Deserving. What does it mean?
We always try to gauge what we deserve and what others deserve, but how is any such thing measured objectively? Do we deal in just more or less than one another or can we find real world measurable things to compare in reference to deservingness? We certainly live different lives and experience different outcomes, but can we ever really determine we deserve our lot in life?
Comments (46)
you deserve the freedom to be human, which includes fair trade of work and goods
I suppose there's an element of justice involved - one must evaluate (judge) who/what deserves whom/what. There's also fairness, another concept allied to justice, to consider. May the best man win! Meritocracy is the cornerstone of deservedness.
To mess up this fantatastic system, guaranteed to make both winners and losers happy/content, we have the deadly duo: lady luck and nepotism.
[quote=Louis Pasteur]Fortune Favors the prepared mind.[/quote]
[quote=Some Guy]Fortune Favors the bold.[/quote]
"Imagine Sisyphus happy – amor fati!"
:100: :strong:
What about that science teacher who gave me a 70 instead of a 90 on my project in sixth grade because he thought it would push me harder? Wouldn't I be deserving of a 90?
I am not sure what the 'we', presented by you amounts to. If you are referring to the laws set up to arbitrate disputes between various claims of right and injury, the possibility that arbitrary decisions will be made without regard to more refined senses of justice is exactly why those institutions came into being.
'We' came to a limit to what could be understood in the dealings between persons and came up with a system to carry on despite that insight not being available to an 'us.'
Even criminals who committed heinous crimes?
So nobody deserves a punishment?
Who are they? And if they can't avoid it? What does it mean?
"They" is anyone. If "they" can't avoid it then "they" suffer the punishment. It means different things to different people. I just don't like the word "deserve." Some equate it with justice, or karma, or whatever. On the non-punishment side, some folks say X deserves to be treated positively. Or everyone deserves a medal. But all that entails judgement. And judgement is subjective. And shouldn't all judgement be placed into the context of an entire life, instead of one or more incidents? And who knows the entire life of another?
Does a deer "deserve" to be torn apart and eaten alive by a pack of wolves? No. But it doesn't not deserve it either. What about the pups back in the den? Do they deserve to eat? What differentiates the intraspecific relations of man from the inter- or intraspecific relations of any other animal(s)?
"Deserves got nothing to do with it." William Muny. It's just life. "Fair" is a subjective creation of our heart, sometimes shared, sometimes written, sometimes not.
Quoting James Riley
:fire: :cool:
:lol: :up: We're all a bunch of underseving lucky/unlucky bastards & bitches.
One deserves one's privilege.
One is lucky to get by.
The poor are always undeserving.
OR ...
Deserts in practice are about morality, not justice. We are all sinners and deserve hell but are redeemed by Christ. Everyone deserves a little kindness from their fellow sinners, and sinners are redeemed by the kindness they show their fellows through Christ.
Quoting Agent Smith
This is a recipe for irresponsibility and social collapse, much favoured by philosophers, and promulgated by the rich.
That doesn't make it false.
So, the domain of discourse isn't truth. Are we then discussing utility? Something else perhaps? Made-up worlds which we've constructed from scratch - mindscapes/ideaverses - which we then overlay on the world to, in a sense, make it human-friendly, more pro-life than it actually is. Imagined orders (vide Yuval Noah Harari)? Interesting to say the least. It's not about truth then, yet you talk of red pill/blue pill.
Good and evil are, quite possibly, (over)simplifications - thinking in binary (usually) makes life much easier. The clarity that it offers (yes/no, no maybe) must come at a price though but many, it seems, can afford it.
I disagree. I think that good and evil are subjective, and individual choice can be informed by truth. It's the idea that there must be some collective human agreement on what is good and what is evil that creates the rub. Even then, the collective can agree on something as good or evil without it being objectively so. That is where we get these funny notions of "justice" and "morality." These are legal or ethical fictions that, like truth, inform our conduct. But there is no objective deserve.
Wot me worry? If there are no values, there is no value to truth, and never mind the bollocks of object and subject.
You equate a lack of communal agreement on values with a lack of individual (subjective) appreciation of values. That is not the case. Just because I don't share your values doesn't mean I don't have any.
If you disagree with unenlightened, you are wrong. :lol:
I have no reason to believe you. and nothing more to say.
You just made my point against your point regarding the subjectivity of value.
I know you don't, but that does not matter.
Another question is, why do we gravitate toward consideration of a lack of deserving (the twin who suffered) instead of asking whether the other twin deserved to be suffering-free? What does one do to deserve to not suffer? And is this strictly a homo sapient thing? And if so, why?
Apparently there are bacteria inside our bodies, held at bay by life. As soon as we die, they have a field day. Do they deserve to suffer the wait? As to those who get to feast early, did they somehow deserve an early meal? Is the concept of "deserve" limited to humans? Why? If the dog performs, does it deserve a treat, but only if it learns something that we want to teach it?
Quoting James Riley
It matters to me.
I know it does. That's the subjectivity. :wink:
Well we aren't Gods. We barely have the capacity to consider human predicaments let alone all life.
While I bring up animals as a worthy comparison, my real goal in doing so is to have us reflect on any difference, and if there is none, then why us? In other words, humans are animals. Some folks like to think we are "better", "moral" "more worthy of deserves" etc. But, from an objective view, which is what I was getting at, we aren't more or less deserving of anything else. Good things happen to those who do and those who don't "deserve" them. Same with bad things. Thus rendering, in my mind, the concept of "deserves" to be of no moment. It means nothing, except maybe to me.
An analogy: Law only matters if it is enforced. Forget if it is enforced blindly, or justly. It must first be enforced to even matter. For there to be "deserves" then "deserves" must matter. But apparently "deserves" does not matter. At least not objectively. Deserves only matters subjectively, and there is no collective agreement on what is deserved; especially when taken out of the context of an entire life.
Quoting TiredThinker
You might indeed do that. Good luck for one, bad luck for the other, deserves, or not. But in either case we tend to consider in isolation, based upon limited, subjective knowledge. Most people see that person jumping/falling from the World Trade Centers and we think: "Innocent! They didn't deserve that!" But what of the woman that was beaten and raped by that man that morning? Karma? The child molested? Did Osama give that guy what he deserved?
How about the heir to a fortune? An heir who did exactly shit to "deserve" the fortune, compared to the guy who worked his ass off all his life, for nothing?
Deserves is too fickle to matter. It's like a Christian god. His worth is as ephemeral and foundational as is the concept of "deserves." Go get me a real god, or a real concept upon which to hang my hat.
Quoting unenlightened
Yeah, but the fact of the matter is that "the red pill" simply shows that choosing is illusory. "There is no spoon." :wink:
This doesn't follow. Some fictions have value (i.e. higher-priority – more adaptive – utility than disutility), and which ones do belong to particular forms-of-life.
Perhaps human animals are more needy than animal animals. Animal animals don't care about money or material things, and perhaps have fewer social needs. Only their health can be taken from them. Unless maybe they're a salamander and can bounce back really well.
Lets assume only humans matter for simplicity. Can we only assume fair or deserving exists objectively if our destiny is determined by a god? If our fortunes far differ that of an apparent equal, perhaps we can only assume things will equalize after life somehow? Or in non-Christian religions a karma judgement that somehow spans between lives?
Should my arguments follow?
Some fictions have fictional value? Is adaptive utility unreal? Well if you insist, I will concede that truth has real utility to social beings such as humans. "Humans deserve the truth" specifies the relation of the form of life to itself as a group. This is the foundation of justice and so on. Forgive me, I simply assumed, parochially, we were all human.
Indeed! :100:
Quoting TiredThinker
I don't think we can assume that. I don't think fair or deserving exists objectively, god or no god. I think it's subjective.
Quoting TiredThinker
In my personal opinion, I think death (maybe after a short transition period) brings us to the perception of what we are now, but do not perceive: Oneness with All. All (god, if you'd rather) is not concerned with subjectivity, except to the extent there are individual living aspects of it (i.e. us). So again, deserves got nothing to do with anything. It's a subjective construct which is subject to different interpretations, depending upon perspective: Predator/Prey. They both see "deserves" differently, unless they are objective about it. In which case, they roll with it.
Deserving is not objectively determined, but politically determined. I tend to look at Michael Sandel's 'Justice' when analyzing deserts, because A. he does not downplay the question of desert, and B. his account is historical and discursive instead of actuarial.
I think we cannot avoid questions of desert, even though we might disagree on the question of free will. We are creatures of value and we relate the actions of others to ourselves. We tend to value actions we consider virtuous and condemn those we consider vicious. what we consider virtuous is no constant matter but depends on the society in which we live and what it concerns virtuous. Those depend on political eliberation, custom, habit etc. That is not to reduce them to whim or to say they are 'merely' socially constructed. They are social constructions but they are necessary cnstructions nonetheless since valuation is I think part and parcel of our phenomenological 'embodied' experience of the world. As such some measures of desert seem to be more or less constant, even though they show a different face. We tend to value those that do not harm us and protect us over those who cause us pain.
Every society therefore has to engage in determining what virtues it tends to reward and what vices it tens to punish. A society that thrives on warlike traditions might reward military bravery and prowess while a society that thrives on trade and non violent conflict resolution might value persuason and argumentation. There is therefore no 'objective' in the sense of ahistorical way of determining deserts. What we can say though is that determining who deserves what is a necessarily political question and being cast out of the process, having no voice in other words, deprives you of some necessary feature of belonging to a society an therefore limiting of your 'being at home' in society.
I therefore disagree with @180 Proof when he states that deserving is just getting what you can take or what you cannot avoid. Even criminals might concur that there punishment was just even tough they tried hard to avoid it. Similarly, one feels the waiter deserves a tip, even though this is harmful to you and can easily be avoided. We tip even if we know we will never see the bar again. The reason is that we tend to value living virtuously, even though we not always do. Everyone does embrace values, even though that means limiting their own will. What we do want is our chance to reflec on them and to have a say in choosing them. We want the opportunity co command, instead of only following.
Luck! :broken:
Quoting Agent Smith
One doesn't always get what one deserves or deserve what one gets. Tant pis. It may or may not be the case that one has another life, or many others, in which the balance of deserts is restored, but in this life, (the one that begins with birth and ends with death) innocents are slaughtered and people get away with murder, occasionally. But this is a necessary feature of a moral world, that virtue is not rewarded and vice is not punished, otherwise the good life and the totally self-serving life would be the same, and even the devil would practice virtue. The justice system would like to make it so, but never entirely succeeds, and many religions try to do the same thing by inventing other realms, or other incarnations where the wrong'uns get their comeuppance and we saints are rewarded with endless virgins or cherubs according to taste.
:chin: It's true that some (all) definitions of a good person include an unwillingness to either expect or accept rewards for one's good acts and justice, in some formulations, recommend punishments less severe than the actual offenses (a disproprtion/imbalance in favor of the offender). Play around with that and your point of view emerges. It's, I have to admit, a very noble idea of what good and justice are. In fact what you've described qualifies for the title/label summum bonum.
I suppose we can break moral actions and their effects as follows:
1. The happiness/sadness they evoke in a person.
2. The appropriate actions such happiness/sorrow elicits in a person.
A truly good (altruist) person wants to make someone else happy (1) but blocks, attempts to at least, the appropriate response in kind, the reward (2).
Coming to justice, a person who has been wronged (1) doesn't want, at least has doubts about, payback (2) and refrains from, in a sense, equalizing the offense. Two wrongs don't make a right logic I believe.
Luck, described as "whatever did I do to deserve this?", is then true goodness in play. Nice!
What about luck of the other kind (lotteries/accidents - getting hit by a falling piano)? No human agency or if there is one, no intent, and so it can't be true goodness?