There’s Something About Desert.
Desert is an interesting notion. It tries to establish something about something, that something accrues to something or someone based upon something or other that is or is not done, performed, acted upon, interfered with, or the such, so that something or other is deserved in response.
It is an interesting notion because it is nonsensical.
Yet it is not an easy matter to show, or describe in what way, desert is a nonsense notion. Let us take a simple example. There is a two horse race. A comes first. B comes second. There is a medal for the winner. So in this sense it is meant that A deserves the medal. There is no doubt that A gets the medal. A finishes the race before B and the horse that finishes the race ahead of the other is given the medal. It seems that it is beyond dispute that A deserves the medal. But what does it mean to say that A “deserves” the medal. A is entitled to the medal, that is beyond dispute. Does being entitled to something connote being deserving of something? Is entitlement synonymous with desert? This is where the problem lays.
Desert seems to imply something intrinsic about the winner, not just that they won the race, but that they are especially deserving of reward. That there is a reward is unremarkable. It is like a contract. If A does such and such then A will be given such a thing. But this is an external event, not something intrinsic to A. Obviously A has greater speed than B. A may be bigger, or stronger, which makes it faster. But being faster is not in itself a deserving thing. It is only under the terms of the contract of the race that it entitles the faster horse to a reward. The horse is not simply deserving. It is not deserving at all. Nothing jumps out of it to say, “this deserves that.” It does something and is rewarded for it.
Desert is a name given to recognise that having performed according to the rules of some contract or other then that person or thing is entitled to something in return. It might be punishment for a bad act. It might be payment for services. Is it the act that is deserving; not the thing that acts, but the actual act? But you can only reward or punish an act by rewarding or punishing the actor. But is it desert at all? Is it something else, not something innate or intrinsic but simply recognising the legitimacy of a contract? A contract certainly has not a lot to do with the notion of desert. Perhaps it can be said that a contract ( a social contract, a legal contract, a terms of labour contract etc.) deserves to be fulfilled. If a man works for me for eight hours I am obliged to pay him for eight hours of work.
But it seems to me that those who proclaim desert as a basis for justice, say, are not simply saying that the contract deserves to be fulfilled, they are saying that if there was no contract there ought to be a contract, that certain people or things simply deserve what they get, at all times everywhere. And it is this notion of desert that I am concerned with.
What does “to deserve” mean? The Wiki dictionary defines it as
“Verb : deserve (third-person singular simple present deserves, present participle deserving, simple past and past participle deserved)
To be entitled to, as a result of past actions; to be worthy to have. After playing so well, the team really deserved their win. After what he did, he deserved to go to prison. This argument deserves a closer examination.”
The first meaning given above suggests a type of contract, much as in the way I have described, “to be entitled to” means that a relationship has to be recognised, an act has to be performed, something has to be done to entitle the doer to something in return. The second meaning, “to be worthy,” I think is closer to the idea of desert as something simply intrinsic the having of which bestows upon the haver the right to claim something that those who have this same thing might also rightfully claim. In this second case there is no contract, it is by virtue of their existence that they draw entitlement. It is this idea of desert that seems to me to be fundamentally flawed. And when we think that many (if not all) contracts are derived from some idea or sense of this second form of the notion of desert, it places the very word itself in jeopardy.
For instance, you are worthy if you have done your eight hours of work and are therefore entitled to be paid. Your worthiness is not a part of you, except insofar as you are the type of being that is likely to do your eight hours of work. But being the type of person who is likely to do eight hours of work is different to actually doing the work. If you did not do the work simply being a “likely type” would not do at all. If the faster horse was ridden so as to lose the race it would not merit the reward. The notion of desert seems to me to be self-defining, a tautology, you are deserving because you are deserving. But deserving of what? Where is it written that such and such will be rewarded with such and such? Surely if desert was a notion that had validity there would be something we could refer to, a set of scales or something, that showed us what entitlement accrued to what act? And yet there is not. It is a nonsense.
The notion of desert is ephemeral, it is not a thing like a cat or a dog that you can point at and describe. We have to put it into context in order to understand it at all. Take for example the statement, “We deserve better than this.” This is a simple statement that has a simple meaning. But how can it have a simple meaning if the idea of desert is a nonsense, if the very word “deserve” is nonsensical?
The notion of desert has arisen in political theory as a question about morality and ethics, of distributive justice, and also of retributive justice. John Rawls argues that there is no such thing as desert. We are not responsible for our natural attributes. Our attributes ought to be put to the collective good, so that all benefit from the skills or attributes of the individual. This seems to be a very communitarian ideal, and it has been refuted by several writers, not the least of which is Kekes. He argues the other extreme, that people are deserving, that we are entitled to the benefit derived from the employment of our skills. This is where desert becomes an important matter to discuss, to flesh out and to either vindicate, or dismiss.
The philosophy of egalitarianism is what drives Rawls’ view of desert. But it is also a philosophical reflection. To what extent are we responsible for our acts or attributes? We are either born that way, or we are educated and socialised that way. Either way, our independence as players seems compromised. Where does individual responsibility lie? But Rawls has a problem when it comes to retributive justice. Surely the criminal deserves to be punished? And if this is true, if the criminal can be held accountable for his or her actions, surely people can be held responsible for their good deeds? Rawls has to reject that criminals are responsible for their acts. But this is untenable. Even if criminals are not responsible for their criminality – they were born that way, their upbringing brought them to it – even so, they ought to be punished. I think at least that this is what most people would agree to. That punishment may be nothing more than a spot of rehabilitation. Retrain the errant child. Nonetheless it may entail a time of incarceration. And some people, as judges often contend, are untreatable, irredeemable. And it may only be for the safety of society that these people are locked up, not because they are deserving of being locked up, but because the general population deserves to be protected from criminality, from murder in the dark, so to speak.
So it may be able to be said that a criminal does not deserve punishment. We simply punish them for expediency, or for our own protection, or for their rehabilitation, but not because they are deserving of punishment. Most people, certainly Kekes, would reject this. In some way they are deserving of their punishment. But if they are deserving, someone must demonstrate what it is that is deserving. And as Rawls has demonstrated, this is no easy task.
The word deserve was derived from the Latin form of to serve, and this suggests that it is in recognition of service that a person or thing becomes deserving. So it is not simply a matter of being the fastest, it is working hard to be the fastest, making the most of your abilities, that would meet Kekes vision of justice as desert.
The problem for Keke is that many people simply do not get what they may be entitled to, whilst some people get much more than they are entitled to. And children are favoured depending on whom they are born to. Vast inequalities in wealth entrench social inequality, and favour some over others despite their lacking any inherent talent or attribute that makes them more deserving than another. The idea of desert must either be thrown out of the window, or else it has to be radicalised. So far I have attempted to throw it out of the window: now I am going to attempt to radicalise it.
The problem for Rawls is that by rejecting notions of desert people lose all responsibility for who they are, they stop being autonomous individuals who are actors on a stage, held to account for their successes and their failures, rewarded for their hard work and punished for bad behaviour. It simply flouts common sense to say we cannot be held accountable for what we do. If I murder somebody I don’t expect to get away scot free. If that was the case then somebody could simply murder me. This would not be a good world to live in. So there must be consequences for our acts, both good and bad. You cannot just have retributive justice. To recognise retributive justice is to recognise distributive justice as well. If I work hard and till my earth and sow my seed and reap my harvest I expect to enjoy the spoils, and not have the lazy man over the valley who has done nothing but drink wine all summer long come over after the harvest for his share. I will rightly show him the door, with nothing more than a beggar’s loaf as a parting gift. If he was incapacitated physically, rather than besotted by wine, I might be more forgiving and part with some of my hard earned wealth to help my poorer cousin who is unable to provide for himself. This is basically what taxation is, it is taking a part of my property and providing it for the general good of those who cannot care for themselves, or to provide infrastructure that can best be provided by a body working for the good of all, such as for roads and rail, to transport my goods to those who can pay the best price for them.
This is society as we know it, at least here in Australia. We punish criminality, we reward success and hard work, we provide welfare to those whom cannot support themselves. The problem is that this is not an end of it. It is a much more complex business. Twenty-one million people create a more complicated tale than the man in the valley. We have large disparities in wealth. We have homeless people begging in the streets. We have people paying two thirds of their incomes in rental accommodation. Our indigenous population suffers from unemployment, high incarceration rates, high mortality rates, and alcoholism and poor health. Our jails are full of people who have committed victimless crimes. The Big Australian, BHP, just made in excess of 22 billion dollars in profit. Actors are paid vast sums of money while the unemployed actor washing dishes earns next to nothing. People serving cappuccinos to the rich and powerful earn breadcrumbs in comparison. The working poor are basically servants of the wealthy class. It is just that they are not called servants in this day and age, but the roles remain the same as 100 and 200 years ago.
These inequalities draw Rawls to his conclusions, and his advocacy of justice as fairness. The simple reality is that a society based upon justice as desert, the type of society enjoyed by most western nations, under capitalist free market economy democracies, as we see today, is not a fair place to be. Rawls is right. Justice requires fairness, and the idea of desert seems to be absurd, and serves only to reinforce the inequalities of society, and seems to exist to this very end, to do this very thing, whilst promoting hard work and recognition of a person’s natural attributes it endorses privilege and an unequal playing field for the participants, the players, in society.
There is little doubt that Rawls’ justice as fairness advocates a communitarian society, and many people see this as undesirable, and likely to encourage laziness and sloth, and a lack in creating self-interest in creating wealth. Some people would argue that this would not be a bad thing. But I am going to argue on the basis that wealth generation serves the general good, and is a desirable outcome for a society, and for all societies. Given this, egalitarianism may not be a desirable goal for society. The problem is, how do we organise society so that it avoids the excesses of wealth disparity that the present situation (and past situations) have provided society.
It is important to avoid either/or here. There is plenty of room on the in-between. Justice as desert is an ethical question, and requires an ethical response. Reward and punishment are things we take for granted. And we ought not to deny the things we take for granted simply because they seem to be a nonsense. I don’t like the word deserve. I think it connotes too much. It is suggestive of something being there that is simply not there.
In many ways I see the idea of desert as being close to the other ephemeral idea of rights. Rights are a concept that many people recognise. But what after all is a human right? Where is it to be found? A person has the right not to be falsely accused. This is one right we might advocate. But where has it come from? Why have we decided on this right and not another? Isn’t it a fact that rights are simply human conventions to defend something that we think ought to be basic to a human life? But there is no formal human rights except those that are written down and encapsulated in law. They don’t exist of themselves. There is no real human right anywhere in the universe. Or if there is I haven’t seen it. We make them up. Human rights are made up. The only reality they have is the reality we give them. They may be greatly desirable to an intelligent and cultured society, to a progressive and modern society. They are after all quite a modern thing, a novelty of the twentieth century. It is we, in our recognition of them, that confer rights. We confer rights to the unborn, to the father, to the mother, to the child, to everyone generally, to the disabled, to women, and blacks, and Jews. But these rights only exist as something that has been given. Often they are something that have been given after they have been long fought for. Much human sacrifice goes into acquiring rights.
I think that we can argue, indeed I will argue, that much human sacrifice needs to go into determining what is an appropriate distribution of wealth within society. There is no book in which it is written what is appropriate, although some will refer to Smith and others will refer to Marx and Engels. These people wrote theories, nothing more. What many of these theories have glossed over is what happens when people are placed into an economic model. We do not all act the same way. Some people are self-interested. Others are self-sacrificing. And very many want only their due, as they see it, a fair days pay for a fair days work, and to enjoy their family and their assets as they seem appropriate, with relative freedom and independence from interference in the enjoyment of their things. They also want protection from the threat or actuality of interference, and to that end are willing to sacrifice some of their income to provide that protection. Over time the production of wealth in a free market economy creates disparities in wealth.
In some way you can say, at any given point in time, say at the beginning, as with Rawls’ curtain of ignorance, or with Hobbes’ State of Nature, everyone is as “deserving” as anyone else. We are all just here. We are all just people. But if you lift the curtain of ignorance, if you put us in the present instead of in a state of nature, we see that some people are enjoying the lives of kings and queens, of aristocracy, whilst others are living lives of squalor and hardship. How can this be right? It beggars comprehension that it can be right. CEO’s of failing companies are given millions of dollars in bonuses whilst a factory worker struggles to feed his or her family. The rich and powerful lead impossible lives in extravagant mansions with servants and housekeepers and nannies and the like while waitresses and prostitutes live in shabby housing with expensive utilities and not a penny to spare on their personal well being. Two children from disparate backgrounds live exceedingly different lives, and go on to have exceedingly different careers, one a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman and the other an itinerant or an alcoholic or a bar attendant. There is nothing remarkable about either of them. Their IQs might be very similar. The only difference is the lives that have brought them to adulthood, the education and socialisation they have received. There is nothing more deserving about the one or the other.
A doctor goes to work for eight hours as does a factory worker. Each works as hard as the other, each is tired at day’s end, but the difference is in the pay packet they bring home at the end of the week. And yet in the state of nature, in a state of grace, they would be equals among men. Behind the veil of ignorance they would each ensure that a measure of equality was ensured. But whip all of that away and it is not only they themselves that are bludgeoned by inequality, it is their partners and their children, and their children’s children. It is not something to be treated lightly or blithely.
People respect a society that respects them. People respect justice. When BHP makes a profit of twenty two billion dollars people have a right to raise an eyebrow, to ask questions. It festers discontent in the community. People feel powerless. The colossus that is the free market seems impossible to shift. And we have democracy. If we don’t like it we can always change the government. But we cannot change the systems that govern us. The systems are not just the political and legal institutions, they are the economic and social institutions, and it are these far and away that determine the inequalities of society. It is in the self-interest of those that are doing well to protect their doing wellness. And of course that is when the political and legal institutions suit them nicely. The nature of politics is to protect the status quo, as is the nature of the legal system. So their job, in effect, is to protect the inequality of a free market system. Somehow we have to shift this colossus, to reject justice as desert, and recommend a new ethical base for society. Even though justice as desert is not widely recognised as valid in the world of political philosophy, nonetheless it underpins the structures of modern civilisation. You can only reject that at your peril.
Why should Paul McCartney be worth one billion dollars? That is, why should Paul McCartney have assets of one thousand million dollars? One thousand million is quite a lot for someone who penned a few songs and sold a few records. The media is a circus that has its own momentum, its own code of ethics, and it values inequality. If everything was equal it would have nothing to write about. It makes absolutely crazy profits and celebrities profit quite well from it. There’s nothing like an endorsement or two to make Tiger Woods a very rich man. He sells products. People will sell their souls, or their baby’s soul, for the chance to win an Olympic gold medal, not because of the chance to be heralded the best at their chosen sport, but because of the rich prize of endorsement that follows. Win a gold medal and all anyone wants to talk about is how it has made you a very rich person indeed. The crocodile tears of the gold medallists who have been subsequently found guilty of cheating through the use of steroids etc., is laughable. They have already made their money. They lose nothing through later disqualification, which is why they do it, knowing that no punishment will rob them of the money to be gained from the use of these performance enhancing drugs. Sir Richard Branson is always smiling, and he has every right to. He is still smiling after his mansion burns to the ground. He can always rebuild it bigger and better next time.
I am not arguing that these people are not entitled to some reward for their effort. As I have previously said, I am here to argue that wealth creation is a good in itself, a good not just for the individual but for society as well. But it is the vastness of the wealth differential between rich and poor that surely has to be redressed if we are to encourage justice as an equal good in itself. This vast disparity, this vast accumulation of wealth by a very small percent of society, undermines the health and well-being of society overall. At least that is my contention. People argue that if we tax more strongly people will put in less effort. I think this argument has some potency if we were to maximise taxation so that everyone earned the same amount, to create a communitarian or egalitarian society. But few people argue for this. People argue for a fairer distribution of taxation. There is also the argument that comes from big business that if they are taxed at a higher rate in one country then they will take their business elsewhere. But if there was a general agreement between countries not to allow businesses to get away without paying tax this would not happen. Tougher restrictions on creating off shore tax havens, of taking assets out of a country, will also promote a fairer outcome. And calling their bluff, self-sacrificing, allowing a company to take its business away, so that everyone can more fairly share in the lesser but more even wealth of the future is also a brave and commendable move. If each country was prepared to do this businesses would soon find there was no off shore to go to. And even without this I believe that many businesses, very many businesses, faced with appropriate taxation measures, would still feel that business is better done at home than abroad.
In the eleven years of the Howard Government tax cuts to the rich were a yearly formality. Instead of promoting a fairer and more equal Australia, it promoted a more unequal and unfair society. Social infrastructure went backwards as government spending on social assets was slashed in order to fuel a deficit reduction strategy, but if the government was truly interested in deficit reduction rather than promoting inequality it could have kept tax cuts to the middle and low income earners. By lowering the tax free threshold for low and middle income earners (which did take place) the wealthiest already received a tax cut. To further cut their taxes by lowering the highest tax threshold at a time when civic services were being cut was in my view immoral and offensive. It meant that the poorest were receiving a less than adequate reduction in their taxes whilst the wealthiest were doing very well out of the Howard years. Peter Costello is overestimated in the Treasurer stakes. The Howard years were years of prosperity for the nation, but socially Australians were neglected, social housing receded like never before, transport became more of a problem rather than less, hospitals and schools were underfunded, and as Labour understood when it went to the election in 2007, there were productivity bottlenecks because our wharves and rail could not keep up with a growing export market.
Appropriate taxation is one of the hardest things to sell to a society. It connotes so much fear. An opposition has an easy job of it, simply by repeating over and over “Tax, tax, tax.” No-one likes taxes, but especially the rich. And the rich own the media. Can you imagine the media circus if a Government promoted an increase in taxation? We are already seeing it in Australia with the introduction of the Resources Rent Tax and the Carbon Tax. The Government is severely behind in the polls. And yet taxation reform, to provide for a more equal society, is required like never before. The profits that individuals and companies are making has become obscene. The easiest way to fix this is through an adequate taxation regime. But don’t tell the rich. Let me remind you again, one company, BHP, received twenty-two thousand million dollars more than they spent in expenses in 2010-11. This is a huge return on their investment. It is a super-profit, nothing less. No-one (not many) denies that BHP deserves to make a profit, but what is argued here is that they deserve to make an adequate profit, not an obscene profit. The best way to return some of that money to the everyday taxpayer is by appropriate taxation policy. Indeed the Government’s initial Resources Rent Tax, which it was forced to reconsider and change after the reaction of the big miners, would have targeted some of this wealth. That opportunity was lost, as the Greens have rightly pointed out, and the loss is felt by ordinary Australian’s who do not have the means they need to get by with their lives.
BHP deserves to make a profit, not from anything intrinsic in what it does, for instance taking the resources of the land for short term gain might be immoral, only history will decide that, but nonetheless social norms accept that it has a right to receive a profit for its enterprise and effort. But deserving to make a profit has to be balanced with other rights and deserts, if that is what we are going to call these things. People have a right to the basics of life. And yet some people cannot afford basic housing. Affordable housing seems like a pretty basic right. How can that right be overridden by BHP’s right to make a profit? For surely it is being overridden. BHP is making its profit. That is an indisputable fact. But people are not able to afford accommodation to suit their needs. Hospitals and classrooms are overcrowded. For instance. And we have not even considered the people in the world who are less fortunate than our own poor, who are suffering by their corrupt governments and the vagaries of the land and the peoples. How do we do this balancing act?
The question is not, “Are there deserts?” or “Are people deserving?” It is rather, “Are there just deserts, and how do we determine them?”
Kekes’ theory of Justice as Desert simply seems to embrace and entrench the status quo. It does nothing to establish how things ought to be. Rawls is interested in how things ought to be, but in determining this he rejects personal responsibility. This rejection of personal responsibility flies in the face of common sense, and there is a lot to be said in favour of common sense. We must be able to prosecute an individual for his crimes. It may not be a question of desert, but simply a matter of protecting society. Likewise people feel that it is appropriate to be rewarded for effort, but it ought to be appropriate reward for appropriate effort. A society that is based upon pack rule, where the top dog fights for his position and fights to retain his or her position, is not a society that most people aspire to. We do endorse Hobbes position that a social contract guarantees certain responsibilities from us and guarantees certain protections to us. It is these responsibilities and protections that need to be determined.
Rawls advocates Justice as Fairness as an alternative to utilitarianism. Certainly some aspects of his fairness model are admirable. But rejecting human responsibility, and endorsing egalitarianism, makes his model inadequate for determining how society must be restructured in order to maximise both responsibilities and protections from a modern society.
I have argued elsewhere for a new form of utilitarianism, a Best-Interest model, for determining outcomes in society. The Best-Interest model rejects the greatest happiness for the greatest number, or the maximisation of happiness, or even the maximisation of preferences, as Singer has advocated.
I was encouraged in this today despite a rejection of it by a member of the Monash Philosophy Department, because of a new initiative of the present Australian Government. This initiative was to deal with guidelines for financial advisers, and one of the recommendations was that the financial adviser must at all times, whenever there was a conflict of interest, act in favour of the interest of his or her client in determining the advice to be given. I was listening to the relevant minister deliver this reform to a press conference on television today, and the minister recognised that it is not always easy to determine what the best interest is in some situations, but that it should be the moral imperative that drives the determination of any advice given. If we are extolled to determine the best interest of outcomes when making decisions that affect ourselves and others then we are likely to make better decisions than otherwise. For example, I might not care for myself whether I drive home drunk after a session at the hotel, but the best interest model would insist that it is not in the interest of others to have me on the road in a drunken state. This would override my own personal disregard for my well-being, and could convince me, when I am considering driving to the hotel knowing I will be drinking to excess, to take the tram or bus or taxi instead, so that I am not likely to drive home when my reason is impaired by being drunk. Not all things are this straight forward, indeed most of them are not. But it is a start. If we begin from this place, considering the best interest of others in my considerations about myself, perhaps my view will be radicalised to such an extent that I will be motivated not by self-interest, but by self-sacrifice, thus diminishing inequalities and negative outcomes.
To argue that someone deserves something seems to me to be a misnomer. You may be entitled to something, through personal sacrifice, through effort and from a desire for reward, but that is a matter of the social contract at work. No-one has a special desert over and above anyone else. Disparities in wealth create a disjunction in society, where disparate rewards are earned that are simply not deserved. How can they be deserved when desert itself is a nonsense idea? Reward for effort is something we recognise as appropriate, just as we punish criminality. But to foster obscene wealth for a few at the cost of the prosperity of the many, does not do justice to the social contract. If we have any rights at all, the first and foremost right must be to be treated equally. That is, we ought not to be discriminated against based upon our individual person. But entrenched wealth disposition is a form of discrimination. Sharing the benefits of wealth generation promotes a harmonious and prosperous society. Taxing wealth to provide for people’s basic needs seems to be an appropriate measure that meets the best interest of all. The furphy that wealth will then leave our shores for tax havens can be dealt with through appropriate measures. If people choose to take their wealth to Mexico, where life is dangerous, where the protections of a modern society do not exist, they are welcome to, but remember, under a model where wealth is not disbursed in an ad hoc and unfair manner, then individuals will really not have that type of exorbitant wealth to blackmail society with, the greaert wealth will be the common wealth, which benefits everyone.
The global community needs a radical rethink on what sort of ethic it wants to promote. The domination of self-interest and greed over self-sacrifice and philanthropy, the thraldom of the working class and the elitism of the ruling class, calls out for better answers. People cannot live without forever. Inevitably it leads to instability within society. People cannot be thralls forever. You cannot have one class that lives a form of life that is impossible to imagine for the majority of humanity. It ought not to even be an aspiration. We need a fairer, caring and humane society, not one that is divided by wealth and class. When corporate entities are wealthier than nations we have to ask if it is desirable that this is the case. When the rich and famous live in an elite circle, immune to the sufferings of the world, ignorant of the sacrifices real people make every day to earn their wage and their family’s bread, something has to change. We need to refocus our energy not on what an ethic is, but what is an ethic’s aspiration. It is the aspiration of the ethic that is important. When Kekes argues for justice as desert he is arguing for laissez-faire, dog eat dog, it is not new, it is not novel, that does not mean it is wrong, but in order to assess it we need to consider the ends that we want, what conduct it is that we truly desire to reward in society. I would argue that we want to promote the type of social contract that Hobbes was talking about, rather than living in a state of nature where life is inevitably “nasty, brutish and short.” A laissez-faire society treats people as commodities, as thralls to the invisible hand of the market, which ensures the ruling class grows to excess over time while the working class remain victims of economics, always struggling to make ends meet.
It is not capitalism versus communism that we need to assess here, despite my terminology. It is a radical rethink of ethics, to consider the kind of society that is desirable to humanity. Do we desire, as a people, a more equal or a more unequal society? There is no reality where we can adopt the position of supporting the status quo, because the status quo is something that is flux, always changing, adrift in the sea of time. Recent thinkers have defined things such as property rights and intellectual property rights. These types of claims are made to entrench the disparity of wealth in society. Let no man take from another what he has himself earned or been entitled to. But we have seen in this discussion that things that are earned or entitled are not necessarily real, they are simply contracts made in negotiating through life. There is a current market value to a thing, and that current market value determines your purchasing power, your power to acquire assets. But there is nothing intrinsic in the thing that is valued that makes it an entitlement of you that you should own a thing. Ownership is a difficult idea. To possess something means simply the ability to defend it against the aspirations of another to acquire it. You may have your own personal army, but usually you will rely on the affirmation of the laws and protections of the society in which you live. But ownership, in that sense, is nothing at all. You own it because you can defend your ownership of it. It is a tautology.
Perhaps the answer to the question. “Why should Paul McCartney be worth one billion dollars?” is “Because he earned it.” But we need to be able to confirm that through rational deliberation. To “earn” something, to be entitled to it, to deserve it, is an ethical question, but the question has not been put. Let us put the question, and determine the answer. Ethics ought to be taught in schools, not as an alternative to religious study, but in place of it. Too often ethics is usurped by religion, and we are prevented from a forthright debate about it. Ethics needs to be taken out of the religious domain. It is not the domain of priests. Priests are often bereft of an ethic. And being a priest does not uniquely qualify you to determine what an ethic ought to be. It is a serious matter that requires serious deliberation, and the ordinary person ought not to be disallowed from engagement on the topic. It is through dialogue that we arrive at answers to problems, even if they are the wrong ones. And we ought not to be elitist and think that only philosophers or priests can arrive at answers to ethical questions. Ethics is about people. If it doesn’t reflect what a person truly is, then that ethic is misguided. For an ethic to be genuine it must be genuinely arrived at.
I see a future where ethics is taught like the three R’s. The idea that school is simply to teach us the tools we need to perform a trade is misguided. Discussing in class, in groups, around tables, who and what we are, and who and what we would choose to aspire to be, are important questions that have been neglected over time. Too often they are questions left to mouldy old men with grey hair sitting in dusty rooms reflecting on the important questions, but no longer being relevant to those questions. Ethics, philosophy, is a living, breathing thing. This is why we need people to be engaged in the discussion of these things. Ethics permeates every aspect of our lives. This is not so strange. Religious teachers will instruct you in the fact that religion ought to affect every part or aspect of your life. And religion is just one form of ethical instruction. But religion teaches closed systems. Ethics, to be true to itself, would entail teaching open systems, systems that are not dead, closed, limited, but always interesting, always challenging, always changing and growing. A progressive society is required to review itself. Just as the Church should look inward, and review itself, society should open its doors to criticism, to ideas about how we can make ourselves better as we move into the future. Questions of an ethical nature seems to me to be a fine way to start.
