tea and tortoises

Sometimes people say the word deserve in a context where I don’t actually think it ends up meaning much. Certainly, with respect to a particular rule system you could intelligibly make claims about who deserves what. Saying “the fastest runner in the race deserves to win” seems to make a certain amount of sense, although it just seems like what you’re really getting at is “the fastest runner of the race is the winner”. I suppose you could imagine a 1st place prize being awarded to someone who actually was the second fastest, but in a certain sense I’d be tempted to say the fastest runner still is the winner, but the awarding committee has erroneously claimed someone else is the winner. I suppose in a certain sense the winner is the person walking away with the prize money, but I think you get what I’m getting at.

No, this is not what I’m referring to. Folks seem to make sort of…..generalized claims about what other folk deserve. Sometimes it’s good:“you deserve healthcare”, or “you deserve happiness”. Sometimes it’s bad: “so and so deserves to die” or “you deserve what’s coming to you.”. I have to admit…I have no idea what this might mean. From a secular perspective I definitely haven’t a clue what you mean. Like…actually, what do you mean? You might want someone to be happy, or you might want someone to die for some infraction or another, but you don’t seem to be claiming that this is just what you want. You might be saying something like “the optimal society is one wherein X consequence comes as a result of X behavior”. That would make a certain amount of sense. But why not just say that, precisely, then? That’s the sort of thing I could meaningfully interact with. For example, I think a society without the death penalty is actually a much better society, and then we would have a discussion. Hard to talk about what people deserve though.

From a theistic perspective you can get a little farther with the concept. You might be appealing to something like the Levitical laws, which has fairly straightforward “if someone does X then Y is the punishment” stuff. In that context X deserves Y just means: Y is what the people of Israel have been commanded to do to you if you happen to do X. From a Christian perspective it all gets a bit hazier, since the New Testament doesn’t have anything like the Levitical laws, and we have at least one instance (woman caught in adultery) where Christ straight up shuts down an attempt at enforcing one of the Levitical Laws. For Christians, saying “X deserves Y” doesn’t usually make sense to me. Sometimes you’ll get a Christian saying “everyone deserves hell”, which basically comes out to either “In fact, God is going to send everyone to hell, absent Christ’s salvific action” or perhaps “Hell is the natural consequence of sin, and everyone has sinned, so in fact everyone is going to hell, absent Christ’s salvific action”. Those may not roll of the tongue as well, but I think it paints a clearer picture of what your trying to say. You might be appealing to some sort of “ought”, but I really don’t know what the unqualified “ought” is supposed to be anyway (see my post titled The Language of Ethics).

At any rate, here we are, and I have another suggestion. Jettison the word “deserve”. I don’t think it ends up meaning much, and it’s vague enough to be unhelpful for communication.