Wei Dai wrote:
The difference I think is obvious. The criminal does deserve punishment, the child who was going to become the criminal didn't. He had the bad fortune to become someone who would be deserving of punishment.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)?
As to why it is the second that is relevant, I don't have a theory from which I can rigorously derive oughts. I'm merely pointing out that our intuitions about oughts have certain characteristics, and that abstract reasoning about those intuitions might produce a persuasive but logically invalid argument--as, in this case, I think it does. I can reverse your question--why is it the fetus who was going to become a mass murderer who we should judge for the mass murderer's crimes, instead of the mass murderer himself?
That's a possible response, but I don't think it is plausible as a description of how we feel. It implies, for example, that if you had an opportunity to risklessly reverse the transfer, say by stealing a dollar from the winner and slipping it into the losers pocket, you ought to do so. Is that your view?> If you find this way of thinking of it entirely implausible, considerNozick'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 upwith 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.
I don't think so. For one thing, lots of forms of gambling are legal.We do have laws against gambling, which suggests that most people do not approve of transfers based on luck.
Going back to the more general issue, one problem with the way you want to think of the question is that, carried to its logical extreme, the implication is that nobody deserves anything. A fertilized ovum has no characteristics that imply desert, at least as most of us see it--indeed, most people regard procedures to keep such from implanting as morally blameless. Hence nobody deserves anything. Hence there is no reason to criticize a blatantly unequal society, say a caste system. Some people in it get a little stuff they don't deserve, some get a lot they don't deserve--but nobody is failing to get what he deserves, because nobody--at the point at which you want to judge people--deserves anything. Carry that one step further back and you are at my rock--which deserves as much, and as little, as you do, since it isn't its fault it is a rock or yours that you aren't.
