship with responsibility and finally the relationship with equality. The first chapter responds to the need to investigate the nature of the concept, the reasons for its pervasiveness in the public debate, the relationship with justice, distributive and retributive. The second chapter deals with free will and luck, and then goes deep into the types of responsibility connected to the idea of merit. The concluding chapter deals with the thorniest elements of the debate, investigating which elements make the concept admissible for an egalitarian perspective, in particular that of relational egalitarianism, through the analysis of the concept of power and respect. Keeping firmly within the boundaries within which desert can act without generating and perpetuating injustice, the thesis proposes a way of investigating and deepening the concept in harmony with, not in opposition to, egalitarian values.