Are There Any Just Deserts?
An argument against the belief that if someone doesn't deserve their wealth it can be taken away justifiably.
Many liberal redistributionists will make the point that the ability to attain economic success is a function of events outside one’s control. Some with strong determinist sympathies will assert that free will is an illusion and success is not a consequence of freely made choices. They believe that from a lack of true agency it follows that the very wealthy do not deserve what they have because they did not earn it.
The arguments about just deserts are usually coming from progressives concerned about income inequality who would like to see higher taxes on the very wealthy. Sometimes they come as arguments against libertarianism. I saw a video against libertarianism which explained that the creator was not a libertarian because he believed individual success was a consequence of luck. The creator suggests that people do not actually earn their success like libertarians would suggest. Would libertarians actually suggest this is why redistribution of wealth is immoral?
If you were to raise the point that some people have more opportunities than others and their success can be largely attributed to luck, some libertarians may disagree. However, I do not think this disagreement would be as common as progressives would think. If the average libertarian would concede that a lot of one’s success involves luck, then how can they think that people actually should be able to keep what they have?
A good thought experiment by the philosopher Michael Huemer is to imagine someone picked a lottery ticket at random and won the lottery. This person got lucky of course. Do they deserve the lottery winnings? In some sense, you could say not really. They did not do anything special compared to the other thousands of lottery players. Even if they do not really “deserve” what they have in some sense, it seems immoral to take it from them.
The implication of the “you didn’t earn that” position is that the government can take what you didn’t earn and redistribute it. However, I doubt many progressives would be okay with taking >99.9% of a billionaires wealth, leaving them with the average income and consider that just. Even taking a great deal of money from an above average person to bring them down to the average seems too far. If someone not deserving their wealth is in some part a justification for taking it, then why put limits to how much can be taken? Where do I place the line of “doesn’t deserve, so can be taken from” and “doesn’t deserve, so needs to be given to”?
If someone walked in a dangerous neighborhood at night and was robbed, we could think the person was foolish but did not really deserve to be robbed. The reason they were robbed was because they were unlucky in some sense. However, why would we limit our analysis to negative events taking place? Does the person who is not robbed deserve to be safe? One could say that everyone deserves to be safe all the time. However, does that entail that we should take action to ensure that is the case? Doing so would be very costly and reduce quality of life in other ways. Some safety precautions would seem unjust if the infringed on liberty too much.
Even if it is true that everything everyone has is a consequence of luck and is undeserved, I do not believe much follows about the ethicality of redistribution. If you use this argument to justify expropriation, why can you not use it to justify murder or assault. What right does someone have to be alive when it is not their choice and not something they earned. The argument against this would employ desert in a different sense. It would basically just mean a right to or entitlement to, as in right to not be murdered. It would seem that this could lead to confusion and leave us back where we started. It would make “Do you deserve what you deserve?” a coherent question meaning “Did you earn through merit what you are morally entitled to?” One could argue that just because someone didn’t earn being alive, doesn’t mean they aren’t morally entitled to remain alive. This would parallel the same argument against wealth redistribution.
Incentives matter.