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So I've been thinking a little about Hayek's point
that there's nothing about an overall state of affairs which arises
from the decentralized actions of individuals in a market economy which
could coherently be an "injustice." As I had said, I agree with Hayek,
and I've been accordingly trying to think of a way to understand the
concept of distributive justice in other terms. But on page 49 of his
book, Elements of Justice, David Schmidtz raises an interesting point in discussing the idea of "desert":
...there
is something slightly misleading, or at best incomplete, in assessing a
society by asking whether people get what they deserve. If desert
matters, then often a better question is, do people do something to deserve what they get? Do opportunities go to people who will do something to be worthy of them?
It
seems to me that while there's something very intuitive about this
point, there's a tension to be acknowledged. To flesh out Schmidtz's
point, he offers on page 46 that "A person who receives opportunity X
at t1 can be deserving at t2
because of what she did when given a chance." The idea here, then,
seems to be that if a person does justice to the opportunity that she's
given in the period between t1 and t2, then she proves that she deserved it at t1.
But
while I think that the above may be a necessary condition for desert,
I'm not sure if it's sufficient. What I have in mind is the interview
where a man and a woman are being considered for a job. We might
imagine that both would, if given the chance, do justice to the
opportunity they were given: both are fully competent to do the job,
and both would work hard at it. We might further say that both would
likely succeed. But let's say that the woman candidate was better
qualified for the job than the man, and it was simply a matter of
prejudice on the part of the prospective employer which led him to
choose the man. Even though the man would end up doing justice to the
opportunity, I still think there's a sense in which we can say that he
didn't really deserve the job, and that the woman did.
I wouldn't want to say that the man in the above example is entirely undeserving
of the job. For his part, he did everything that we would have wanted
him to do. But there is, I think, a sense in which he will have gotten
something that he didn't deserve, even if he did everything he could to
do justice to the opportunity he got. I definitely need to think about
this some more, but it's a start.
Update:
Incidentally,
Schmidtz makes more or less the same point in the next chapter in
discussing whether a person who does not deserve an opportunity can
still do justice to it. Sorry, Dr. Schmidtz! This seems to be a common
theme...
The one thing that I think can be preserved from this
post is the idea that something needs to be said about the person who
is deprived of an opportunity that she did deserve because someone else got an opportunity he didn't
deserve, even though the latter did justice to the opportunity once he
got it, and therefore has "done all anyone could ask," to put it as
Schmidtz does on page 52. Something...but I'm not sure what.