a blog about philosophy in public affairs

Category: Moral values Page 1 of 7

When whatever you do, you get what you least deserve

In this post, David Benatar (U. Cape Town) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the paradox of desert, exploring the issues that arise from ‘acting rightly’ and the costs it may incur.


(C) David Benatar. Camondo Stairs, Galata, Istanbul, 2022

Imagine that you are a soldier fighting a militia that is embedded within an urban civilian population. You face situations in which, in the fog of war, you are unsure whether the person you confront is a civilian or a combatant, not least because the combatants you are fighting often dress like civilians. You can either shoot and ask questions later, or you can pause, even momentarily, to take stock, and risk being shot.

Depending on the precise circumstances, pausing may be either a moral requirement or merely supererogatory (that is, a case of going beyond the call of duty). Either way, the soldier who pauses is morally superior to the soldier who shoots without hesitation. However, there will be situations in which a soldier is killed precisely because he acted in the morally better way.

Understanding the paradox

This is only one example of what I call the “paradox of desert”. This paradox is not the familiar observation that “bad things happen to good people”. Instead, it is that the very thing, namely acting rightly, that incurs the cost, also makes the cost (especially) undeserved.

The paradox arises is various ways. It is not always the case that the person who fails to act rightly deserves the fate suffered by the person who does act rightly. This is partly because the phrase “acting rightly” can mean either “doing one’s duty” or “going beyond the call of duty”.

If, for example, pausing before shooting is supererogatory and not a moral requirement, then we certainly cannot say that the soldier who shoots deserves to die. However, even in such circumstances we can say that the soldier who pauses, least deserves to die.

Another reason why a person who does not act rightly may not deserve the fate that befalls the person who does act rightly, is that nobody may deserve that fate. For example, it is clearly unreasonable to think that somebody who fails to act as a whistle-blower deserves to die, even if that is the fate that befalls the person who is a whistle-blower. However, it remains the case that the whistle-blower is especially undeserving of paying the price of acting rightly.

The paradox of desert manifests very often, and not only in extraordinary circumstances such as war or whistleblowing. For example, extremely charitable people may give away so much of what they have, that they later find themselves unable to afford some important good, such as health care.

Similarly, a person who assiduously avoids contributing to global warming may, for that reason, be deprived of benefits, such as reunions with geographically distant but emotionally proximate relatives. By contrast, the person who flies without compunction thereby gains those benefits.

The paradox of desert has both retrospective and prospective manifestations. Retrospectively, we simply observe that somebody got what they least deserved. Prospectively, the paradox generates a dilemma for the person who is deciding whether to act rightly. Should you act rightly and pay the price, or should you not act rightly and thereby avoid a cost by not acting rightly? What you deserve is not fixed until you act, but however you act, you will get what you least deserve. That is paradoxical.

Responding to the paradox

One possible response to the paradox is to deny that the costs of acting rightly are net costs. This response will be effective in some situations. For example, charitable contributions can benefit not only the recipients of charity but also the givers.

However, while it is reasonable to think that acting rightly brings some reward, enough reward sometimes to outweigh the costs of acting rightly, it is implausible to think that the rewards of acting rightly always outweigh the costs. This is because of how severe the costs sometimes are. They might include death, considerable suffering, imprisonment, and social ostracism.

The paradox of desert does not have to arise in every circumstance. It need arise only sometimes, which it does when the costs of acting rightly are greater than any benefit of doing so. Indeed, it is very likely that the paradox of desert arises with great regularity. If we look carefully at the human world, we find that although it sometimes does pay to be good, the reverse is also often the case. This is not a license to act wrongly, although it may sometimes be a valid reason not to go beyond the call of duty. Recognizing the paradox of desert can itself have value. Although some instances of the paradox of desert are not avoidable, others are. At least collectively, we can limit the situations in which acting rightly is a net cost, and acting wrongly is a net benefit. Thus, if we recognize the paradox of desert, we can go some way to meliorating its manifestations.

An inverted verification principle for political theory

What do these four countries have in common?

Driving for Values

Smart cities are full of sensors and collect large amounts of data. One reason for doing so is to get real-time information about traffic flows. A next step is to steer the traffic in a way that contributes to the realisation of values such as safety and sustainability. Think of steering cars around schools to improve the safety of children, or of keeping certain areas car-free to improve air quality. Is it legitimate for cities to nudge their citizens to make moral choices when participating in traffic? Would a system that limits a person’s options for the sake of improving quality of life in the city come at the cost of restricting that person’s autonomy? In a transdisciplinary research project, we (i.e., members of the ESDiT programme and the Responsible Sensing Lab) explored how a navigation app that suggests routes based on shared values, would affect users’ experiences of autonomy. We did so by letting people try out speculative prototypes of such an app on a mobile phone and ask them questions about how they experienced different features of the app. During several interviews and a focus group, we gained insights about the conditions under which people find such an app acceptable and about the features that increase or decrease their feeling of autonomy.

Good Friendships for Real People

In this post Simon Keller (Victoria) discusses his recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, in which he asks what it means to be a good friend in non-ideal circumstances.

Image by efes from Pixabay

Invisible discrimination: the double role of implicit bias

In this post, Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (Stockholm University & Institute for Futures Studies) discusses her recently published article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (co-authored by Nicolas Olsson Yaouzis) exploring the roles that implicit bias and social norms play in discriminating hiring practices.


The US, like many other countries, is marked by pervasive racial inequalities, not least in the job market. Yet many US Americans, when asked directly, uphold egalitarian “colour-blind” norms: one’s race shouldn’t matter for one’s chances to get hired. Sure enough, there is substantial disagreement about whether it (still) does matter, but most agree that it shouldn’t. Given such egalitarian attitudes, one would expect there to be very little hiring discrimination. The puzzle is how then to explain the racial inequalities in hiring outcomes.

A second puzzle is the frequent occurrence of complaints about “reverse discrimination” in contexts such as the US. “You only got the job because you’re black” is a reaction familiar to many who do get a prestigious job while being black, as it were. Why are people so suspicious when racial minorities are hired?

Intellectually Humble Free Speech Law

Scholars familiar with the philosophical arguments in favor of robust free speech protections commonly identify three kinds of arguments given in favor of such protections:

1. Free speech helps us discover truth,
2. Free speech is required for democratic self-governance,
3. Free speech is an important part of autonomy.

Contemporary social and political circumstances—including the persistent spread of viral misinformation via social media—have called these traditional arguments into question.

Can we really claim that free speech helps us discover truth when the data suggest that falsehoods travel, on average, much faster and farther than truthful corrections? Does free speech, on balance, help preserve democracy when the integrity of elections is being undermined by orchestrated viral disinformation campaigns?

Such questions prompted by social, political, and material reality ought to be taken seriously. Taking such questions seriously may require us to reconsider what kinds of arguments best ground free speech rights. This may, in turn, require us to reconsider what good free speech law and policy should look like.

An ad-hominem attack on… actually, let’s just call it Reply to Van Goozen

Thanks to Sara for a thoughtful response to my initial post. Sara’s very reasonable, and I confess a certain deliberate provocativeness in the original post. Nonetheless, I want to push back on a few things.

An ad-hominem attack on an ad-hominem attack on non-consequentialism

Last week, Michael Bennett proposed an ‘ad-hominem attack’ on non-consequentialism. He suggested, quite plausibly, that philosophers and political theorists tend to produce work that is complex, at least partially because ‘[p]romotion and prestige requires a constant stream of publications’ and it is ‘difficult to keep that up unless you have complex theories that require a great deal of elaboration’. This provides support for a kind-of debunking argument against contemporary anti-consequentialism:

It does seem awfully suspicious that the normative realm would turn out to be so complicated, given our career incentives to make it look complicated. I think we have reason to be less confident in complex philosophy as a result, and less confident in anti-consequentialism in particular.

I think it’s clear that among academic philosophers there is a tendency to overcomplicate things. This applies to philosophers of all stripes and backgrounds, but is perhaps particularly jarring among philosophers of the ‘analytic’ or ‘Anglo-American’ tradition, given our avowed focus on analysis, logic argument and rigour (this characterization of the analytic tradition can and has been questioned, but let’s go with it for the time being). Indeed, the focus on providing logical arguments for our positions seems to me to contribute significantly to this  tendency towards complexity, often at the cost of clarity.

But to get to the point – does this institutional and epistemic bias in favour of complexity provide an argument (debunking or otherwise) against anti-consequentialism? I’m not sure that this is the case.

An ad-hominem attack on anti-consequentialism

I think there’s something unintentionally revealing about the title of Frances Kamm’s book Intricate Ethics. Most people, I expect, would find it quite odd for intricacy to be a key selling point for a theory of ethics. Yet this actually makes complete sense, albeit not in the way Kamm intends. Philosophers need ethics to be intricate. If it were simple, they’d be out of a job.

Selling Silence: The Morality of Sexual Harassment NDAs

In this post, Scott Altman (USC Gould) discusses his recent JOAP 2022 Annual Essay Prize winning article about the morality of sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements.

Harvey Weinstein, Chairman, The Weinstein Company
Harvey Weinstein by Thomas Hawk (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) pay sexual harassment and abuse victims not to tell their stories or name their abusers. Harvey Weinstein’s many NDAs, and the #MeToo movement, spurred some states to make such NDAs legally unenforceable. 

My Selling Silence article argued in favor of these laws. Sexual wrongdoer NDAs protect abusers, endanger future victims, and undermine deterrence. The article rejected three justifications for wrongdoer NDAs, two of which I will mention briefly before explaining the third.

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