What does anyone deserve? Where does a idea like [deserve] fit in our models of the world?
A simple idea but it seems to hold behind it quasi-religious undertones.
Deserve seems bound up in mythic concepts of Justice. Justice as a supernatural balancer.
“He got what he deserved.” As if the judgment of people were echoed by some force in the universe which would eventually “settle the score”.
Does anyone deserve what they get no mattter if it is beneficial or harmful? Do those who suffer deserve it? Do those who proser deserve it? This might be freely expessed in a simplified version of “Karma.”
Yet isn"t this just so much after the fact projecting? That something desirable or undesirable befalls someone is not the result of some form of cosmic accounting.
The universe holds no bond with our all too human judgments of each other. Yet we wish it did. We wish that the universe cared as we cared, but it cannot.
I’d say if we adopt the framework that we are responsible for our own thoughts, which in turn manifest in the real world at an intensity dictated by our emotional influence, as translated by everyone else’s conscious input, then we can incorporate the notion of ‘deserve’. Under this system it is merely an acronym for ‘thought’ or ‘imagined’.
You deserve it if you can make it happen, sonny boy.
Xunzian I always thought you were a chick. Are you female?
Mostly agree with the above from Old Gobbo
(yeah like I understand what he’s talking about!??!lol)
but I’d put it in a slightly different way - what can you earn - see previous post based on an old Smiths tune of course!
It’s a synthetic value… You desurve something or don’t in accordance with a system under which u are being judged…
if we were to try and make it a kind of objective value… then we could say things like “a flying rock desurves to fall” … judging situations within an objective system of laws… the laws of nature…
but being a determinist that would be a waste of time… since everything that happens “desurves” to happen…
Yeah, your point pretty much sums it up. One “deserves” something in so far as a social system dictates it. If I go out and rape and kill a bunch of people I don’t logically deserve punishment through the act in itself but I deserve punishment due to the fact that society does not want me to do such things, thus I am judged. This is called rule of law.
I was just thinking about this the other day. It seems that people have such solid impressions of what someone ‘deserves’ as a result of doing X, yet absolutely no reasoning for why a bad deed deserves a bad deed. We don’t even know what the word ‘deserve’ really means. It’s just something we feel, yet the entire penal system is based on it. We murder people in retaliation, as in capital punishment – we end life – because we feel like it.
