Here's a thought experiment that may illustrate one reason why this "market distribution is the correct distribution" seems problematic to some: Imagine that all babies born each week were pooled and then reassigned randomly to the parents. Your adult personality, opportunities and welfare would to a large extent be a function of the parents you drew in this lottery. You could end up in the household of a millionaire or a single mum working at McDonalds. Is your luck in this draw morally relevant? Is the difference in welfare outcomes morally acceptable? And, returning to our real world, to what extent is the present criteria for the assignment of infants to parents (based, ordinarily, on genetic factors) reflective of merit?This gets back to the point I made earlier, with some additions.
1. The question isn't whether you deserve to be the sort of person you turned out to be. It is whether the person you turned out to be deserves certain outcomes.
2. Nozick's distinction between desert and entitlement is useful here--and connects to the puzzle of moral luck. One version of the latter is to observe that there are many people, perhaps most, who if they had been in the setting of Hitler's Germany and offered the position of concentration camp guard would have accepted. Does that mean we should regard all of those people with the same moral repulsion we would regard someone who actually had been a concentration camp guard? Should we regard the driver who drove dangerously fast after drinking a little too much, skidded, and just missed a small child in the same way as the driver who, under the same circumstances, killed the child?
Combining my first and second points. One strong moral intuition, although not the only one, is that you deserve what you create--that people who make a large contribution to the society deserve a large reward. How large a contribution you make depends on a variety of factors, none of which the hypothetical disembodied identity that represents you stripped of all genetic and environmental characteristics "deserves" to have, some of which are characteristics of that identity with genetics added, some of that with genetics and environment added, and some pure luck.
If you find this way of thinking of it entirely implausible, consider Nozick's example of two men, each of whom is entitled to is current assets by whatever the morally correct rule may be, who bet a dollar on the flip of a coin. Nobody will say that one of them deserved to win the bet. Yet most of us would say that the one who wins the bet is entitled to have the dollar. And if the previous distribution was just, and just distributions cannot depend on morally irrelevant criteria such as luck, that means that we have just approved a move away from a just distribution.
All of which suggests that end state ethics--you deserve to end up with X share of the pie--have problems.
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David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
