“Everyone gets what they deserve” is the unironic (and secular) motto of a close family friend who is wealthy in Brazil, one of the countries with the greatest levels of economic inequality in the world. I have heard the sentiment echoed widely among the upper and upper middle class. Maybe it’s not as extreme as that, but it is a clear expression of the idea that unfortunate people deserve their misfortune to the point that those who have the resources to help them should not bother. This sentiment also characterizes Objectivism, which is commonly (though not always) associated with libertarianism.
You misunderstand Rand’s Objectivism. It’s not that people who bad-luck into a bad situation deserve that situation. Nor do people who good-luck into a good situation deserve that reward. You only deserve what you work for. That is Objectivism, in a nutshell. If I make myself a useful person, I don’t owe my usefulness to anyone, no matter how desperate their need. That may look like you’re saying the desperate deserve their circumstances, but that is just the sort of fallacy Eliezer was writing about in the OP.
Where libertarian political theory relates to Objectivism is in the way the government often oversteps its bounds in expecting successful people to do extra work to help others out. Many libertarians are quite charitable—they just don’t want the government forcing them to be so.
You misunderstand Rand’s Objectivism. It’s not that people who bad-luck into a bad situation deserve that situation. Nor do people who good-luck into a good situation deserve that reward. You only deserve what you work for. That is Objectivism, in a nutshell.
You only deserve what you work for—do you get what you deserve? If you don’t, then what purpose does the word “deserve” serve? If you do get what you deserve, how come the world looks like it’s full of people work for something, deserve it, and don’t get it?
I’m only trying to correct the comment’s incorrect assertions about objectivism and libertarianism. To address your comment, I’ll start by pointing out Objectivism is a system of ethics, a set of rules for deciding how to treat other people and their stuff. It’s not a religion, so it can’t answer questions like “Why do some people who work hard and live right have bad luck?”
So, I will assume you are saying that people who work hard in our society seem to you to systematically fail to get what they work for. To clarify my comment, objectivism says you only deserve to get what you work for from other people. That is, you don’t in any way deserve to receive from others what they didn’t already agree to pay you in exchange for your work.
But, some people can’t find anyone to pay them to work. Some can’t work at all. Some can sell their work, but can’t get enough to make a living. Because of the size and complexity of our society, there are huge numbers of people who have these problems. Sometimes it’s their fault—maybe they goofed off in high school or college—but often it’s not. If we were cavemen, we’d kick them out of the cave and let them starve, but we’re not. We have multiple safety mechanisms, also because of the size and complexity of our society, through neighbors, schools, churches, and local, state and national governments, that help most people through hard times. The fact that I’m OK with governments being in that sentence is a major reason I can’t call myself a strict Objectivist, but I’m still more a libertarian than anything else, politically. I think the ideal is that no one should fall through our safety nets, but there will always be people who do, just like the mother of five in the OP.
And when everyone is having a harder time than usual, more people will fall through the safety nets.
And if your problem is with whole nations of people who seem to work hard for very little, well, I probably agree with you, and our beef is with the history of colonialism.
“To clarify my comment, objectivism says you only deserve to get what you work for from other people. That is, you don’t in any way deserve to receive from others what they didn’t already agree to pay you in exchange for your work.”
Although it might work as a system of ethics (or not, depending on your ethics), this definitely doesn’t function as a system of economics. First of all, it makes the question of wealth creation a chicken-and-egg problem: If every individual A only deserves to receive what individual B agrees to pay them for work X, how did individual B obtain the wealth to pay A in the first place?
The answer is probably that you can also work for yourself, creating wealth that did not exist without anyone paying you. So your equation, as you’ve expressed it, does not quite balance. You’re missing a term.
Wealth creation is very much a physical thing, which makes it hard to tie to an abstract system of ethics. The wealth created by work X is the value of X; whether it’s the food grown from the earth, or the watch that has been assembled from precisely cut steel, glass, and silicon. That is the wealth that is added to the pool by labour and ingenuity, regardless of how it gets distributed or who deserves to get paid for it. And that wealth remains in the system, until the watch breaks or the food spoils (or gets eaten; it’s harder to calculate the value of consumed food). It might lose its value quickly, or it might remain a treasure for centuries after the death of every individual involved in the creation of that wealth, like a work of art. It might also be destroyed by random chance well before its predicted value has been exploited.
Who deserves to benefit from the wealth that was created by the work of, and paid for by, people who have been dead for generations? The question of who deserves to benefit from the labour X, and how much, becomes very tricky when the real world is taken into account...
One might argue that that is what Wills are for, but a Will is usually a transfer of wealth in exchange for no work at all. Does an individual morally deserve their inheritance, even if they didn’t work at all for it?
It also gets tricky when the nature of humans as real people and not abstract entities is taken into account. People are born helpless, have finite lifespans, and their lifespans are in some way a function of their material posessions. A child is not physically capable of executing much labour, and will die without access to food and water. If children are treated as individuals, then no child deserves to live, because no child can perform the work to pay for their upbringing. Unless they are signed into a loan, but this would need to be done before they have the decision-making capacity to enter a contract.
But the mortality of people is still an issue. A human cannot physically survive zero wealth for more than a few days. So a human on the edge of poverty cannot realistically negotiate a contract either, because the party that offers them pay has infinite bargaining power. One might argue that they don’t need bargaining power if there is competition between multiple individuals offering contracts, which will drive the contract toward something reasonable. But again that abstraction ignores reality—this individual will die after a few days of no food, and even the process of competitive bidding for contracts takes time.
In this case, a person with little wealth will do work X in exchange for very little pay, much less than the value of X, and in practice just enough to keep them alive enough to continue to do X the following day. But simply because that is what they agreed to receive (due to their inability to reject the deal), does that mean that is what they morally deserve to receive?
Finally, some goods are just too difficult (computationally) to manage as contracts between individuals. The value of the resource might not even be presently known by science, although it exists (for example, the economic value of an intact ecosystem). The trespasses and exchanges might be so frequent and poorly documented that the consumption of the resource cannot be managed by legal contracts between owners and licensees (for example, the air we breathe).
“Everyone gets what they deserve” is the unironic (and secular) motto of a close family friend who is wealthy in Brazil, one of the countries with the greatest levels of economic inequality in the world. I have heard the sentiment echoed widely among the upper and upper middle class. Maybe it’s not as extreme as that, but it is a clear expression of the idea that unfortunate people deserve their misfortune to the point that those who have the resources to help them should not bother. This sentiment also characterizes Objectivism, which is commonly (though not always) associated with libertarianism.
Sounds like our good friend the just-world fallacy.
You misunderstand Rand’s Objectivism. It’s not that people who bad-luck into a bad situation deserve that situation. Nor do people who good-luck into a good situation deserve that reward. You only deserve what you work for. That is Objectivism, in a nutshell. If I make myself a useful person, I don’t owe my usefulness to anyone, no matter how desperate their need. That may look like you’re saying the desperate deserve their circumstances, but that is just the sort of fallacy Eliezer was writing about in the OP.
Where libertarian political theory relates to Objectivism is in the way the government often oversteps its bounds in expecting successful people to do extra work to help others out. Many libertarians are quite charitable—they just don’t want the government forcing them to be so.
You only deserve what you work for—do you get what you deserve? If you don’t, then what purpose does the word “deserve” serve? If you do get what you deserve, how come the world looks like it’s full of people work for something, deserve it, and don’t get it?
I’m only trying to correct the comment’s incorrect assertions about objectivism and libertarianism. To address your comment, I’ll start by pointing out Objectivism is a system of ethics, a set of rules for deciding how to treat other people and their stuff. It’s not a religion, so it can’t answer questions like “Why do some people who work hard and live right have bad luck?”
So, I will assume you are saying that people who work hard in our society seem to you to systematically fail to get what they work for. To clarify my comment, objectivism says you only deserve to get what you work for from other people. That is, you don’t in any way deserve to receive from others what they didn’t already agree to pay you in exchange for your work.
But, some people can’t find anyone to pay them to work. Some can’t work at all. Some can sell their work, but can’t get enough to make a living. Because of the size and complexity of our society, there are huge numbers of people who have these problems. Sometimes it’s their fault—maybe they goofed off in high school or college—but often it’s not. If we were cavemen, we’d kick them out of the cave and let them starve, but we’re not. We have multiple safety mechanisms, also because of the size and complexity of our society, through neighbors, schools, churches, and local, state and national governments, that help most people through hard times. The fact that I’m OK with governments being in that sentence is a major reason I can’t call myself a strict Objectivist, but I’m still more a libertarian than anything else, politically. I think the ideal is that no one should fall through our safety nets, but there will always be people who do, just like the mother of five in the OP.
And when everyone is having a harder time than usual, more people will fall through the safety nets.
And if your problem is with whole nations of people who seem to work hard for very little, well, I probably agree with you, and our beef is with the history of colonialism.
“To clarify my comment, objectivism says you only deserve to get what you work for from other people. That is, you don’t in any way deserve to receive from others what they didn’t already agree to pay you in exchange for your work.”
Although it might work as a system of ethics (or not, depending on your ethics), this definitely doesn’t function as a system of economics. First of all, it makes the question of wealth creation a chicken-and-egg problem: If every individual A only deserves to receive what individual B agrees to pay them for work X, how did individual B obtain the wealth to pay A in the first place?
The answer is probably that you can also work for yourself, creating wealth that did not exist without anyone paying you. So your equation, as you’ve expressed it, does not quite balance. You’re missing a term.
Wealth creation is very much a physical thing, which makes it hard to tie to an abstract system of ethics. The wealth created by work X is the value of X; whether it’s the food grown from the earth, or the watch that has been assembled from precisely cut steel, glass, and silicon. That is the wealth that is added to the pool by labour and ingenuity, regardless of how it gets distributed or who deserves to get paid for it. And that wealth remains in the system, until the watch breaks or the food spoils (or gets eaten; it’s harder to calculate the value of consumed food). It might lose its value quickly, or it might remain a treasure for centuries after the death of every individual involved in the creation of that wealth, like a work of art. It might also be destroyed by random chance well before its predicted value has been exploited.
Who deserves to benefit from the wealth that was created by the work of, and paid for by, people who have been dead for generations? The question of who deserves to benefit from the labour X, and how much, becomes very tricky when the real world is taken into account...
One might argue that that is what Wills are for, but a Will is usually a transfer of wealth in exchange for no work at all. Does an individual morally deserve their inheritance, even if they didn’t work at all for it?
It also gets tricky when the nature of humans as real people and not abstract entities is taken into account. People are born helpless, have finite lifespans, and their lifespans are in some way a function of their material posessions. A child is not physically capable of executing much labour, and will die without access to food and water. If children are treated as individuals, then no child deserves to live, because no child can perform the work to pay for their upbringing. Unless they are signed into a loan, but this would need to be done before they have the decision-making capacity to enter a contract.
But the mortality of people is still an issue. A human cannot physically survive zero wealth for more than a few days. So a human on the edge of poverty cannot realistically negotiate a contract either, because the party that offers them pay has infinite bargaining power. One might argue that they don’t need bargaining power if there is competition between multiple individuals offering contracts, which will drive the contract toward something reasonable. But again that abstraction ignores reality—this individual will die after a few days of no food, and even the process of competitive bidding for contracts takes time.
In this case, a person with little wealth will do work X in exchange for very little pay, much less than the value of X, and in practice just enough to keep them alive enough to continue to do X the following day. But simply because that is what they agreed to receive (due to their inability to reject the deal), does that mean that is what they morally deserve to receive?
Finally, some goods are just too difficult (computationally) to manage as contracts between individuals. The value of the resource might not even be presently known by science, although it exists (for example, the economic value of an intact ecosystem). The trespasses and exchanges might be so frequent and poorly documented that the consumption of the resource cannot be managed by legal contracts between owners and licensees (for example, the air we breathe).