The Philosophy of 'You didn't build that'

What’s more, it doesn’t particularly matter to utilitarians whether people give the money away voluntarily or if the government takes it from them, as utilitarians do not believe that people have inalienable rights, such as a right against excessive taxation. NYU’s Sam Scheffler, whose view combined elements of “high liberalism” and consequentialism, has expressed concern that the unpopularity of desert among liberals in political philosophy disconnects the discipline from real political debates about welfare, crime and other issues, where responsibility and desert matter a great deal.

Funnily enough, the main proponents of a robust idea of desert within academic political philosophy are luck egalitarians, who are arguably the most left-wing contingent in real world political terms, seeing as they support eliminating inequalities in wealth due to differences in intelligence. This school, which includes the late G.A. Cohen of Oxford and UC San Diego’s Richard Arneson, argues that it is morally imperative to minimize the degree to which people’s life outcomes are attributable to luck. And, if determinism is true, more or less everything is a matter of luck. This is why luck egalitarians generally reject determinism in favor of “metaphysical libertarianism” – the confusing term for the position that free will and determinism cannot be reconciled, and free will exists. In his classic essay, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Cohen wrote (pdf), ”We may indeed be up to our necks in the free will problem, but that is just tough luck. It is not a reason for not following the argument where it goes.”

Many right-leaning political philosophers reject the idea of desert as well. The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick supported limited government because he thought government coercion was almost always an impingement upon individual rights, not because he thought rich people deserved what they got. At most, he believed that in virtue of their rights, people deserved not to be denied what they earned through “acts of capitalism between consenting adults.” He in fact argued aggressively against those who would have the government distribute goods to people based upon what it judged they deserved.

First Principle

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.


Second Principle

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:

(a) to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle and,
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Rawls world = Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron.