On the flipside, egalitarian instincts (e.g. “justice and liberty for all”, “all men are created equal”) are often deemed desirable, even though many a times “deserve” stems from such concepts of how a society should supposedly be like, “what kind of society I want to live in”.
There is a tension between decrying “deserve” as harmful, while e.g. espousing the (in many cases) egalitarian instincts they stem from (“I should have as many tech toys as my neighbor”, “I’m trying to keep up with the Joneses”, etc.).
I think this is a different flavor of deserving. Stabilizer is using deserve to explain how people got into the current situation while you’re using it to describe desirable future situation. The danger is assuming that because we are capable of acting in a way that gives people what they deserve, that in all situations someone must have already done so, so everyone must have acted in such a way that they have earned their present circumstances through moral actions.
The concept of “deserve” is only harmful to the extent people apply it to things they don’t in fact deserve. In this respect, it’s no different from the concept of “truth”.
On the flipside, egalitarian instincts (e.g. “justice and liberty for all”, “all men are created equal”) are often deemed desirable, even though many a times “deserve” stems from such concepts of how a society should supposedly be like, “what kind of society I want to live in”.
There is a tension between decrying “deserve” as harmful, while e.g. espousing the (in many cases) egalitarian instincts they stem from (“I should have as many tech toys as my neighbor”, “I’m trying to keep up with the Joneses”, etc.).
I think this is a different flavor of deserving. Stabilizer is using deserve to explain how people got into the current situation while you’re using it to describe desirable future situation. The danger is assuming that because we are capable of acting in a way that gives people what they deserve, that in all situations someone must have already done so, so everyone must have acted in such a way that they have earned their present circumstances through moral actions.
The concept of “deserve” is only harmful to the extent people apply it to things they don’t in fact deserve. In this respect, it’s no different from the concept of “truth”.