This is an interesting point. Suppose we carry it a little further.I agree with your first point, but not the second one. I don't see why, efficiency aside, more able and hard-working people deserve more. Being more able and hard-working should be reward enough by itself. Lazy and incompetent people no doubt did not consciously decide to become lazy and incompetent, so why should they be punished for it, again if efficiency is not a consideration?
Cruel and dishonest people didn't choose to be cruel and dishonest. Or, if they did at some point choose to be those things, they didn't choose to be the sort of people who would make that choice. So why should they be punished for it?
We generally take it for granted that humans somehow deserve more than dogs, or at least more than earthworms or, if there are any earthworm liberation types around, more than rocks. But a rock didn't choose to be a rock.
To put it differently, once you take the determinist position, that all your characteristics can ultimately be traced to factors outside of your control, it looks as though "deserve" becomes a meaningless concept.
One thing wrong with this is that it takes the entity doing the deserving to be some sort of disembodied identity, stripped of all its actual characteristics--since those characteristics are only accidents which "it" didn't deserve to have. Hence my extreme example of the rock.
But when we talk about desert, we aren't saying "the disembodied entity that ended up as Adolf Hitler deserved to have bad things happen to him." We are saying "Adolf Hitler deserved to have bad things happen to him." "Desert" is being predicated of an entity with its actual characteristics, not of the entity stripped of those characteristics, so the fact that the imaginary stripped entity doesn't deserve to have the characteristics it does is irrelevant.
I hope that isn't too confusing. It is, I think, an interesting puzzle, but not an insoluble one.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
