Decoupling Desert and Responsibility

One of the differences in how people analyze the world I’ve found most interesting has been called high decoupling vs low decoupling. What is decoupling? In this context, it means an ability to consider ideas in isolation, disconnecting them from other variables and influences. Low decouplers think of ideas as embedded in a social context, and thus think analyzing ideas in abstract, isolated terms rather than placing those ideas in a social narrative is misguided. A very long essay you can check out describing this divide and applying it to modern debates can be found here, but here are some snippets outlining some of the key ideas:

High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing and operationalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses. Cognitive decoupling is what scientists do…

While science and engineering disciplines (and analytic philosophy) are populated by people with a knack for decoupling who learn to take this norm for granted, other intellectual disciplines are not. Instead they’re largely composed of what’s opposite the scientist in the gallery of brainy archetypes: the literary or artistic intellectual.

This crowd doesn’t live in a world where decoupling is standard practice. On the contrary, coupling is what makes what they do work. Novelists, poets, artists and other storytellers like journalists, politicians and PR people rely on thick, rich and ambiguous meanings, associations, implications and allusions to evoke feelings, impressions and ideas in their audience. The words “artistic” and “literary” refers to using idea couplings well to subtly and indirectly push the audience’s meaning-buttons.

To a low-decoupler, high-decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a high-decoupler the low-decouplers insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight.

I tend to lean much more into the high-decoupler mindset. One aspect of high-decoupling I find beneficial is the ability to separate things that are often practically related but still logically distinct. As the author of the above-linked essay notes, “Even when issues don’t belong together logically and/or causally they’re often structurally, socially and emotionally similar and that makes them feel like a single thing — with a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reactions to single instances.” But even if different things emotionally feel the same, nonetheless, different things are different. (That’s right, I’m not afraid to make such bold, controversial statements as “different things are different.” Stay tuned for further hot takes!) And I find it very useful and clarifying to separate these things when trying to think about the world.

As one example, Dan Moller, in his book Governing Least, decouples the ideas of desert (not the sandy kind, the philosophical kind of “desert” that indicates deservingness) from entitlement. In ordinary, day-to-day life, what you deserve and what you are entitled to tend to go together frequently enough that it “makes them feel like a single thing – with a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reaction to single instances.” Thus, many philosophers who advocate redistribution argue that the well-off lack desert for what they’ve accumulated, even if they accumulated their wealth in the most morally pristine ways possible. If you accumulated your wealth honestly because you were intelligent, hard working, and driven – well, they say, you didn’t deserve to be born an intelligent and hard-working person. You didn’t earn your natural capacities, nor did you earn the environment you grew up in and the mentors you encountered to help you develop those capacities. Thus, you don’t deserve the wealth you accumulate through those capacities.

Moller, however, points out that what one deserves is logically distinct from what they are entitled to. If you and I are hiking together and you just so happen to stumble across a massive diamond valued at a hundred thousand dollars, clearly you didn’t deserve this good fortune in some deep moral sense. Nonetheless, you entitled to it. Similarly, someone who wins the lottery or hits a jackpot on a slot machine doesn’t deserve their winnings, but they are still entitled to them. The fact that you didn’t “deserve” to find the diamond does no work at all for the case for redistribution. If I were to say to you “You didn’t deserve to find that diamond and it could just as easily have been me, so give me some of that money, it’s mine!” I’d be in the wrong. It simply doesn’t follow that because you didn’t deserve your good fortune that I therefore am deserving of it – or even that I’m entitled to take some of it from you.

There are also discrepancies in the opposite direction – sometimes, you can deserve something yet not be entitled to it. Let’s say you’re an employee in my company. You work hard and produce great value, and a job opening is available that represents a significant promotion for you and for which you are clearly qualified. Nonetheless, because it’s my company, I decide to give the job to an old buddy of mind who has done none of the work you’ve done. Since this is my company, I can hire whomever I want into whatever role I want – you are not entitled to that job. However, it still seems reasonable to say that even though you were not entitled to that promotion, you still deserved it.

Or suppose you are getting married and want your parents to come to your wedding, but they refuse. Perhaps you’re marrying someone of a different race and they disapprove, or maybe you’re gay and marrying someone of the same sex and they deeply oppose that. I think it’s fair to say that you deserve to have your parents there supporting you at your wedding, but nonetheless, you are still not entitled to it. Their refusal to be there and support you is wrong, but it would also be wrong to force their attendance and make them pretend to be supportive against their will. Thus, while desert and entitlement often (perhaps usually) overlap, they are still distinct and can be decoupled. You can deserve something but not be entitled to it, and you can be entitled to something even if you don’t deserve it.

At the risk of taxing your patience, dear reader, all of the above has simply been me laying the ground for another decoupling I think is worth making – being responsible for your situation, and deserving your situation. If you are responsible for the situation you are in, does that equate to saying you deserve to be in that situation?

This has some intuitive force behind it. If you tell someone “You’re responsible for the situation you’re in,” that seems almost synonymous with saying “this is your fault” or “you deserved it.” Unless, of course, the situation is good, in which case saying they’re responsible for being there sounds like a form of affirmation or congratulations. “What you are responsible for” and “what you deserve” also seem “like a single thing” at first glance. But reality is rarely able to be described in a single exceptionless statement, and these, too, can be decoupled.

Picture the following situation. John Q. Example is wandering down the street, listening to music with his headphones on. Unfortunately for Mr. Example, he’s so engrossed in the jaunty tunes coming through his headphones that he loses all focus on where he is wandering – and he wanders into a crosswalk, where he is struck and killed by a car. It seems to me in this case, two things can be said. Mr. Example is responsible for what happened – his behavior was careless and directly lead to his death. At the same time, it also seems true to me that Mr. Example did not deserve to die. He was responsible for causing his own death, but he nonetheless did not deserve death. After all, imagine that he had absentmindedly wandered through the intersection but, through sheer luck, was missed by every car that drove past, making it safely to the other side. Suppose after witnessing this, I pull out my trusty handgun and shoot him dead. When the police are called, I try explaining to them that was I did was justified, because, after all, Mr. Example deserved to die because of his inattentive and careless behavior. That would obviously be an absurd statement, and I’d be a moral monster for making it.

My aim here is not to provide some finely-tuned description for when being responsible means deserving it, and when it doesn’t. (Good luck trying to spell that out!) But I do think people’s difficulty decoupling the two ideas leads to problems.

Someone who holds the “you’re responsible for X therefore you deserve X” principle very strongly is Bryan Caplan. For years he’s been referencing a book he’s been writing on poverty and blame (a book I’m impatiently awaiting!), and one key distinction he makes is between the deserving and undeserving poor. Part of what makes someone deserving or undeserving depends on how responsible they are for their situation, as Caplan argues here:

A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem.  Poverty is a problem, so a person deserves his poverty if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his poverty.

Caplan, of course, does not argue that everyone who is poor deserves it. By his lights, many people who are poor don’t deserve it, such as those born disabled, children of irresponsible parents, or people who had the bad luck to be born in impoverished countries and who are prevented from attaining better prospects elsewhere. Nonetheless, he says, there are many people who are poor today who are responsible for the situation they are in, and thus they deserve to be poor.

Now, I don’t find the above quoted statement from Caplan very compelling as stated. The aforementioned John Q. Example could have taken “reasonable steps” to prevent his death, but it still seems obvious to me that he didn’t deserve to die. And while Mr. Example is a hypothetical case, it’s not a far-fetched or fanciful one. Scenarios basically matching what I described are not at all rare. While “you are responsible for X therefore you deserve X” is often true, perhaps even true in most cases, it is not a logically or metaphysically necessary truth. More is needed to establish that one deserves X than merely pointing out that they are responsible for X. I’m hoping he spells out additional arguments to bridge this gap in his book, when it is released.

But there’s another side to this coin. Because some ideas, if not decoupled,  seem “like a single thing” with “a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reactions to single instances,” many people will respond to Caplan’s argument in a particularly counterproductive way. Suppose you don’t believe anyone ever truly “deserves” to live a life of poverty. This is surely a valence many people will have. When hearing the argument “they are responsible for their poverty, therefore they deserve it,” some people, failing to decouple responsibility from desert, will play the reverse card and instead think “they don’t deserve poverty, therefore, they are not responsible for it.” To such people, I would encourage taking a third route – “they don’t deserve to be in poverty, but they are still responsible for it.”

Why would I encourage this route? For one, I think as a factual matter Caplan is correct that very often people are responsible for their poverty through the choices they have made over their life. (In the past, I have been such a person myself.) And here’s another one of those hot takes I promised – I think we should say things that are true and refrain from saying things that are false. Even if you believe someone who has made those decisions doesn’t deserve to be poor, it would still be untrue to say they are not responsible for having ended up poor. And for two, if you truly have compassion for people in that circumstance, the absolute worst thing you can do for them is convince them that they aren’t responsible for how they ended up. If someone becomes genuinely convinced their choices aren’t what created their current situation, that entails convincing them there is nothing they could do to improve their situation by making different choices. Convincing someone they bear no responsibility for their situation isn’t compassion. It’s denying their basic agency and denying them even a modicum of dignity.