Point 2 (a person deserves his problem if there were steps he could’ve taken to prevent his problem) is obviously wrong if you stop to think about it even a little bit.
Let’s say someone was murdered while walking in a dark alleyway at night. He could have not done that and therefore not be murdered. Does he deserve to be murdered?
Another example would be laws. If there’s a law against criticizing the government, one could avoid punishment by not criticizing the government, yet someone who does clearly doesn’t deserve the punishment.
I think this is less "thinking a little bit" and more "thinking a lot about how to uncharitably understand reasonableness as something not involving foreseeable or even plausible consequences of actions". And if the claim is about foreseeable consequences of your actions, the law example proves trivial to contend with. Resisting an arrest for an unjust charge can be bad AND the law itself being enforced can be bad. These are not selfevidently incompatible positions, there are two different actions to evaluate here and both can reach the same conclusion.
When did I ever bring up resisting arrest? All I said was that the hypothetical person doesn’t deserve the punishment for committing the crime, despite said punishment being a forseeable consequence of an action they could have chosen not to take. I never said that they resisted arrest or did anything other than criticize the government. It’s a simple proof by counterexample.
If we're in the game of using intuition pumps to evaluate morality, turnabout is fair play. I brought up resisting arrest because it presents us an example where a common intuition is that you do, in fact, deserve punishment regardless of the merits of the law being enforced. I'm reminded of Randy Barnetts distinction between legitimacy and justice here, but regardless, I don't think it's so obviously wrong (your words) given that it doesn't seem to generalize. In fact, civil disobedience is hardly uncontroversial itself. Foreseeability seems to me to play a much more strident and even dispositive role.
So people who engage in civil disobedience against unjust laws deserve to suffer whatever consequences arise? That’s a very strange use of the word deserve. Most people would say that even if they brought it on themselves, said consequences are an unfortunate reality, not something they deserve to experience . “Deserve” to me means that it is desirable that the person experiences it, that the world is better if this person gets what they deserve. We don’t say people who go out alone at night “deserve to die”, we say murderers “deserve to die”. We only prescribe suffering as desirable or “deserved” when someone has done something morally wrong. This suggests that point 2 in the original post is a poor fit for how we use the word deserve.
I also note that you admix situations largely under one person's control with a situation under two people's control in your walking down a dark alleyway example. The person making the decision to walk down the dark alley is adding risk, true, and if he say slipped on some garbage and fell, breaking his arm in the process, one might say he deserved it as he could have walked somewhere with enough light to see yet chose to walk in a more risky area.
However, getting murdered is in general not something people deserve, because humans are not supposed to murder humans. The murderer is clearly using his agency and improperly. You can't assess a moral situation involving two people and treat one of the primary actors as having no more agency than a force of nature and arrive at correct moral intuitions.
You could add in “reasonable” to my quote and my argument would remain unchanged. We know it isn’t necessarily likely that going in a dark alleyway at night would result in death, but it is plausible. One could reasonably choose to take a detour that goes through safer streets. Likewise with the legal example, if you know the consequences for breaking the law, not doing so is a reasonable choice.
As for your other objection, if you think there are ANY other factors than “could they have reasonably prevented this” involved in determining whether someone deserves their problem, your issue is with Caplan’s definition, not with my counterargument.
In my opinion, "Deserve" is a spectrum. If the only thing the person did wrong was walk alone at night, that's still on the "did not deserve it" end, because it was one relatively reasonable mistake. But they did deserve it more than someone whose house was broken into when asleep.
I think even this is objectionable. I would say that neither of them deserved it at all, because whether you deserve something is a matter of the moral choices you have made, not a matter of whether or not you could have prevented it. That’s why we don’t say that people who go out alone at night “deserve to die”, but we do say murderers “deserve to die”.
If you disagree, I would ask: does a soldier who willingly enlists in the army deserve to die? (Assume for our purposes that the war being fought is something morally unobjectionable, like fighting Nazi Germany or something.) Anyone who does that is very aware that death is a forseeable consequence to that action, but I doubt anyone would say that means they deserve death.
Let's replace "deserve to die" with the phrase "have a societal priority in making sure they live".
Does a person who walks alone at night in bad neighborhoods have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, a pretty big one, but not absolute. It's quite bad when innocents ever die, but costs of policing bad neighborhoods are pretty high.
Does a person who is sleeping soundly in bed with their doors locked have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, a huge one. One of the top priorities of any civilization should be in stopping that kind of chaos.
Does a soldier who enlists have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, still a moderate one, we don't throw away lives like garbage. But it's not an emergency if it happens. It's expected it'll happen, especially in pursuit of strategic objectives.
I think it can be very hard to determine if there were "reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem". If he is poor then he could have picked himself up by his bootstraps and gotten job. But what if he was born physically or mentally disabled in a way that makes it impossible to get a job? Are there reasonable steps he could have taken to prevent himself from being born with that handicap? Almost certainly not.
But what about the man who is not obviously physically or mentally handicapped? Then surely he could have taken reasonable steps to get a job. Easy for someone who happened to be born with a lucky combination of genes and environment to foster job-getting abilities- not so easy for someone with less a less luckily combination.
Ultimately we are all somewhere on the luckiness scale and none of us can take credit or assign blame for where we or someone else lands on that scale. Everything we do and everyone else does is ultimately driven by luck. If you think your high agency means that you can transcend luck, then you are just not looking deep enough because it was only luck that gave you the ability to be high agency.
I think a much better principal is to simply try to incentivize outcomes that we prefer. Still hard, but at least avoids anyone having to try to judge what is "reasonable" for someone else to do.
"Everything we do and everyone else does is ultimately driven by luck."
I don't think you have fully thought through the implications of this claim, or compared it to reality to see if it really lines up. For instance, it implies that no one can plan and execute any sort of forward looking process with any level of success, unless the probabilities are so high that it turns into "if someone chooses X outcome Y will almost always happen" which then moves away from it being all luck and down to choice again. Otherwise you get things like "I meant to post a comment on a blog, but ended up sending my credit card info to a cousin I never knew I had in Beirut. Isn't luck crazy?" on a fairly regular basis. We don't see that, so there are clearly many predictable regularities in how things work with high enough probabilities that we get to choose across ranges of outcomes, even if luck plays a role.
This treatment of "luck" reads to me as more explosive for any assignment of agency, and thus moral evaluations based on actions, than you seem to think it is. For one, I don't see why the nebulousness of the extent of someone's discretion doesn't also apply to luck, and thus the descriptive validity of the premise you're judging the moral evaluation by. It doesn't strike me as obvious that actions being more difficult by virtue of limiting circumstances obviates moral consideration, unless it limits the ability to choose between *available* options, rather than merely limiting the choice set. The options could be randomly assembled and the choice itself could still be at least a weight in consideration.
I for one would love to see any legal system operate without semi-arbitrary reasonableness standards. Any endangerment charge or tort is dead in the water without it. Reasonableness may itself be one of the things we want to incentivize, not merely all of the innumerate behaviors it leads to.
I fully agree in practice - it is generally more productive to help someone who is capable of taking the "reasonable steps". I am hesitant, however, on the moral aspect. Attributing blame/saying someone "deserves" their poverty implies a degree of free will which is unlikely to exist.
Its is very difficult, and against our deep intuitions, but the sympathy we feel should be based on the outcome. The ability/psychology of that individual must however influence the way we as society treat that individual.
If someone complains about not making the rent, and they smoke, drink, or do drugs, their priorities are not mine and I won't help them, whether relative, friend, or stranger.
This "morality" and "deserve" are taken too literally and as if they have clear objective universal meanings.
Why should the sympathy we feel be based on the outcome and not also such things as intent, foreseeable consequences, adherence to custom, etc.? We often feel people deserve outcomes they don't actually get, which is what we mean by "They had that coming" when the outcome we feel they deserve happens.
I think the response would be that the feeding strays example has confounders like negative externalities. Helping someone who is comatose, and thus cannot either take or forgo any choices to help themselves, wouldn't present such confounders.
Point 2 (a person deserves his problem if there were steps he could’ve taken to prevent his problem) is obviously wrong if you stop to think about it even a little bit.
Let’s say someone was murdered while walking in a dark alleyway at night. He could have not done that and therefore not be murdered. Does he deserve to be murdered?
Another example would be laws. If there’s a law against criticizing the government, one could avoid punishment by not criticizing the government, yet someone who does clearly doesn’t deserve the punishment.
I think this is less "thinking a little bit" and more "thinking a lot about how to uncharitably understand reasonableness as something not involving foreseeable or even plausible consequences of actions". And if the claim is about foreseeable consequences of your actions, the law example proves trivial to contend with. Resisting an arrest for an unjust charge can be bad AND the law itself being enforced can be bad. These are not selfevidently incompatible positions, there are two different actions to evaluate here and both can reach the same conclusion.
When did I ever bring up resisting arrest? All I said was that the hypothetical person doesn’t deserve the punishment for committing the crime, despite said punishment being a forseeable consequence of an action they could have chosen not to take. I never said that they resisted arrest or did anything other than criticize the government. It’s a simple proof by counterexample.
If we're in the game of using intuition pumps to evaluate morality, turnabout is fair play. I brought up resisting arrest because it presents us an example where a common intuition is that you do, in fact, deserve punishment regardless of the merits of the law being enforced. I'm reminded of Randy Barnetts distinction between legitimacy and justice here, but regardless, I don't think it's so obviously wrong (your words) given that it doesn't seem to generalize. In fact, civil disobedience is hardly uncontroversial itself. Foreseeability seems to me to play a much more strident and even dispositive role.
So people who engage in civil disobedience against unjust laws deserve to suffer whatever consequences arise? That’s a very strange use of the word deserve. Most people would say that even if they brought it on themselves, said consequences are an unfortunate reality, not something they deserve to experience . “Deserve” to me means that it is desirable that the person experiences it, that the world is better if this person gets what they deserve. We don’t say people who go out alone at night “deserve to die”, we say murderers “deserve to die”. We only prescribe suffering as desirable or “deserved” when someone has done something morally wrong. This suggests that point 2 in the original post is a poor fit for how we use the word deserve.
I note you dropped "reasonable" from the quote.
I also note that you admix situations largely under one person's control with a situation under two people's control in your walking down a dark alleyway example. The person making the decision to walk down the dark alley is adding risk, true, and if he say slipped on some garbage and fell, breaking his arm in the process, one might say he deserved it as he could have walked somewhere with enough light to see yet chose to walk in a more risky area.
However, getting murdered is in general not something people deserve, because humans are not supposed to murder humans. The murderer is clearly using his agency and improperly. You can't assess a moral situation involving two people and treat one of the primary actors as having no more agency than a force of nature and arrive at correct moral intuitions.
You could add in “reasonable” to my quote and my argument would remain unchanged. We know it isn’t necessarily likely that going in a dark alleyway at night would result in death, but it is plausible. One could reasonably choose to take a detour that goes through safer streets. Likewise with the legal example, if you know the consequences for breaking the law, not doing so is a reasonable choice.
As for your other objection, if you think there are ANY other factors than “could they have reasonably prevented this” involved in determining whether someone deserves their problem, your issue is with Caplan’s definition, not with my counterargument.
No, no, your counter argument still ignores the issue of other people’s agency and whether their behavior is itself reasonable or proper.
In my opinion, "Deserve" is a spectrum. If the only thing the person did wrong was walk alone at night, that's still on the "did not deserve it" end, because it was one relatively reasonable mistake. But they did deserve it more than someone whose house was broken into when asleep.
I think even this is objectionable. I would say that neither of them deserved it at all, because whether you deserve something is a matter of the moral choices you have made, not a matter of whether or not you could have prevented it. That’s why we don’t say that people who go out alone at night “deserve to die”, but we do say murderers “deserve to die”.
If you disagree, I would ask: does a soldier who willingly enlists in the army deserve to die? (Assume for our purposes that the war being fought is something morally unobjectionable, like fighting Nazi Germany or something.) Anyone who does that is very aware that death is a forseeable consequence to that action, but I doubt anyone would say that means they deserve death.
Let's replace "deserve to die" with the phrase "have a societal priority in making sure they live".
Does a person who walks alone at night in bad neighborhoods have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, a pretty big one, but not absolute. It's quite bad when innocents ever die, but costs of policing bad neighborhoods are pretty high.
Does a person who is sleeping soundly in bed with their doors locked have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, a huge one. One of the top priorities of any civilization should be in stopping that kind of chaos.
Does a soldier who enlists have a societal priority in making sure they live? Yes, still a moderate one, we don't throw away lives like garbage. But it's not an emergency if it happens. It's expected it'll happen, especially in pursuit of strategic objectives.
I think it can be very hard to determine if there were "reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem". If he is poor then he could have picked himself up by his bootstraps and gotten job. But what if he was born physically or mentally disabled in a way that makes it impossible to get a job? Are there reasonable steps he could have taken to prevent himself from being born with that handicap? Almost certainly not.
But what about the man who is not obviously physically or mentally handicapped? Then surely he could have taken reasonable steps to get a job. Easy for someone who happened to be born with a lucky combination of genes and environment to foster job-getting abilities- not so easy for someone with less a less luckily combination.
Ultimately we are all somewhere on the luckiness scale and none of us can take credit or assign blame for where we or someone else lands on that scale. Everything we do and everyone else does is ultimately driven by luck. If you think your high agency means that you can transcend luck, then you are just not looking deep enough because it was only luck that gave you the ability to be high agency.
I think a much better principal is to simply try to incentivize outcomes that we prefer. Still hard, but at least avoids anyone having to try to judge what is "reasonable" for someone else to do.
"Everything we do and everyone else does is ultimately driven by luck."
I don't think you have fully thought through the implications of this claim, or compared it to reality to see if it really lines up. For instance, it implies that no one can plan and execute any sort of forward looking process with any level of success, unless the probabilities are so high that it turns into "if someone chooses X outcome Y will almost always happen" which then moves away from it being all luck and down to choice again. Otherwise you get things like "I meant to post a comment on a blog, but ended up sending my credit card info to a cousin I never knew I had in Beirut. Isn't luck crazy?" on a fairly regular basis. We don't see that, so there are clearly many predictable regularities in how things work with high enough probabilities that we get to choose across ranges of outcomes, even if luck plays a role.
This treatment of "luck" reads to me as more explosive for any assignment of agency, and thus moral evaluations based on actions, than you seem to think it is. For one, I don't see why the nebulousness of the extent of someone's discretion doesn't also apply to luck, and thus the descriptive validity of the premise you're judging the moral evaluation by. It doesn't strike me as obvious that actions being more difficult by virtue of limiting circumstances obviates moral consideration, unless it limits the ability to choose between *available* options, rather than merely limiting the choice set. The options could be randomly assembled and the choice itself could still be at least a weight in consideration.
I for one would love to see any legal system operate without semi-arbitrary reasonableness standards. Any endangerment charge or tort is dead in the water without it. Reasonableness may itself be one of the things we want to incentivize, not merely all of the innumerate behaviors it leads to.
I fully agree in practice - it is generally more productive to help someone who is capable of taking the "reasonable steps". I am hesitant, however, on the moral aspect. Attributing blame/saying someone "deserves" their poverty implies a degree of free will which is unlikely to exist.
Its is very difficult, and against our deep intuitions, but the sympathy we feel should be based on the outcome. The ability/psychology of that individual must however influence the way we as society treat that individual.
If someone complains about not making the rent, and they smoke, drink, or do drugs, their priorities are not mine and I won't help them, whether relative, friend, or stranger.
This "morality" and "deserve" are taken too literally and as if they have clear objective universal meanings.
Why should the sympathy we feel be based on the outcome and not also such things as intent, foreseeable consequences, adherence to custom, etc.? We often feel people deserve outcomes they don't actually get, which is what we mean by "They had that coming" when the outcome we feel they deserve happens.
Looks good to this former Bernie voter. I look forward to seeing where this goes.
I don’t share the same intuition on point 4.
Someone not taking steps to fix their poverty does imply that giving them help is morally wrong.
I have an aunt who feeds all the stray cats in her neighborhood. She is wrong to do so.
I think the response would be that the feeding strays example has confounders like negative externalities. Helping someone who is comatose, and thus cannot either take or forgo any choices to help themselves, wouldn't present such confounders.
I would not consider a person who is simply comatose, through no fault of their own, to be deserving of their poverty.
Agreed. That's the reason I used it as an example. I'm saying Bryan's view may be compatible with your own, that I think you misunderstood 4.
Wasn't there a book on this topic planned? Did I miss it?
Agree. My sympathies would go overwhelmingly towards the “undeserving poor”.
Look forward to next post on how this translates into policy.