I’m not convinced there can be a rational analysis here; or even that such a thing is useful.
It would be useful in helping us understand how to move past it, especially in public policy. A lot of what Rawls, and later Nussbaum, says about desert is highly rational (as is Nozick’s contradictory view). Yet it also seems to tie into some very basic human responses that may not be rational at all. Are there non-consequential, non-welfarist reasons why a rapist shouldn’t “get away with it”? A tougher question than it might appear.
The Fragility of Goodness? I haven’t read it, unfortunately. have you?
But we can probe a bit, based on other ethical considerations. We can grant that ethics is not algorithmic. “Success” as understood in the OP might differ from flourishing. What remains may be the cultivation of virtue, the insistence on improvement.
Some interesting relevant facts/thoughts.
The degree to which we are motivated to take particular actions are informed by our environment and history, as well as our neurological makeup.
The degree to which we feel a sense of personal agency is another relevant determinant to the likelihood we take directed action to achieve an outcome.
In other words, hard work is harder work in some contexts than others, but feeling like you have no say in how hard you work (which is purely a function of narrative) can make hard work harder.
I have a high IQ, which allows me to do some things with much less effort than other people. I am not responsible in any but the most peripheral ways for my IQ (I don’t batter my head against the wall), but it’s an incredibly strong predictor in my success at cognitive tasks. Is that luck? I am fortunate, for sure.
I have Attention Deficit Disorder. I am not any more responsible for that than my IQ. It makes doing the class of behaviors that is traditionally classified as “being disciplined” more difficult for me than the average person. This makes being successful at tasks that involve organizational structures more difficult for me. Am I unlucky? It’s certainly less than ideal.
Can I make choices that optimize for my IQ and interests, and insulate against my ADD? I think so. I chose work that was mentally and socially stimulating without requiring a structured academic degree, and I had pretty good success in it. I’ve kept myself otherwise interested with amateur acting and lots of self-directed learning.
I can imagine ways that small details out of my control might have drastically changed my life for both the better and the worse. I can see versions of my life where I was dead by 30, and versions where I was wealthy and content (I am relatively content, but wealthy is a bit of a stretch… I guess it’s all relative though). Apart from the appropriate humility for what success I have, and the appropriate lack of shame for the success I’ve failed to achieve. I’m not sure what benefit such imaginings bring me.
One can have both luck and be a hard worker and do well or horrible in life but that doesn’t mean that luck doesn’t matter or hard work doesn’t matter
Also, I didn’t mean to imply that I want you to be a fatalist. I’m simply saying that luck is an important factor in life.
To a fatalist, it doesn’t matter unless they were fated for it to be so. To someone with free will it does matter unless they choose a different outcome. There is everything between these truths. The point if one needs to create one is to know thy self. Some examples:
Personal truth.
Social truth.
Universal truth.
Where do you stand? (You can reverse engineer these truths by knowing who you are right now as a possible example. Luck also doesn’t exist to a fatalist only the illusion of it.)
Ecclesiastes chips in:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
I read and admired it when it first came out and (like so much else) have largely forgotten it. I had in mind her Anger and Forgiveness, which I read just recently. Not her best book, but she has interesting things to say about how our strong intuitions about desert, understood as rewards and punishments for certain behaviors, have to be confronted when we try to promulgate a forward-looking social policy. I think she’s too quick to dismiss the normative appeal of “getting one’s just deserts,” though I agree that the concept is probably unworkable at a societal level.
@LordKing777 or anyone
I had some time and thought I’d bring up a mental model to bridge the gap on how to analyze where do you stand? Important note that there is a difference between where you personally stand or where you stand universally.
When you say you are “the pilot,” this is how I construe that comment: you operate at Level 2, with possible lines extending toward Level 1 or Level 3 depending on context.
Level 0: observers.
Level 1: free will. You possess complete free will and fully control your trajectory and outcomes for whoever is in your story. There is no collective consciousness unless you allow it.
Level 2: Degree of control. You fully control your environment or yourself and partially the other variable. (You have the potential to be famous in whatever. If you are not pursuing this, it is your right.)
Level 3: Degree of control. You fully control your self and nothing of the other variable.
Level 4. Degree of control. You partially control yourself or your environment. You’re usually following someone else’s story and can at times exercise your own divine rights.
Level 5: fatalism: you have to follow your fate as there are no choices.
Level 6: excommunicated: You are forced to go against your destiny/fate in order to survive.
You do not control the environment, nor does it solely control you; rather, you co-create each other.
free will is like sailing a ship. You cannot control the wind or the ocean (fatalism/environment), but you have absolute control over your sails and rudder (free will). Your trajectory is a collaboration between your will and the universe’s laws.
That’s called level 2 congrats. (Wait until you’re level 1 or also known as a dream within a dream.)
One final tip, in my experience most are at level 3 - 5. If you really are a level 2, then you are a bell of the ball and have access to things like your dream job. To others, this a fork in the road of a could have been but for whatever reason it never came into being.
The myth that hard work pays off keeps the serfs in the field.
Add the myth that one is responsible for one’s situation through one’s choices, and serfdom services itself.
That’s America.
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Unfortunately, hard work does not always pay off at all. You can put years of effort, discipline, and sacrifice into something and still fail to get the outcome you wanted
Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure
…we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.
A simulation, in which success was achievable by both talent and luck. The implications: talent increases the probability of converting a lucky opportunity into success; the most talented rarely win; and the absolute highest peaks of success were almost never occupied by the most talented people. Instead, they were overtaken by people with moderate talent who simply experienced a higher-than-average streak of lucky breaks.
In addition, success breeds success. Early random luck compounds into greater institutional access, resources, and visibility, skewing final outcomes into a massive wealth-gap distribution.
The most interesting part of this paper is that it asks why we give more resources to the successful—supposedly on the basis of merit, but actually on the basis of luck.
To this we can add the more recent bias that we give resources to those who are noisy—those who feature in the media—an aspect even more removed from merit. The result is Trump and Musk.
Both equal distribution and random distribution to a large group of high performers were more successful than distribution based on merit.
The conclusion is that success is not a measure of merit.
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