On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 11:04:53AM -0800, david friedman wrote: > 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.
What's the difference between these two questions? Why is the second one relevant and the first one not? Or, to ask the question another way, consider a criminal as he is now and as a child before he committed any crimes. If we punish the criminal a week from now, don't we also punish the child version of him, since this future punishment has negative utility for both of them? Can we justify this punishment if it has no efficiency effects (i.e., no deterrence effect)? > 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. All of our current theories and intuitions about desert and entitlement are linked with their effects on efficiency. I'm not arguing against rewarding people for making contributions to society, all things considered. Instead I'm arguing against Bryan's position that merit is a good independent of efficiency. > 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. That's an interesting point which I'll have to think about. But one response is that the person who won the dollar is NOT entitled to it, but we ignore the injustice because it would be too costly to rectify. We do have laws against gambling, which suggests that most people do not approve of transfers based on luck.
