We think we deserve things.
I study hard, and I get good grades. I treat people nicely, and they’re nice to me in return. I lie to someone, they discover the lie and get angry. In each of these pairings, one event joins to another by something more than causality, by a relationship of ‘deserving’. What does this relationship involve?
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In part, it involves a debt. To deserve is to be owed. Someone or something owes success to the diligent, praise to the charitable, scorn and punishment to the law-breakers.
Who owes? In former times, God; today, the cold impersonal universe. At all times, though, society, or rather, society mystified as God or nature. ‘What one deserves’ functions as a debt owed by society to a person for their good or bad deeds.
The relationship of deserving expresses a temporarily unrealized potential in the relationship between an individual and their group. To ‘get what one deserves’ realizes the potential, discharges the debt.
Certain events break the logic of deserving. Does anyone deserve to own billions of dollars? Does anyone deserve what happens to them in a genocide? We react to these anomalies in various ways, trying to restore the logic of the system of deserving.
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Deserving has another, more intimate dimension. We believe that we deserve things. I deserve this accolade for my accomplishment. I deserve the respect of others, their esteem, their love. Or I do not — I deserve scorn and rejection for the immorality or the ineptitude of my actions, for my bad deeds.
We define ourselves in part by what we think we deserve. Deserving constitutes part of the fabric of our selfhood. So we struggle, not just to achieve certain things, but to deserve them.
Likewise, when someone else deserves something, that obligates me. If a person deserves respect, I owe them respect; if they deserve love, I should love them. If they deserve punishment, I must find a way to punish them or to participate in society’s punishment of them.
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From a strictly materialist, scientific view, this concept of deserving seems to involve some mystification. For instance, why should a person who works hard ‘deserve’ good grades or financial success? Working hard leads to one or the other of these outcomes some of the time, under the right conditions, as a causal relationship. If I throw a ball at a target I can hit the target; does that mean I deserved to hit the target? What makes hard work to an end different from throwing a ball at a target?
Why does a person perform any act, good or bad? In the first instance, because they have a motivation. Where did the motivation come from? Perhaps from their own values and desires. But at some point, retracing the chain of consequence leads us somewhere beyond the boundaries of the person. Our motives come from beyond ourselves, from the complex interplay of our basic biological nature, plastic and protean as it is, and the networks of relationships we have with human and non-human others in the world around us. We may choose what to do at any given moment, but we did not choose to be who were are.
In other words: who I “am”, and what I do, results from a play of forces I mostly do not control and mostly have no awareness of. Even my conscious choices have causes and consequences that I cannot know. Why should society owe me esteem or disesteem for these choices made under these conditions?
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Perhaps we can grant this for little complex choices made in ordinary circumstances: the choice to buy someone a birthday present that turns out not to quite suit them, or to spend more time than one should with someone who is not one’s lover. But our impulse to moral judgment, to assign just desserts, comes roaring back in when we confront the extreme cases: the woman who sacrifices her life to rescue strangers from a burning car before fire crews can arrive, the man who tortures and murders for his own sadistic enjoyment. Surely, we say, these people deserve something.
What if we did not? What if we heard that impulse, the impulse to say “they deserve/I deserve” and simply did not act on it?
We would begin to experience events around us less for what they mean to us, what debt they incur in us or how they affect the debts owed to us. We would begin to perceive beyond these relations of indebtedness to the more complex, ambivalent, and contradictory forces that motivate people’s actions.
What could we do then? What could we not do?
The Practical Theorist 
I just posted a blog on almost the same topic, though I didn’t go into the “big questions” in as much depth.
I think optimistic theories about a just universe like belief in karma tend to get dressed up for those of us with preening entitlement complexes in wealthy countries like the U.S. Buddhists might try to rack up karma not expecting instant gratification (i.e., payback in their own lifetimes) and not even aspiring to reincarnation as a prince, but rather hoping to attain a state of enlightenment that allows them to escape the suffering of life and dematerialize forever. *Poof* no more pain, and no more happiness that brings with it the eventual tragic loss of whatever makes you happy. Not what most Americans are thinking about when they profess to believe in karma, is it? Americans want karma to promise them rewards on earth so they don’t have to look forward to cavorting with cherubs in heaven.
But I do think that having hopes of being treated with reciprocity when we are behaving in respectful and considerate ways are reasonable. You just can’t get hung up on those expectations, because not everyone will reciprocate. And then there’s George Bernard Shaw’s take on The Golden Rule: “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” And that was from a cheeky socialist.
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Thanks for the comment. Yeah, I agree that we have lots of perfectly good reasons to treat people with respect and consideration. I can think of at least three: the expectation of reciprocity, which you mentioned; as a kind of activism that may not reward us individually but could help create the world we want to live in; or as an expression of our own relationship with ourselves (e.g. because “I want to be a compassionate person”, that sort of thing). I’m sure there are others. All of these are oriented to some concrete social relations: with individual others, with a community, with ourselves. In each case it’s possible to quickly step back from the concept of deserving to the more particular expectations that guide our actions.
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I really like the way you put that, so I quoted your comment under my blog entry on the same general topic. Thanks for your reply!
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My pleasure!
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