Academic

Moral Luck in the News

By Lawrence Solum

Neal Tognazzini of Garden of Forking Paths offers a link to Chris Colin's No Offense, but You Don't Deserve Your Salary from the San Francisco Chronical:

When money or other tokens of success are given to us, it's supposedly because we did something to deserve them. But what did we do? The abstract concept of deserving our livings is so built-in that we don't much question it, not outside of freshman-year dorm rooms, anyway. Work equals money, duh. I live by this premise like everyone else, but it bugs me that I can't defend it.

You, for instance, with the prestigious banking job. You might argue that you went to school, put in long Saturday nights at the library and made great sacrifices to get this job, and indeed that you continue to put in hard work. Or you, with the groovy sculpture commission, after all those years toiling in obscurity: Surely your creativity and perseverance have earned you this minor recompense allotted by our society.

But I argue that we do these things because we were taught to. Or because we inherited certain genes. Or because life conspired to put us on the track that led here. So what if our work ethic is better than that of the guy down the hall? Any talents, work ethic, intelligence or ambition strike me as qualities we inherited or learned along the way ? or else cultivated thanks to other qualities we inherited or learned. A person who pulls herself up by her bootstraps, in other words, is a person lucky enough to have that determination, grit, inclination, whatever.

So given the capricious and arbitrary nature of this arrangement, isn't it capricious and arbitrary whatever rewards we get? Or don't get, for that matter: If we were unlucky enough to have been born in a poor, starving village in Africa, could anyone say that we didn't deserve material comforts?

Dana Nelkin's entry on Moral Luck in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a more philosophical take!  Bernard William's famous essay is available in his collection of essays entitled Moral Luck.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).