Harry Brighouse keeps the debate on desert aflame.
It is as obvious to me that no-one deserves political power as that no-one deserves their talents, or deserves to live in an environment in which those talents attract the contingent rewards that they happen to attract. (Steffi Graff’s income more than doubled in the year after Monica Seles was stabbed. Did she deserve to be in that environment? No. So in what sense did she deserve her increased income? Not any foundational moral sense, surely?) Is Wilkinson denying this?
I find this to be a puzzling response. Yes. I’m denying a lot of this, because it’s pretty crazy.
Now, as a matter of fact, I think very few people deserve political power. But not because nobody deserves anything, but because the mechanisms of democratic choice generally fail to even loosely track desert. But sometimes people are elected because of their merit and, to the extent unequal political power is legitimate, they deserve their office and its powers. None of this is to say that there exist no non-desert grounds for legitimate political power.
People of course don’t deserve their talents, insofar as a talent is pure potential given at birth. People of course do deserve their talents if they have deliberately cultivated and brought them to fruition through effort and work. If I am a wonderful violinist, I no doubt got to be that way by some combination of native ability and years and years of hard practice and discipline. If Harry doesn’t believe that people deserve their cultivated talents, then I wonder why not. It’s obvious to me, and I think most people, that people do deserve their cultivated talents. I don’t deserve to be the sort of person who is ABLE to become good at the violin. But if I worked hard to realize my ability, then I deserve the ability that I’ve earned through my dedication and hard work. I take this judgment to be a deep and fundamental part of our moral self-conception. I think people who disagree have either broken or ideologically distorted intuition. Of course!
Surely Steffi Graff did not deserve to be in a Seles-free environment! But this has no bearing whatsoever on whether Graff deserved her winnings that year, since she had no responsibility for stabbing Seles. If she won a bunch of matches played according to the rules of tennis, then she deserved to win them, and deserved the prize money. Isn’t this obvious? Suppose that 30 years ago a fetus was aborted who, in the nearest possible world in which she was not aborted, became the best women’s’ tennis player in history and dominated all the major tournaments. By Harry’s logic, we then have to say that almost all of the major tournament winners neither deserved to win, nor deserved their prize money. I consider this a reduction to absurdity. (Michael Phelps is living a lie!)
More of the same:
Politicians who win do not deserve to win at the very least because they do not deserve to live in systems which reward their particular talents (very few UK MPs would reach the top in the American political system, and very few American members of Congress would reach the top in the UK system; desert just doesn’t help out here). There are good, desert-free, reasons for designing a political system one way or another. I don’t see how desert could possibly come into it.
Again, I don’ think politicians tend to deserve their power, but I think they could in principle. Anyway, I guess I should just make explicit that I reject this form of argument:
(1) S doesn’t deserve to be in context C.
(2) S does A in context C, and thereby gets some reward R.
So, (3) S doesn’t deserve R.
I don’t deserve to be in a universe where our actual laws of physics obtain. But I eat, and thereby preserve my life in virtue of the laws of physics. So I don’t deserve to live? I know this is an utterly stupid argument, but I don’t really see how other arguments of this form really differ. Try a Michael Phelps example. Michael Phelps doesn’t deserve the existence of the 100m freestyle, which happens to be well-suited to his particular physical talents. Michael Phelps wins the Olympic gold in the 100m freestyle. So Michael Phelps doesn’t deserve the Olympic gold. But of course he does deserve the gold, simply in virtue of swimming faster than his competitors in accordance with the official rules.
I haven’t gotten to the core of Harry’s comments, but I need to run. So more later.
Unless you go down the Matthew Yglesias road and argue that self-discipline, energy, and those things which compel some talented people to work hard are similarly inate. There is something to that, of course. Its reductio is more absurd than whatever wisdom it imparts, however.
Will-
You can say that Steffi Graff or Michael Phelps ‘deserve’ all their winnings and rewards because they won them in actual institutional contexts. But can they (or could they) legitimately say: hey, you can’t change the institutional context (by bringing Seles back, or by not having a certain event being a gold medal competition at the Olympics) because I won (or would have won or will win) these rewards in this other institutional context?
Even if we says Phelps deserves his gold medal for the 100m (and it is crazy thinking to think otherwise), is it crazy to say there should not be a 100m Olympic event? Is it crazy to say claims of desert should not stop such a shift in context?
I take you to be saying that if we were to evaluate what is the best institutional context, desert has to be a factor (or the factor) in making a choice between institutional schemes.
Simply because a person would deserve something in one institutional scheme is not a legitimate reason for why that insitutitional scheme should exist.
And Will- It seems a little strange to say “Isn’t this obvious?” and then show the power of your common-sense intuition by using phrases like “nearest possible world.” Counterfactuals are very counter-intuitive. However well you explain them, I don’t think all that much is obvious in that realm.
Will- there is no way you can say that Phelps deserved to win the Gold in all possible worlds (or to keep it simple, this world, and the nearest possible world where the super-swimmer competed and beat him). The point is that Phelps’ claim of desert *in this world* is not strong enough for it to necessarily survive in some *nearest possible world*. And let’s say we are talking about shifts in possible worlds that can occur through, say, government or institutional action and changes in the basic structure. Desert in one context does not prevent us from evaluating the justness of another context. The same is true of evaluating basic structures. That is, unless you think the basic structure of a society cannot be just unless it incorporated a (strong? pre-institutional? moral?) notion of desert.
“If Harry doesn’t believe that people deserve their cultivated talents, then I wonder why not. It’s obvious to me, and I think most people, that people do deserve their cultivated talents.”
1. There is an ambiguity here in the phrase “people deserve their cultivated talents”. Do you mean their cultivated talents, minus their innate ability? Or if they cultivate a talent at all, they then deserve the entire result?
Say A starts with more innate violin-playing ability than B. Both practice the violin, but A works harder to cultivate her abilities. In the end, they both play the violin equally well. Do you think [1] A is more deserving than B because more of her ability is due to cultivation, or [2] A and B are they equally deserving because they now have the same ability after cultivation.
[1] is clearly not tracked by a free market that does not do at least some rough work in equalizing starting points. [2] does not seem intuitively obvious, or if it is, it is not clear why desert is so important morally and must be a part of a theory of justice.
Or if [2] is right, imagine this scenario. B has a high innate talent level in some area, but does no cultivation at all. A has a low or medium innate talent but has been cultivating this talent. A invites B to compete (or somehow B ends up competing with A, perhaps B never having participated in such a competition before), and B ends up winning because of a high innate talent. Did B deserve to win?
If we say B did not deserve to win, why is this? Because he did no cultivation? It seems likely that despite him having no cultivation, we would pronounce him the winner, and so we are left with the case of the underserving winner by the rules of the game. That hardly seems intuitively obvious. (though maybe this would be a rare case and hence not much of a worry?)
If we say B did deserve to win, notice it is not because B has worked to hard to realize his ability and B deserves his ability. In this case, he did no cultivation at all!
But say that B had actually put in some minimal cultivation in? Then we are not defending desert on the basis of hard work, but as the result of ANY cultivation, however small, plus native assets.
But you don’t have to be crazy to see that is a little less intuive than Will’s formulation of: “if I worked hard to realize my ability, then I deserve the ability that I’ve earned through my dedication and hard work.”
Again, do you deserve [1] just the portion of talent you have cultivated through hard work or [2] the entirely of the ability (innate talent + effort).
By the way, no one ‘in their right mind’ thinks that just because you cultivate an ability means you deserve a reward, or a large reward. Spending my life perfecting my kazoo playing ability does not mean I deserve a larger income than (or really any income) someone who learned how to design decent webpages. I really doubt Will believes that mere cultivation of ability, regardless of the ability, leads to desert. Or he may say you deserve your kazoo playing ability, but it is desert of the cultivated ability only in some cases, not desert of reward; your duration of cultivation is not (always) the determining factor in what reward you will get. Someone who cultivated their talent less and worked less hard than another person could easily be rewarded more.
Furthermore, if we want to say that you deserve the total extent of your cultivated talent, and that you deserve what rewards you are promised in a particular institutional framework for cultivating that talent, it does not follow that you deserve to be a particular institutional context that rewards your particular talents.
Also, what determines which particular cultivated skills and talents are most rewarded? Is it marketplace laws of supply and demand?
If desert is not merely the cultivation of talents, but the cultivation of talents that are favored by the market, AND the market is what determines what talents you will be rewarded for cultivating, THEN it becomes a little tautological to say that the market best tracks desert, no?
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Unless you go down the Matthew Yglesias road and argue that self-discipline, energy, and those things which compel some talented people to work hard are similarly inate. There is something to that, of course. Its reductio is more absurd than whatever wisdom it imparts, however.
Will-
You can say that Steffi Graff or Michael Phelps ‘deserve’ all their winnings and rewards because they won them in actual institutional contexts. But can they (or could they) legitimately say: hey, you can’t change the institutional context (by bringing Seles back, or by not having a certain event being a gold medal competition at the Olympics) because I won (or would have won or will win) these rewards in this other institutional context?
Even if we says Phelps deserves his gold medal for the 100m (and it is crazy thinking to think otherwise), is it crazy to say there should not be a 100m Olympic event? Is it crazy to say claims of desert should not stop such a shift in context?
I take you to be saying that if we were to evaluate what is the best institutional context, desert has to be a factor (or the factor) in making a choice between institutional schemes.
Simply because a person would deserve something in one institutional scheme is not a legitimate reason for why that insitutitional scheme should exist.
And Will- It seems a little strange to say “Isn’t this obvious?” and then show the power of your common-sense intuition by using phrases like “nearest possible world.” Counterfactuals are very counter-intuitive. However well you explain them, I don’t think all that much is obvious in that realm.
Will- there is no way you can say that Phelps deserved to win the Gold in all possible worlds (or to keep it simple, this world, and the nearest possible world where the super-swimmer competed and beat him). The point is that Phelps’ claim of desert *in this world* is not strong enough for it to necessarily survive in some *nearest possible world*. And let’s say we are talking about shifts in possible worlds that can occur through, say, government or institutional action and changes in the basic structure. Desert in one context does not prevent us from evaluating the justness of another context. The same is true of evaluating basic structures. That is, unless you think the basic structure of a society cannot be just unless it incorporated a (strong? pre-institutional? moral?) notion of desert.
“If Harry doesn’t believe that people deserve their cultivated talents, then I wonder why not. It’s obvious to me, and I think most people, that people do deserve their cultivated talents.”
1. There is an ambiguity here in the phrase “people deserve their cultivated talents”. Do you mean their cultivated talents, minus their innate ability? Or if they cultivate a talent at all, they then deserve the entire result?
Say A starts with more innate violin-playing ability than B. Both practice the violin, but A works harder to cultivate her abilities. In the end, they both play the violin equally well. Do you think [1] A is more deserving than B because more of her ability is due to cultivation, or [2] A and B are they equally deserving because they now have the same ability after cultivation.
[1] is clearly not tracked by a free market that does not do at least some rough work in equalizing starting points. [2] does not seem intuitively obvious, or if it is, it is not clear why desert is so important morally and must be a part of a theory of justice.
Or if [2] is right, imagine this scenario. B has a high innate talent level in some area, but does no cultivation at all. A has a low or medium innate talent but has been cultivating this talent. A invites B to compete (or somehow B ends up competing with A, perhaps B never having participated in such a competition before), and B ends up winning because of a high innate talent. Did B deserve to win?
If we say B did not deserve to win, why is this? Because he did no cultivation? It seems likely that despite him having no cultivation, we would pronounce him the winner, and so we are left with the case of the underserving winner by the rules of the game. That hardly seems intuitively obvious. (though maybe this would be a rare case and hence not much of a worry?)
If we say B did deserve to win, notice it is not because B has worked to hard to realize his ability and B deserves his ability. In this case, he did no cultivation at all!
But say that B had actually put in some minimal cultivation in? Then we are not defending desert on the basis of hard work, but as the result of ANY cultivation, however small, plus native assets.
But you don’t have to be crazy to see that is a little less intuive than Will’s formulation of: “if I worked hard to realize my ability, then I deserve the ability that I’ve earned through my dedication and hard work.”
Again, do you deserve [1] just the portion of talent you have cultivated through hard work or [2] the entirely of the ability (innate talent + effort).
By the way, no one ‘in their right mind’ thinks that just because you cultivate an ability means you deserve a reward, or a large reward. Spending my life perfecting my kazoo playing ability does not mean I deserve a larger income than (or really any income) someone who learned how to design decent webpages. I really doubt Will believes that mere cultivation of ability, regardless of the ability, leads to desert. Or he may say you deserve your kazoo playing ability, but it is desert of the cultivated ability only in some cases, not desert of reward; your duration of cultivation is not (always) the determining factor in what reward you will get. Someone who cultivated their talent less and worked less hard than another person could easily be rewarded more.
Furthermore, if we want to say that you deserve the total extent of your cultivated talent, and that you deserve what rewards you are promised in a particular institutional framework for cultivating that talent, it does not follow that you deserve to be a particular institutional context that rewards your particular talents.
Also, what determines which particular cultivated skills and talents are most rewarded? Is it marketplace laws of supply and demand?
If desert is not merely the cultivation of talents, but the cultivation of talents that are favored by the market, AND the market is what determines what talents you will be rewarded for cultivating, THEN it becomes a little tautological to say that the market best tracks desert, no?