I regularly find that I have a different viewpoint to others on various topics due to having a different sense of whether someone is deserving of something. There is a sense of deservingness that seems to stem from status quo bias where people lean towards people having a right to continue with their current behaviour. Examples of this include:
Should cars get priority over cyclists on roads because the roads were “built for cars”?
Should someone who works in a dying profession be supported to continue in their current job?
Should people be allowed to continue with unethical practices such as fox hunting on the basis that they are traditional?
My fairly consequentialist worldview means that in these situations I think that the best approach is to consider which option leads to the best outcome, rather than thinking about whether someone deserves to be able to continue doing things in the way that they have historically been done. Obviously Chesterton’s fence style arguments apply, but I’m not going to dive into that here. I think there is a deeper, more interesting sense of deservingness that impacts people’s thinking on questions like the following:
Should inheritance tax exist?
Should paedophiles be punished even if they haven’t committed any crimes?
Should “charity start at home”?
Aside from any incentives that an inheritance tax creates, this is the example where people tend to feel most strongly that inheritors didn’t earn this money and shouldn’t benefit just because their parents happen to be wealthy. I think these arguments extend to the latter two examples though. It’s not like paedophiles have chosen to be the way that they are, and it’s random chance which side of a border someone was born on so it seems very odd to direct charitable donations on this basis. Examples involving the distribution of wealth and resources around the world trigger a sense of unfairness and injustice more than other examples, but I think it’s just as arbitrary for issues like uglier people having worse average life outcomes.
Similarly, I don’t think that someone who is unusually smart deserves to be rewarded with a higher salary just for being smart. It’s clearly economically useful to have this as an incentive to make people work harder, and this feature emerges naturally anyway since smarter people can often produce more economically valuable work. However, this leads to people with lower IQs being worse off relative to people with high IQs. They haven’t done anything to deserve this; it’s not like they chose their genetics or upbringing.
The same applies to sports. It’s a useful incentive to give more reward to higher performing athletes, but genetics play a huge role in someone’s talent at a particular sport. No one gets better genetics by “earning” them.
My perspective on this is partially influenced by my view that free will is likely an illusion, which means that I don’t think that people are fundamentally responsible for their actions on some level. This doesn’t have many consequences for how I think about day to day life, but it does influence how I view the role of the justice system. All else being equal retributive punishment is bad as it is just additional suffering being brought into the world. However, clearly the justice system sets a useful disincentive for people committing crime in the future. In general, I think punishment and reward are useful incentives but nothing more.
I don’t think you need to hold this view of free will to agree with me on most issues where deservingness comes into play though. By default, many people believe that someone’s physical characteristics or upbringing aren’t their fault, but that people are responsible for the actions they take. This often doesn’t get extended to IQ or other involuntary characteristics that people have, when I think if most people reflected on it they would agree that it should.
Addiction is a slightly complicated example because ideas like willpower automatically come into consideration, but the fact that some people find things more addictive than others (and therefore have to exert more effort to avoid becoming addicted) is inherently unfair. While many people look upon people with addiction issues with sympathy, there is often an undertone of “if I was in their shoes I simply wouldn’t have gotten addicted”. This is a version of the Typical Mind Fallacy that causes people to view addicts as more deserving of their situation than they are in reality.
Maybe at this point you’re thinking that this discussion seems mostly irrelevant in practice given that issues involving deservingness usually end up resolving to the same answer regardless of whether you use the standard approach of whether someone is deserving of punishment or reward, or the consequentialist approach. However, there is a practical distinction between whether deservingness is a useful heuristic, or whether it is closer to some objective truth about the world.
A couple of years after I had left my high school a couple of kids were messing around and set fire to a rope in the gym hall. This then led to a lot of the school burning down. Despite this not being the intended consequence of their actions (although it is a foreseeable one), a lot of people in the local town got their metaphorical pitchforks out and demanded that these kids were sent to juvenile prison. This seemed very counterproductive to me. Sending these kids to juvenile prison sends very little signal to any future mischief makers that they should think twice before doing something reckless, relative to something softer like detentions (especially given that this is on top of half of the town hating the kids in question). As well as being costly to the taxpayer, sending them to juvenile prison would make their future life outcomes worse which could increase the likelihood that they then go on to commit more serious crimes in the future. And while these kids aren’t particularly sympathetic characters, I don’t want to ignore the fact that this would be inflicting avoidable suffering on them.
These considerations can often get washed out by an instinctive desire for retribution and justice, even if it comes at a cost to society. In cases where there is no clear incentive being set, then whether someone is deserving of something is normally an irrelevant consideration and the focus should instead be what creates the best outcomes for the world. I think using this perspective would reduce the number of knee-jerk reactions that people have that lead to punishment without any benefit to society.