One of the most radical features of Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness is that it fundamentally rejects the widespread and perennial view that justice is centrally about giving people what they morally deserve (at least where what individuals morally deserve is viewed as being identifiable prior to standards of justice). In his discussion of “Legitimate Expectations and Moral Desert” (TJ 273–277), Rawls allows that “[t]here is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed according to moral desert,” but makes clear that “justice as fairness rejects this conception” (TJ 273).He states unambiguously that “the principles of justice that regulate the basic structure and specify the duties and obligations of individuals do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it” (TJ 273). Rawls thereby takes himself to be departing from one central tradition in philosophical understandings of the relationship between justice, desert and virtue, stretching from W.D. Ross back to Leibniz (at TJ 273 n.11, Rawls refers to Ross 1930 and Leibniz 1951 [1697]), even though he nevertheless thinks that his account of the relative priority of justice and desert need not be in tension with the central features of Aristotle’s view of justice (TJ 9–10).