You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else.
I don't think it's unfair or morally wrong that an attractive person can be paid to model whereas I can not. Or a very tall person could be paid to play basketball while a short person who has more skill and practiced much longer and harder can not.
It's hard to change you height, but your mind? Of course you can change that!
You can exercise and train your mind of course, as you can with your body. I don't see that as a plausible reason people believe this way. I think they are stuck in the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual dogma for reasons that are not rational.
A leftist is not immune, and a professor is certainly not immune to this.
I think progessives care mostly about the economic consequences, not a judgement of someone as a person.
Also as I said, there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
If it's not, even the best funded policies with the best intentions can only get you so far, and inequality will remain. Not because of a conspiracy that is keeping some down while lifting others up, but because of nature.
I do believe that it would be good on all counts if they would accept genetics, because it would allow for asking much better questions, but I can see why they can't: they're heavily invested in the opposing position and few people are happy to just throw away an investment.
> there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
That's true, but maybe that's because they matter less? I.e. if inequality was primarily defined by height or beauty, they might have a harder time with it. Intelligence & related non-physical things are more important, I believe everybody intuitively accepts that.
And furthermore, looking into extremes, it's also perfectly clear that people are not actually against the idea that there is "unchangeable bad luck". A person with a severe genetic based mental disability (let's say downs syndrome) is clearly extremely unlikely to ever create much value or be paid much money and nobody has a problem with that (again I'm talking purely economically, not their value as a person or the love and happiness they bring to others).
I believe they matter less because they're not a great predictor for success. You have plenty of very attractive people working the checkout at the super market, but few very smart people. At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
Fair point about people with severe genetic disadvantages. I guess most people broadly categorize them into a different group and measure their success relative to that group ("he's doing great, he can often manage his daily chores alone"), not compared to "normal" people. It's more of a achievement vs perceived potential, I think.
You can see whether or not they are smart, can you?
> At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
This just all seems like complete handwaving to make observations fit the hypothesis.
What we do know for sure is that people are not at all hesitant about attributing to luck/genetics many things which affect a person's ability to contribute, create value, and earn money. Both physical and intellectual conditions, as well as circumstances of birth. So the burden of proof required to claim otherwise for specific cases has to be far higher than this.
It would be a real moral problem to have others judge the value that someone is able to contribute by strange factors like this -- some faceless "expert" decides the NBA player has to forfeit their income because they are over 7'2".
The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.
If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
I also think there should be various safety nets so the poorest and least skilled people can have at least basic access to necessities and training if they would be otherwise unable to support themselves.
That's not really what I'm saying. The ways in which society hands out wealth and power today are not necessarily the ways in which it always has or always will. What specific traits lend one toward success are a bit subjective and take different forms at different times and places. So if right now, some individual cannot succeed as easily as another, those tables may very well turn at some point in the future.
To the degree that we justify whoever is being rewarded now, because they are smart/resilient/beautiful (by current standards) or whatever allows them to succeed, we must also acknowledge that under different circumstances it may very well be that we would be congratulating someone else for completely different justifying reasons. By the same token, if someone is not rewarded by society, we should resist the urge to justify their lack of success in terms of some intrinsic deficiency, when indeed they very well may have succeeded with the same traits in a different version of society. The arbitrary nature of how society chooses to reward individuals clashes with attempts to justify the status quo, which would much prefer to describe outcomes as an inevitable consequence of various conditions, like genetics, that can be used to explain why some are wealthy/powerful and others destitute.
It is this framing that I find to be morally suspect, because it tries to justify the current social hierarchy in absolute terms, when the reality is a bit more complex and subject to the prevailing whims of the times we live in.
> If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
Agreed. I only want to acknowledge that these are but a few of the many ways society can choose to value its individual members. The genetics, or upbringing, or nutrition, or behaviors of those who have achieved success are not predictive of obtaining wealth or power in all versions of society, past and present, and so should not necessarily be treated as more important or superior in any universal way.
You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?
I think you can put anyone in that environment and they would become elite in whatever you push them into if they stick with it. On the other hand when you look at people that have bad outcomes in life, they generally don't have any good role models or much parental presence in their lives, and that seems to be a much stronger factor than genetics in terms of finding success in this world.
To me, 'everyone' does not mean literally every person but rather the vast majority. Whether this number is 95% or 90% is going to be interpreted differently. I think nearly all of us can agree that as intelligence falls on a bell curve there will always be those unfortunate enough to not be able to do certain tasks. However the nature of the bell curve does mean that around 90% of people are above ~80 IQ.
I see intelligence mostly as your rate of learning. That means you're competing with people who will get better faster than you. The only way to beat that is to outwork them, but there are only so many hours in the day.
More so because there is no proof for that.
Individuals exhibit different levels of intelligence. Sure, life is unfair.
However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.
Do you have an alternative explanation for the results of twin studies on IQ then? It's also not just IQ, so many things very strongly correlate between identical twins.
> Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
Does natural selection only work on non-humans then?
Alternatively, it could be viewed as more of a reshuffling, where selection will still take place in the long run but with very different pressures.
The way I see it, none of us asked to be born, so if we really are trying to be 'fair', everyone should be granted a base level of material support regardless of their ability to contribute. I also think all of us would be much better off we collectively valued happiness more than material wealth. There is definitely a place for incentives, but when those come with the baggage of class warfare, past a certain point they become more destructive than constructive on aggregate.
Yes, definitely. Ask anyone who breeds animals for a living. You can select for even more abstract traits like "willingness to train", obedience or fearlessness.
While they do not necessarily inherit intelligence, there is a non-zero likelihood that eg. intelligence is a gene-thing. This non-zero likelihood might be bigger than a primarily by moral standards led discussion might suggest us to be.
I don't see why that would be more convincing. As a hyperbole, if two completely different species (say a monkey and a primate) are exposed to the same learning environment, one would definitely end up fairing better than the other due to the differences in their brain. The twin studies just show that, given most other factors for twins are likely to be the same.
Genes determine differences in intelligence between say a human and a dog or a human and a bird.
Genes also determine physical size, skin color and basically every difference in human attributes.
What black magic makes it so that these genes just happen to not at all influence intelligence among humans?
You can't see it but ideology is influencing your bias. You are unable to see how ludicrous it is to say intelligence isn't inherited when literally every single other thing is.
Yes, this is why top schools are designed to segregate out stupid people - positive eugenics.
If not everyone can be expected to learn and be proficient in everything due to genetics, then suddenly merit itself is also based strongly on luck, and now the belief that people with greater merit should have better lives no longer seems fair. Intelligence is now just another gift to the fortunate who are destined to have a better life. How can you feel good about using your considerable advantages to the detriment of others if your merit is the result of a jackpot paid out at birth?
Even if you believe that with enough time and perseverance you can overcome your lack of intelligence compared to another person, you have to ignore the fact that having to spend more time on something (but actually, everything) than everyone else will put you further and further and further behind everyone else in a way that compounds quickly.
Modern society is ostensibly structured this way: the smart will win. If intelligence becomes genetic, it can instead be said that "the lucky will win." And successful people desperately want that to not be the case, because they want to believe they deserve their considerable advantages. And they want to be guilt free about the miserable lives some people lead; it's their fault for being stupid, after all.