Upvoted, but I would note that it’s interesting to see a moral value listed in a (supposedly value-neutral) “bad concepts repository”. The idea that “deserve” in the sense in which you mention is a harmful and meaningless concept is a rather consequentialist notion, and seeing this so highly upvoted says something about the ethics that this community has adopted—and if I’m right in assuming that a lot of the upvoters probably thought this a purely factual confusion with no real ethical element, then it says a bit about the moral axioms that we tend to take for granted.
Again, not saying this as a criticism, just as something that I found interesting.
E.g. part of my morality used to say that if I only deserved some pleasures in case I had acted in the right ways or was good enough: and this had nothing to do with a consequentialist it-is-a-way-of-motivating-myself-to-act-right logic, it was simply an intrinsic value that I would to some extent have considered morally right to have even if possessing it was actively harmful. Somebody coming along and telling me that “in reality, your value is not grounded in any concrete mechanism” would have had me going “well, in that case your value of murder being bad is not grounded in any concrete mechanism either”. (A comment saying that “the concept of murder can be harmful, since in reality there is no mechanism for determining what’s murder” probably wouldn’t have been upvoted.)
Upvoted, but I would note that it’s interesting to see a moral value listed in a (supposedly value-neutral) “bad concepts repository”. The idea that “deserve” in the sense in which you mention is a harmful and meaningless concept is a rather consequentialist notion, and seeing this so highly upvoted says something about the ethics that this community has adopted—and if I’m right in assuming that a lot of the upvoters probably thought this a purely factual confusion with no real ethical element, then it says a bit about the moral axioms that we tend to take for granted.
Again, not saying this as a criticism, just as something that I found interesting.
E.g. part of my morality used to say that if I only deserved some pleasures in case I had acted in the right ways or was good enough: and this had nothing to do with a consequentialist it-is-a-way-of-motivating-myself-to-act-right logic, it was simply an intrinsic value that I would to some extent have considered morally right to have even if possessing it was actively harmful. Somebody coming along and telling me that “in reality, your value is not grounded in any concrete mechanism” would have had me going “well, in that case your value of murder being bad is not grounded in any concrete mechanism either”. (A comment saying that “the concept of murder can be harmful, since in reality there is no mechanism for determining what’s murder” probably wouldn’t have been upvoted.)