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Thesis Nobody deserves their talents, and that settles more about pay than people admit

Pieter de Jong Fellow
· 6 replies · 156 views
JusticeAnalyticJohn RawlsRobert Nozick#desert#moral-arbitrariness#natural-lottery#talent
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Where it stands

I'm a machine learning engineer in Utrecht and I am paid a lot, mostly because a fairly rare combination of mathematical aptitude and programming skill is in demand right now. I want to argue a thesis that applies to me personally.

I did not earn my aptitude. It came from genes I didn't pick and parents who read to me, a good Dutch school, and the luck of being born when this skill happened to be valuable. Rawls's claim is that the distribution of natural talent is morally arbitrary, and he goes further: even the willingness to make an effort, he says, depends heavily on fortunate family and social circumstances. That second claim is the one people resist, and the one I think is true. My diligence is as much a gift as my aptitude.

If that is right, then my salary does not track anything I deserve in the deep sense. It tracks scarcity. Scarcity can justify paying me more if that serves a purpose, as Rawls's difference principle allows, but it cannot justify the belief that I have earned the difference in a way that makes redistribution an injustice to me.

Since I spend my days with deterministic code, I'm perhaps biased towards thinking nobody deserves anything in the strongest sense. I'd like to hear the best case against.

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6 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Dima Nasser

    For Fellow

    For. I've used a wheelchair since a car accident at fourteen. The natural lottery is not an abstraction to me; it changed in one evening. I knew people before and after who worked exactly as hard. What changed was what their effort could produce in a world built for some bodies. If talent and its rewards are deserved, then so is my loss of them, and I refuse that conclusion.

    Helpful · 1

Against the thesis 3

  1. Kwame Asante

    Against Fellow

    Against, in part. Nozick has a short reply that I think is stronger than it looks: whether or not people's natural assets are arbitrary from a moral point of view, they are entitled to them and to what flows from them. Desert and entitlement are different. You don't deserve your kidneys, but they're yours.

    There's also a worry about where your argument ends. If every feature of me, my talent, my effort, my character, is a gift of circumstance, then there's no "me" left to be the bearer of claims. Rawls is accused of not taking the separateness of persons seriously in exactly this way.

  2. Tomasz Wójcik

    Against Fellow

    Against the inference, not the premise. Grant that nobody deserves their talents. It doesn't follow that society may dispose of the fruits as it likes; that needs another premise. Rawls actually sees this. He doesn't base the difference principle on desert at all. He distinguishes desert from legitimate expectations: once fair institutions exist, people are entitled to what those institutions promise them for their contributions. So your salary is neither deserved nor undeserved. It's legitimately expected, if the rules are just. That's a weaker thesis than yours.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Gerrit Venter

    Against Fellow

    Against, from thirty years coaching rugby. I accept that talent is luck. Some boys are born fast. But I've watched slow boys train every morning in the cold for three years to earn a place. You can tell me their discipline came from good fathers, and sometimes it did, but sometimes it came from nothing I could see and against every circumstance. If you explain that away too, you've stopped describing people and started describing weather. I'll grant you talent. Leave me effort.

    1. Pieter de Jong

      Fellow

      Gerrit, I can't fully answer that, and I'm not sure I want to. I'll settle for this: effort deserves respect regardless of where it comes from. Whether it deserves a salary forty times another person's is a separate question, and that's the one my thesis was about.

      Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    Kwame, the kidney analogy is good, but notice it's about bodies, not market returns. Nobody pays me rent on my kidneys. The question is whether I'm entitled to whatever price the market sets for my aptitude this decade. Tomasz, the legitimate expectations point is exactly right, and I accept the correction: my thesis should be about desert, not about what I may keep under fair rules.

    Helpful · 3