The blameworthy deserve blame. So runs a platitude of commonsense morality. My aim here is to set out an understanding of this desert claim (as I call it) on which it can be seen to be a familiar and attractive aspect of moral thought. I conclude with a response to a prominent denial of the claim.Before getting down to business, a few preliminary remarks are in order. First, the desert claim is not about the meaning of 'blameworthy'. It is a substantive claim about the normative status of blame of the blameworthy.Second, what is offered is not a reductive analysis. I connect the desert of blame to a number of normative and evaluative phenomena: the fittingness of blaming emotions, conditions the satisfaction of which renders one blameworthy, reasons to blame, justice in one's attitudes toward oneself and others, and the value of a blameworthy person's being blamed. Drawing these connections is a way of clarifying what the desert of blame comes to. The procedure leaves desert unanalyzed. That, I think, is as it should be; desert is as fundamental a normative phenomenon as any.Third, the blameworthiness at issue is a mode of moral responsibility. We might say that when one is so blameworthy, the blame of which one is worthy is moral blame. Some argue that in addition to moral blame, there are varieties of nonmoral blame-blame, for example, for poor athletic performance or for aesthetic failure, when no moral fault is imputed. If there is such nonmoral blame, there might be worthiness of it that is not a mode of moral responsibility. Such a thing lies beyond the scope of this paper.Some philosophers distinguish two or more varieties of moral responsibility, and thus two or more varieties of moral blameworthiness. 1 One kind, often called accountability, is such that those who are so blameworthy can appropriately be held to account for what they have done. Holding someone to account in the relevant way can include having and expressing emotions such as