Deserving to be Rich Without Free Will
People often dispute which principle of distributive justice is fair, whether the rich and the poor deserve their fates, or whether the outcomes of capitalism and markets should be systematically rearranged. But If we don’t have free will, then it’s difficult to imagine how we can logically preserve the idea that people truly deserve things at all. That might be challenging even if free will were real, but its nonexistence places this notion of desert in imminent jeopardy. We usually think about the ramifications of free will skepticism in terms of moral responsibility, retributive justice, and punishment for wrongdoings (e.g., whether someone can be blameworthy for something if they couldn’t have done otherwise), but disproving free will also endangers praiseworthiness and puts common ideas about economic justice on the chopping block, too.
Some rewards and punishments can be justified on consequentialist grounds (sans free will), and so can many of the key characteristics of free market economics, but issues of distributive justice and the relative prosperity of economic participants are much less clear. It’s easily imaginable that the severe inequality and sizable profits required for optimally calibrating the economy to society’s benefit would startle progressives,1 but the inverse is also true—maybe we’ve substantially overshot the ideal values along those dimensions. Regardless, it’s not like everyone subscribes to consequentialism, and almost nobody appears eager to wholly restrict debate over inequality and redistribution to matters of utility.
Instead, ideological adversaries bitterly contest whether particular high-profile fat-cats—CEOs and financiers especially—are (un-)deserving of their elevated social standing and mind-bending bank accounts, depending on whether they benefited too much from propitious circumstances, nepotism, etc. (i.e., whether someone is “self-made”). Others try distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. Few are prepared to completely jettison popular notions about economic desert.
Suppose that some empirical results incontrovertibly showed that heavy-handed taxation and redistribution improved the overall well-being of society—a largish portion of right-wingers would still disfavor such interventions and characterize them as thievery or as offensive handouts to unscrupulous layabouts. Conversely, a nontrivial portion of leftists might opt to reduce payouts to the ultra-wealthy even without any sort of countervailing benefit.
Many people (especially libertarians) hold suspiciously convenient beliefs that their personal judgments about distributive justice line up seamlessly with the maximally efficient allocation of resources as
deftly points out:Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
Here again, it’s unlikely that such folks are willing to agree that earnings and wealth should be reconfigured exclusively by whatever is socially beneficial. Despite all the lip service to economics, many libertarians subscribe to precisely the opposite viewpoint: the econ and utility talk is all a sideshow for them. They’ll readily skewer opponents for their economic illiteracy only to, when pressed, sheepishly admit that they’re committed to opposing redistribution either way, because they believe that taxation is theft and so on. Thus, the nonexistence of free will dissolving any notion of economic desert outside of consequentialism would be particularly bad news for them, since, at bottom, they recommend allocating resources exclusively on the basis of desert.
But if free will doesn’t exist—and I don’t really think that it does—all of these people (right-wingers, leftists, libertarians, and anyone else trying to adjudicate economic payouts on the basis of desert) are totally misguided, and their disagreements are so hopelessly encumbered with wrongheaded instincts that the majority of prevailing discussion and existing thought about redistribution should be abandoned entirely. Or so it seems.
I’ve written before about a technique for disproving free will via something called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (i.e., S is only blameworthy for X if he could have done otherwise). Here’s a slightly modified version of that argument focusing on economic desert to illustrate what I’m getting at:
In a deterministic world, no one could have avoided their current economic circumstances.
If someone could not have avoided their current economic circumstances, they cannot be blamed for their current economic circumstances.
Thus, no one can be blamed for their current economic circumstances.
Thus, the Right’s reflexive disgust towards improving the economic welfare of feckless screw-ups is illogical, and there’s no such thing as the “undeserving” poor (beyond considerations of disincentives and efficiency).2 Most free-will-skeptical philosophers would probably select another argument to justify this conclusion, but I’m comfortable defending this one. But while the nonexistence of free will nicely undercuts enthusiasm for retributive punishment or any right-wing theory that poor people ought to suffer because they deserve it, the inverse questions of praiseworthiness and affluence (e.g., whether someone can deserve to be rich without free will) are, for pretty subtle reasons, much trickier.
Philosopher Susan Wolf wrote an article in 1980 titled “Asymmetrical Freedom” wherein she argued for the existence of a curious disharmony between blameworthiness and praiseworthiness: while blameworthiness requires that someone could have done otherwise (i.e., free will), praiseworthiness doesn’t. According to Wolf’s reasoning, the capacity to appropriately weigh and respond to moral considerations is a prerequisite for anyone to be fairly subject to assignments of blame or praise, and wrongdoings show that the wrongdoer lacked that capability. Only someone with ability-to-do-otherwise free will might both (1) possess the solid reasoning and psychology making them eligible for blame and (2) commit a wrongdoing regardless. Notice, however, that this paradox disappears when evaluating praiseworthy actions, which can presumably result from well-functioning psychology and reasoning without issue—in fact, the inability to do otherwise in those scenarios is evidence of someone’s virtue:
When we ask whether an agent’s action is deserving of praise, it seems we do not require that he could have done otherwise. If an agent does the right thing for just the right reasons, it seems absurd to ask whether he could have done the wrong. ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ ‘He couldn’t hurt a fly’ are not exemptions from praiseworthiness but testimonies to it. If a friend presents you with a gift and says ‘I couldn’t resist,’ this suggests the strength of his friendship and not the weakness of will.3
Whether you want to call this a type of compatibilism is up to you, I guess. Ultimately, I lean towards disagreeing with Wolf’s outlook for a bouquet of reasons that I’ll sidestep here and, contra Wolf, I’d probably bite this bullet and conclude that if someone truly couldn’t help but do something, then that really does undermine their supposed praiseworthiness for doing it, but her logic is incisive and the theory dovetails nicely with the actual-sequence compatibilism that I’ve detailed before. Plus, it makes more sense that someone acting virtuously possesses the capabilities required for properly deserving their fate.
Supposing Wolf is correct, however, could it justify extreme wealth disparities if some rich person’s affluence derives from laudable reasoning/actions and they satisfy other criteria for praiseworthiness and desert (whatever those are)? I’m uncertain whether even this could rescue a libertarian conception of distributive justice. If positive economic outcomes are merited, but preserving them entails undeserved negative outcomes for others, then we’re in a philosophical pickle: we’d generate an injustice either way. This is a potential locus for distinction between praiseworthiness in general and positive economic desert in particular—highly praising someone who’s already celebrated doesn’t prevent praising others, or at least the relevant costs are muted and subtle.
A steadfast libertarian might counter that we should conceptualize poverty as an absence of positive economic results rather than a purposeful allocation of economic blameworthiness,4 and I think that’s the best argument for a libertarian approach to distributive justice, but notice that this strategy entails modifying common language and attitudes surrounding economic hardship. Opposing redistribution by claiming that someone deserves to be penniless suggests their economic disadvantage is a fate that’s handed out following an unfavorable judgment by the market. Under a Wolf-inspired defense of inequality, however, those libertarians should rework their characterization of the indigent as people who haven’t justifiably acquired wealth rather than people who have shown they deserve to languish in destitution, which is a less odious framework anyway.
Those favoring redistribution while also committing to Wolf’s asymmetry would need to reject this way of thinking and equate any decision to preserve existing inequalities with a judgement of blameworthiness. But given the dueling of requirements of justice mentioned above, it’s then unclear how a Wolf-style progressive would negotiate the task of redistribution at all—maybe by favoring the less wealthy party to minimize the magnitude of the injustice.
Here’s an interview with Bryan Caplan where he argues for this.
Note that all the progressive compatibilist philosophers would have to reject this argument.
Wolf, Susan. “Asymmetrical Freedom.” 77 The Journal of Philosophy 151, 156 (1980).
This outlook neatly corresponds to the fashionable explanatory inversion of poverty and wealth that I’ve written about.