Deserving

A thought recently came to mind as to whether or not “deserving” something made a difference as to whether or not it was given or gotten. When it all comes down to it, the whole idea of “deserving” is actually sort of a strange one in modern society and I think the entire concept of it is sort of exclusively cultural.

I also considered the possibility that when it comes to wealth of any kind, it might be impossible to give a really sound rational argument for anyone deserving anything. Why does the man who was born into a middle class family deserve the middle class money over that of one born into poverty? After all, not everything that we receive is earned, or deserved.

But does that mean that whether or not you “deserve” something matter as to whether or not you will end up receiving it? Unfortunately, even if we could develop a logical system for determining whether or not something could lay claim to riches over one person or another, I fear that the world would never be able to accurately follow it; all anyone deserves is dependent upon social perceptions and norms.

For instance, one of the first points at which we give, even at an unconscious level, deservingness of anything is the idea of personhood. If a being cannot be considered a person then by that notion they are probably not entitled to the same things that a person would be. But how can we define a person? People have been trying to do this for centuries and yet the legal system is consistently creating new laws and regulations throughout the years that make judgments off some sort of intuitively felt definition that the entire population can never fully agree on.

Even as society at large slowly gathers more empirical evidence and draws rational conclusions over time it can be extremely difficult to determine whether or not a full definition will be reached in the foreseeable future. Recently I was sitting in an Intro to Philosophy class and the concept of defining personal identity was being discussed. I found myself getting extremely confused over the different ideas: If you were to transfer the brain of one person to another’s body is it still the same person? Does sameness of brain mean sameness of person?

Many of us are intuitively inclined to answer that a brain can define identity all on its own but some situations could easily arise to alter this notion. The methodology for how we determine who receives what, even right down to a person’s very core, matters.

One of the very first areas in which we might start figuring this whole concept out is in relation to our own lives and our material possessions. For example, does any corporate CEO really deserve something like a ten million dollar per year salary? I began asking myself a question very similar because of my eventual dream of being entirely and completely financially comfortable.

Question 1: Do I, Scott Lee, deserve to have one million dollars per year?

At first impulse, most people would replace my name and consider the question for themselves and then would proceed to give arguments based on a number of premises, all mostly based off emotional compulsion.

Premise 1 – If I work extremely hard, then I deserve X amount of dollars.
Premise 2 – If I have been through an extreme amount of pain, I deserve Y amount of dollars.
Therefore: I deserve X + Y amount of dollars.

You could claim that there might be a way to devise a method of quantifying, or giving numerical value to the values of X and Y, or X+Y being the total amount of money you actually deserve. If anyone could give me an even remotely valid way to do this, let me know, but the entire thing wreaks of emotionally driven and flawed rationalization to me.

To really get anywhere with the above question and its combination of answers we really have to examine things more carefully. A new question I immediately followed with was this:

Question 2: How does anyone come to deserve anything of material value?

Some possible answers:
Premise 1 – They must, by some means and on a quantitative scale, earn the right to obtain those material things.
Premise 2 – Society must accept through social means and by majority rule their earnings.
Premise 3 – Then the first premise is true, then the second invariably regulates the quantities of deserving.
Therefore: Deserving anything of material value comes from the quantity through which you earn it and the approval of societal social norms as they interact and relate to each other.

Now I think I am actually getting somewhere with this second question and its proposed premises for providing a sufficient answer. Of course, we are still dealing with the troubling proposition of quantifying a means to deserving anything. Not to mention the truth value of premise 3 – if the relationship does exist between the first two premises then how do we calculate the intricacies of that relationship?

Question 3: Assuming anyone does deserve anything they receive, does their deserving it make a difference as to whether or not they receive it?
The more I explore the idea of deserving the more I realize that the thing that matters most is social convention, if we are only exploring an answer through logic. The entire concept actually turns out to be pretty vague unless we come up with a much more clear definition of just what “deserving” really is.

So what lies ahead as an answer for our own lives? Do we turn to some sort of folk wisdom like: nothing new under the sun or nothing lasts forever? How do we know where to turn? What is to say that there is such a thing as deserving and if there is: do we even deserve anything at all? Nevermind material possessions – do we even deserve to be alive?

In struggling to find answers to these questions in a rational manner, it has created a tremendous sense of gratitude in me. Maybe even at the age of 21 as I write this article I am incredibly lucky to even be here at all, and thus comes a powerful feeling of giving thanks.

So maybe you can answer the questions better for me: what is deserving? Assuming we know what it is, how do we know what we deserve? Assuming we know how to determine what we deserve – what do you deserve and why?