I think it may be time to take down the paywall on this article from Foreign Affairs:
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
Freedom, Action, and Desert
Chapter 3 of George Sher’s Desert offers what might be described as a dialectical exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of an expected-consequence account of desert (“dialectical” is my term, “exploration” is Sher’s). An expected consequence account of desert says that, properly understood and specified, we deserve the expected consequences of our actions.
Before I describe the account proper, however, I think it’s worth saying a word or two about the overall aim and structure of the chapter. Sher’s claims in this chapter are easily misread and misunderstood, and I think that the other members of our Zoom discussion did in fact misread the chapter, giving it a stronger (hence less charitable) reading than it deserved. As far as I can see, though Sher gets some of the details wrong, his overall assessment of the expected consequence conception of desert is just right. So I’m a little puzzled at my fellow discussion partners’ criticisms of the chapter as a whole, and challenge them to “bring it,” as the youngsters nowadays say.
Continue readingLike Rain in the Desert
It’s been raining a lot where I live, and that’s given me both the impetus and the material for reflecting on one of the examples Sher gives in chapter 3 of Desert—a case of desert meant to illustrate what he calls “the expected consequence” model. I’ll have more to say about chapter 3, and the model itself, in a later post I’m planning to write. But for now, I just want to hash through one of the deepest and most profound of Sher’s examples, what might be called the rainfall example*:
Continue readingThe expected consequence account is the sort of account we want. But does it mesh with our intuitions about specific cases? In many instances it does. It coincides, for example, with the intuition that Wilson, who knowingly submitted his application late, now deserves to be disqualified. If this desert-claim is to have normative force, it is surely because one ought to suffer the predictable consequences of one’s earlier carelessness. And the most straightforward way of explaining this is precisely to say that such predictable consequences inherit the value of the free choices that led to them. For similar reasons, the account correctly accommodates claims of this type: Harris, who didn’t bring his raincoat, now deserves to get wet….
Just as the man who leaves his umbrella home when it rain deserves to get wet, so too does the man who brings his umbrella deserve to reach his destination dry (pp. 41-42).
Need and Desert
This is just a passing thought that I’ve been meaning to blog for awhile–almost apropos of nothing. It isn’t a natural continuation of any topic we’ve discussed so far in our conversations on Sher’s Desert, but bears an obvious relation to the topic of desert in general.
It’s common to distinguish claims of desert sharply from claims of need. The contrast, I think, goes back at least to Aristotle, who makes it in a rather complex way in his discussion of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. It finds clearer and sharper expression in the work of Ayn Rand, who insists that no claim of need, as such, can in principle ever be a claim of moral desert. To deserve is to earn moral title to the deserved object, but one can need something without having done anything to earn it (e.g., a roof over one’s head, health care, food), and one can deserve something without really needing it (e.g., praise). The things we need and deserve can, of course, overlap in certain instances, but (on Rand’s view) need is never sufficient for desert.
Continue readingYou Didn’t Build You: The Rawlsian Critique of Desert
This is a summary of chapter 2 of Sher’s Desert, keyed to session 2 of the MTSP discussion of that book.
As mentioned in an earlier post, the fourth of Sher’s puzzles about desert in chapter 1 casts doubt on the legitimacy of the concept. How can anyone deserve anything if our capacity for putting forth the effort necessary to earn things is itself undeserved? Chapter 2 of Sher’s Desert tackles the most prominent contemporary version of this argument, John Rawls’s attack on moral desert in A Theory of Justice. Rawls puts the point like this:
Continue readingIt seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 89 of the Revised Edition [1999]).
Character-Based Voting FTW
Lorenz Kraus is (or was) a candidate for US Senate, based in Troy, New York. My knowledge of his candidacy is based on about ten minutes’ Internet search after he sent me a crank email cc’d to Counter-Currents Publishing, a white nationalist website, among other recipients. Ten minutes is all it took to figure out that Kraus was a crank, and all it would have taken to figure out not to vote for him.
How? Because Kraus’s entire campaign is based on anti-Semitism of a wild, overt, over-the-top sort. No need to hash through the details; once was enough for me. If you don’t want to take my word for it, spend maybe ten minutes scrolling through his Twitter feed below (underneath the separator), or whatever else comes up in a Google search. If it takes you more than ten minutes, you’re doing it wrong.
Continue readingGeorge Sher’s “Desert”: The Dimensions of the Problem
This post is a summary of chapter 1 of George Sher’s Desert, keyed to session 1 of the MT Seminar on Philosophy. For background, read this post.
The Preface of George Sher’s Desert begins with a statement of the obvious: the concept of moral desert is central to moral judgment and deliberation, and yet (at least as of 1987, the date of the book’s publication), we lack a systematic account of the nature and justification of moral desert. Indeed, ever since Rawls’s “critique” of moral desert in A Theory of Justice (if it is one), doubt has been cast on the coherence or viability of the concept. So the book sets out to provide a justification: “one of my central aims is to display the underlying justification of desert claims (George Sher, Desert, p. xi).
Sher calls his approach to ethical theorizing “pluralistic”: instead of beginning with some higher-order account or principle that entails desert claims, he starts with the desert claims “we all make,” and works to systematize them with the proviso that “desert need not have any single normative basis” (Sher, Desert, p. xii). So the approach is both “pluralistic” and in a sense, “bottom up.”
Continue readingMcCormick-Taber Seminar in Philosophy Redux
About twenty years ago, PoT blogger Michael Young and I started a philosophy discussion group that we somewhat pretentiously called The McCormick-Taber Seminar in Philosophy (MTSP), idiosyncratically named for the locations where the first seminars took place in the early 2000s: McCormick Park in Princeton, New Jersey, where I lived at the time, and Taber Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island, where Michael lived.* We self-consciously conceived the group as a successor to David Kelley’s so-called Institute for Objectivist Studies, in which the two of us were involved, or perhaps over-involved, during the 1990s.
Continue readingCOVID Booster Shot Meets Health Care Monopoly
This post is part of an occasional series on health care. Here’s the prologue to the series, which originally preceded the post below.
Here’s a fairly straightforward story from The New York Times from a few days back, reminding us of the fact that immunity from some of the COVID vaccinations is limited in time, and may well require a booster shot.
WASHINGTON — Biden administration health officials increasingly think that vulnerable populations will need booster shots even as research continues into how long the coronavirus vaccines remain effective.
Senior officials now say they expect that people who are 65 and older or who have compromised immune systems will most likely need a third shot from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, two vaccines based on the same technology that have been used to inoculate the vast majority of Americans thus far. That is a sharp shift from just a few weeks ago, when the administration said it thought there was not enough evidence to back boosters yet.
On Thursday, a key official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency is exploring options to give patients with compromised immune systems third doses even before regulators broaden the emergency use authorization for coronavirus vaccines, a step that could come soon for the Pfizer vaccine.
Skipping a bit:
Pfizer’s continuing global study of its clinical trial participants shows that four to six months after the second dose, the vaccine’s effectiveness against symptomatic infection drops from a high of 95 percent to 84 percent, according to the company.
As a (then) full-time hospital worker actively exposed to high concentrations of COVID, I got my second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot on January 6. If the vaccine’s effectiveness definitely drops from 95% to 84% in four to six months, then I’m well past my due date for a booster. Though I’m no longer a full-time hospital worker, I’ve been waiting for twelve weeks now for the paperwork to go through on my bid to work per diem for Hunterdon Medical Center’s OR. Assuming it goes through, I’ll be back in the COVID-intensive environment I previously inhabited. And if it doesn’t go through, I intend to apply to do the same work at a different hospital. So one way or another, I intend to make my way back to hospital work, and (by implication) to re-immerse myself in COVID.
Continue readingHealth Care: A Series
This was originally a post on COVID booster shots, but I’ve now broken it into two separate posts, the first a prologue offering a very general summary of my approach to issues in health care, and the second, a post expressing skepticism about the need to wait any longer before we roll out a COVID booster, as well as skepticism about monopolistic institutional arrangements (distributive and/or regulatory) in health care.
I work in health care, but have no worked-out view on the political economy of health care. In fact, part of the reason I accepted the (full time) job I currently have, in hospital revenue cycle management, is to clarify my thoughts on that very subject. So I’m open to being schooled on issues in health care by anyone willing and able to do so–a category that probably includes a very large number of people. For the time being, I’m willing to remain at least temporarily in a state of curmudgeonly skepticism, willing to take pot shots at almost everyone, but unwilling to pledge allegiance to much of anything. You might regard that as a frivolous position to take, considering the stakes involved. But I don’t.
Since I’m going to be writing here at PoT about health care a fair bit in the near future (I’ve done some already), take what I say in the preceding skeptical (or dialectical) spirit. My aim is, through discussion and experience, to work my way from skepticism to something more definite.
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 