What We Deserve

By Leopold Brown @ 2023-04-20T07:43 (+4)

I am using this article as part of testing my communicator aptitude. Any comments/feedback would be appreciated!

Chat GPT-3.5 Turbo Summary

"The note is likely to be about the idea of deserving something in life. It may explore whether or not we truly deserve the things we have, and whether or not we are entitled to certain outcomes or experiences. The note may also consider the role of hard work and luck in achieving what we want, and question whether our expectations of what we deserve are realistic or fair. Ultimately, it may encourage readers to reflect on their own beliefs about deservingness and consider how these beliefs shape their attitudes and actions in life." 
- ChatGPT

Grain of salt

I do not have a background in moral philosophy, ethic, or writing. I am not extremely knowledgeable and everything in this argument is simply a proposition to be questioned and inspected, not a fact or anything concrete. That being said, let's get into it...

What do we deserve?

I often think of the question: 
What do we deserve?

Capitalism argues that we deserve the money that we work for. As I see it, this is true; but only in vanishingly few real-world circumstances.

I also hear that people all deserve equal amounts of money. I completely agree with this sentiment and believe that everyone deserve the same rights and opportunities, but I will have to nitpick this common statement a little bit. Definition of 'deserved' as given by my Obsidian Free Dictionary API:

To be entitled to, as a result of past actions; to be worthy to have.

While I completely agree with the sentiment, this is how I think of what is 'deserved'. Therefore, if two people's past actions are different, that implies that they 'deserve' different things. Because of this, a hard working person deserves more than a lazy person.

Initial thoughts on what we 'deserve'

In a capitalistic society, if you make money, that is your money that you deserve. This makes sense to me in very certain circumstances, such as this simple scenario:

DISCLAIMER:
I use the term 'laziness' here as "unwilling to do work or make an effort" (Obsidian Free Dictionary API), and am assuming all agents have similar mental states and no mental health issues. I think that mental health plays a key role in how difficult it is to put forth personal effort; however, mental health is a wide spectrum and is extremely difficult to quantify. Therefore, I am presenting simplified scenarios, and I believe that my argument stands regardless of whether you consider mental health or not.

You have two high school siblings, Alex and Sam. Alex is hard working, putting in 10 hours a week, whereas Sam doesn't work at all, purely out of laziness. On the weekend, Alex eats out, goes bowling with friends, and gets the newest video game console. Sam isn't able to do any of that because they don't have any spending money. In this case, I absolutely agree that Alex deserves their lifestyle - they earned it and should spend their money as they see fit. If Sam wanted to have the same lifestyle, they could get a job and work for it.

Of course, my agreement with this example hinges on a key factor:
- There is no luck involved with each of them making money, only personal effort.

Here is an alternate scenario I do not agree with the outcome of:

You take two random people, Adrien and Carson. Adrien's parents supported them through college and then they landed a job paying 50k per year. In contrast, Carson cannot afford to be unemployed after high school so they get a restaurant job making a salary of 30k per year. Let's assume both are working the same hours with the same amount of personal effort. In this example, the biggest reason Adrien is making more money is because he was fortunate enough to be able to go to college.

Unlike the first example, Adrien and Carson put in the same amount of personal effort but receive very different amount of money. In my mind, Adrien and Carson both deserve the same amount of money (from a moral standpoint). Obviously, they will not get the same pay from an economics standpoint, but that is not to say that they shouldn't.

We don't 'deserve' random events

A large crux of my argument centers around the point that people do not 'deserve' random events that happen to them, they only 'deserve' rewards for personal effort. Here are two extremely basic positive/negative scenarios:

Scenario 1: I find a lottery ticket on the sidewalk. As it happens, it has the winning numbers, and I collect 100 million dollars. In my opinion, I do not 'deserve' that money, as I did not put in any personal effort. Because of this, I do not 'deserve' the new car I bought, nor do I 'deserve' the gold foil toilet paper I am now using.

Scenario 2: I get mugged on the way to work, and lose 50$. I would say I did not 'deserve' to get mugged, but regardless it happened. Because of this, I would not say I 'deserve' going hungry on my 6 hour work shift (due to not being able to buy food).

These scenarios seem very in-line with my previous argument, because I did not put in any actual effort in either scenario, and therefore do not morally 'deserve' anything out of either. However, here are some more 'out there' scenarios that I feel this could be applied to:

Two people making different amounts of money because...
1. ...one was able to attend college, and the other couldn't.
2. …they were born in different countries.
3. ...one was taught financial responsibility at a young age, the other was not.
4. ...one invented a revolutionary technology, whereas the other put in 80 hour work weeks at the only job they could get.
5. ...one is a mathematical savant trading stocks on Wall Street, and the other did not score high enough on their SAT to get into college.

These scenarios do not differ much in the amount of personal effort put in, but differ drastically in the amount of money each person earns. Many of the major factors of why some people earn less money is simply due to luck - lucky to be born somewhere specific, lucky to be taught valuable lessons, lucky to be naturally intelligent, etc. etc.

The most drastic example of this that I can think of:

Insane Scenario:
Jeff Bezos makes $78.5 billion per year. To be extremely conservative, lets assume he works every second he is awake, or 17 hours per day. That means he earns roughly:

$\frac{\$78.5B}{year}\ast \frac{year}{365days}\ast \frac{day}{17hours}=\$12,651/hour$

Now, lets compare that to the other end of the spectrum - according to OurWorldInData, the average Pakistani worker earns $2.57 per hour.

If you are one to subscribe to these two statements:
1. We deserve the money that we work for.
2. We do not deserve the benefits or harms of random events.

Then the only way Bezos and the average Pakistani worker deserve the amount they are earning is if Bezos is working/has cumulatively worked 4,922 times harder. Obviously this is untrue, and can easily be applied to less crazy scenarios.

Implications

Capitalist societies say that you deserve the money that you work for. However, I think this ignores the fact that the biggest decider of earnings is simple luck. Because of this, I do not believe that it is accurate to say that someone fully 'deserves' the money that they have earned, especially when there is such a massive income gap between countries and individuals.

I think that we should help people simply because they need it. However, I think it can also be argued that we should help people because they themselves earned it and deserve it. They just don't get it because they are treated extremely unfairly.

Even under a capitalist viewpoint that we all deserve what we work for, we still have a moral obligation to help people, as they deserve just as much - or more - than we do.