Part Two · The Demands of Life · Series 10

Desert, Luck & What We Owe Each Other

I did everything right and I'm still drowning — whose fault is that?

Forthcoming Political & SocialEthics

The question

Two people are sitting in the same open-plan office, and they are both, right now, telling themselves a story about desert. The first one just got the promotion. She worked for it — late nights, the hard accounts, the stuff nobody else would touch — and when the email came she felt something clean and good go through her: I earned this. This is mine. The second one didn't get it. And he is doing the math at his desk, the math you do at 2 a.m. and then again at 2 p.m.: he showed up too. He worked the hours. He did, as far as he can tell, everything you are supposed to do — and he is further behind this year than last, the rent went up again, and the word that keeps surfacing is one he hates because it sounds like an excuse: rigged. Like the whole thing was rigged.

Now hold them both in your head at once, because here's the thing neither of them is looking at. She is fast, and focused, and able to grind — and she did not build the brain that does that, or choose the household that taught her to. He is none of those things on the days it counts — and he did not pick the brain or the household that left him short either. The very stuff the office is paying her for and docking him for, neither of them ordered. It arrived. So when she says I earned this, and he says it's rigged — are they even disagreeing? Or are they two people standing on opposite sides of the same thing nobody chose, each telling themselves the only story that lets them sleep?

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.

1

I earned this

Two colleagues in the same office — one has just been promoted and feels she earned it; the other did everything right and is further behind than last year. This first episode examines both sentences, "I earned it" and "the whole thing is rigged", and notices the fact neither is looking at — that the abilities which did the earning were dealt out, not chosen.
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2

The lottery you didn't enter

Two equally drunk drivers take the same dark road, and a child steps out in front of one of them. Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams named this the problem of moral luck in 1976, and Robert Hartman presses it further in — luck reaches into the character we answer for — while asking in return whether seeing the luck in someone's cruelty means no one was ever cruel.
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3

All the way down

Neil Levy's Hard Luck (2011) sets out the luck pincer — every act flows either from circumstances you did not choose or from a character those circumstances installed — and the argument then comes for the last thing that seemed your own, the trying itself. Kant's claim in the Groundwork, that the one unqualified good is a good will, marks how much is at stake if even the effort was dealt out.
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4

So nobody earned it?

The tempting reply — so nobody earned anything, and the question can be dismissed — is taken seriously and refused. Through the case of a parent consoling a daughter after a lost race, the episode shows what the universal-luck exit costs — it dissolves the trying along with the blame, and still cannot say what anyone is owed.
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5

The veil of ignorance and the basketball player

Three answers from a century of political philosophy, each at full strength. John Rawls argues that since no one earned the hand they were dealt, society's rules should be chosen from behind a veil of ignorance; the luck egalitarians would compensate brute bad luck, and Elizabeth Anderson's 1999 essay "What Is the Point of Equality?" asks what that does to the people it means to help; Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example argues that any patterned distribution is undone by free consent. The episode ends in a deadlock, not a verdict.
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6

The self that owes nothing

Michael Sandel identifies the assumption the deadlocked positions share — a self that stands prior to everything it chose, owing only what it signed for — and argues, with Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989), that no such self can be found. The dispute over who deserves what turns out to run deeper than the goods, down to what a person is.
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7

Where 'merit' came from

The word itself is examined. Nietzsche's genealogy reads merit as a weapon in a status struggle; Hegel answers that worth was never a private possession but something conferred in recognition between people; and David Miller, in Principles of Social Justice (1999), argues that a disreputable history does not prove desert tracks nothing real.
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8

What do we owe each other?

The final episode gathers what the dismantling has left and returns to the two colleagues in the office. Nothing is settled between them; the question moves from what each deserves to what we owe each other, with T. M. Scanlon's answer — principles none of us could reasonably reject, with no deserving in it — among those left standing. No verdict is offered.
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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

The communitariansNietzscheHegel

The question

The episodes

Thinkers

Where it connects