Does Anyone Deserve Anything?

Heads up – this one got way too long and philosophy-y. To make it more digestible I’ve ripped off the Cracked house style and filled it up with pictures.

Like this!

Thought Experiment Time

Thought experiment time!

This is Daniel Broadhead. In December 2012, at the age of twenty-one, he volunteered to donate a part of his liver to a stranger. The procedure required life-threatening surgery and left him with months of painful recovery to endure as well as a permanent scar on his torso. Daniel risked his life and endured months of pain for no reason other than to help someone he had never met. Part of Daniel’s liver was implanted in a four-year-old boy, saving the boy’s life.
(source)

This is Michael Carroll. In May 2004, at the age of twenty-two, he walked into a Christian disco armed with a baseball bat and threatened several people. Between 1997 and 2006 he racked up 42 criminal offences including theft,  joyriding, affray and drugs charges.*
(source)

Here’s the question: who deserves a lottery win more? The nice young man who selflessly risked his life to save a child he’d never met, or the drug-using petty criminal with a history of violence who, crucially, happened to actually buy a winning lottery ticket?

*Maths fans will be aware that Michael was just fifteen in 1997. In fact he was first detained as a child of thirteen. Cursory research indicates that he grew up against a background of violence and abuse, and he actually comes across as a rather sympathetic character in many ways. However, this is a thought experiment so for the sake of argument let’s say he’s history’s (or, at least, Norfolk’s) greatest monster.

Why does anyone deserve anything?

People make a lot of claims about who deserves what, and the more I think about these claims the less I know what any of them mean. Bankers don’t deserve their bonuses. Scroungers don’t deserve benefits. You deserve to be with someone who appreciates you. Everyone deserves a fair trial. Paedophiles deserve to be hung. Michael Bay deserves to be shot. The Turtles deserve better than that.

Are any of these claims true? If so, why? What makes them true? Why not just say you’re born, and then a bunch of shit happens, and then you die, and that’s it. Where does deserving come into it? Why does anyone deserve anything?

My first reaction to that position is that I kinda don’t want it to be true, but I find it hard to say exactly what’s wrong with it. Part of the problem is that I’m not really sure what the word ‘deserve’ is supposed to mean, and I suspect that a lot of the people using it don’t know either.

This is the point where I get into a bit of a tizz and everything starts soundling like gobbledegook. To get out of the tizz we are going to have to do some philosophy.

Pictured: the author.

Some philosophy

Let’s start by considering a very common example: “Arsenal deserved the win (despite losing 1-0)”. Why would anyone say that? Surely the team that deserves to win is the one who scores the most goals? Yet claims of this kind are made all the time by people who know stuff about football, while other people who know stuff about football nod sagely. They might dispute particular examples, but the claim is never rejected as absurd in a strictly logical sense. So ‘deserve’ in this case cannot mean “are owed under the rules of the game”. What does it mean then?

Pictured: Arsenal, maybe.

There are, I think, two parts to the Arsenal claim – a) Arsenal played better than the other team; b) the team who plays better deserves to win. Note that neither part has anything to do with the rules of football, which actually determine who does win. Going back to the lottery example, our gut might well tell us that the good person deserves the money more than the bad person with the winning ticket, regardless of the actual mechanics of how lotteries work.

At the most basic level, I think a lot of us would agree with the following:

Good actions deserve to be rewarded.

Bad actions deserve to be punished.
(Or, for the soft hearted, “bad actions do not deserve to be rewarded”. I’ll stick with the word ‘punishment’ in what follows for simplicity’s sake).

But this reward or punishment need have nothing to do with the formal systems in place around the action, the rules governing action in that sphere or any contract entered into between the interested parties. “X deserves Y” does not mean the same as “X is entitled to Y under the rules of some system”  (though it may be the case that X is both entitled to and deserves Y, they are not mutually exclusive concepts). This is what the Arsenal and lottery examples show us. Similarly a criminal might receive the full punishment specified by law, yet leave onlookers thinking she deserved a harsher sentence.

Nor does the punishment or reward have to be in any way caused by the action (or set of actions) which is being punished or rewarded. Imagine Nigel “what a tosser” Farage giving some kind of awful speech somewhere, saying stupid, hateful things out of his stupid, hateful face, when a seagull flying overhead happens to defecate directly onto the top of his stupid, hateful head. In that case you might well say that Nigel totally deserves it for being such a tosser. But, unlike a court sentence or a match result, the faesces landing on Nigel is completely unrelated to that spewing from his mouth.

What a tosser.

So how, if at all, is saying “Nigel deserves bad things happening to him” any different than just saying “I want bad things to happen to Nigel”? Well, the first statement has the appearance of an objective description of the world, while the second is a subjective report of my psychological state – one sentence makes a claim about Nigel, the other makes a claim about me. Further, the first sentence suggests that there is some justification for the bad things to happen – whereas I can consistently (without logical absurdity) wish bad things upon someone totally undeserving. Nigel deserves bad things because of his bad actions.

I still don’t really know where this relationship between action and deserved consequence is supposed to come from though. It’s like we imagine that the world operates by some set of rules which say “these kind of actions deserve these kind of consequences”, rules which exist outside of and supercede any actual system of rules created by people. If any such meta-rules exist then they are totally invisible; perhaps undetectable, perhaps detectable only though inference. Personally I see no good reason for believing the world operates according to such rules, when the only evidence for their existence is a kind of folk superstition and gut feeling.

This picture is not relevant.

Here we have arrived at a central question of moral philosophy. It’s another question about which I’m not really sure what I think. I think it’s my confusion over this that ultimately confuses me about deserving. One way of asking the question is: are there any moral facts?

“Murder is wrong”

“charity is good”

“Nigel Farage deserves to have a bird shit directly onto his head”

As we’ve seen these sentences make claims about the way the world is, about murder, charity, Nigel “absolute dicknose” Farage, and those things’ place in the world. If any of these sentences are true, if “bad people deserve punishment” is true, then we have ourselves a moral fact. But, as I’ve tried to show, it’s hard to say what makes such claims true, beyond “because I feel like they are”.

I typed “moral facts” into google and got this.

What they teach at philosophy school

Here are three responses to the Nigel sentence.

We could take it at face value, and say it’s just not true. Nigel doesn’t deserve bad things to happen to him because no one deserves anything, because the world doesn’t have rules like that. This is the “shit just happens” response I was worried about at the start. In moral philosophy this is known as an error theory, because it says that our usual way of talking and thinking is based on a fundamental error – the false belief that there are moral facts.

We could take it at face value, and say it is true. Nigel does deserve to have bad things to happen to him, because he’s a bad person and because it’s a fact that bad people deserve punishment. What is the basis for this moral fact? God maybe, or maybe these facts are just brute, unsupported truths. Sometimes explanations run out and you’re left with “that’s just how it is”. Positions vaguely like this get lumped together under the name moral realism.

A third option is not to take the sentence at face value. Perhaps when we say “Nigel deserves bad things” what we mean is “I disapprove of Nigel’s actions”. On this view moral statements, though they look like statements of fact, are really expressions of moral opinion. That could be totally true without there being such a thing as moral facts. This view is generally known as non-cognitivism, or expressivism.

Good gravy, this turned into an essay and a half didn’t it?

Emergency kitten.

What were we talking about again?

Does anyone deserve anything? We’ve gone around the houses, but what I think I reckon is that people don’t, really, deserve anything. Not really. Not in an absolute, objective, real kind of way. But we think people do, and what we think is important. It seems to me like a kind of fiction we make up, a story we tell ourselves, a story with great and terrible consequences. When we believe that adulterers deserve to be stoned to death people die in the streets. When we believe that everyone deserves certain things, like life, liberty and security, we do things like this. That link is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the most wonderful, hopeful, remarkable documents ever written. It’s full of statements like this:

“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

I’m not sure that sentence is, strictly, true. But I think the fact that I desperately want it to be is important.

This is the end now.

Big up yaself for reading this far. That got way out of hand. If anyone wants to read more about this stuff the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is always a good place to start: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/desert/ (MASSIVE shout to the absolute hero who wrote that entry for coming up with the section heading “1.0: Ingredients of Desert”).

Philosophy, as far as I’m concerned, is just the process of talking stuff through and trying to figure out what you think about it. So what do you think about deserving?