Against Desert Part 4: Better to be Worse

This is the best argument in the series against desert by far and I think sort of settles the debate unless I'm wrong about something important

Here are the first three parts of the series.

Suppose that a person is guaranteed to suffer at some point in the future. If they are morally worse, according to desert views, it is better if they suffer. Thus, if a person is guaranteed to suffer, it seems on its face that desert views imply that it would be better if they were morally worse; this makes it so that the badness of their suffering decreases. But this is implausible—making someone who will suffer morally worse cannot be good.

To avoid this, the believer in desert may posit that for every level of suffering, the marginal benefit in terms of total goodness from decreasing one’s desert always makes a bigger difference than the changed effect on the value of their well-being. But it’s not clear that there’s a way to do that.

The most simple account of desert cannot meet this basic constraint. According to this view, the more deserving one is, the better their well-being is. However, this would mean that as their level of well-being goes to infinity, the marginal value of a small increase in desert would go to infinity. This is an implausible form of hypersensitivity, but even if it were not, it implies that, as long as adding a bit of virtue is not infinitely valuable, then if one were suffering a lot, it would be better to make them more vicious.

One could adopt a capped view according to which the more well-being one has, the less their desert multiplies the value of the marginal unit of well-being. So, for example, if one was more virtuous by 1 unit of virtue, this would increase the value of their first 100 units of well-being by a factor of .1, but their next hundred units by a factor of .01, and then by .001, and so on. Perhaps the motivation for this would be prioritarian—the more well-being one gets, the less value their marginal units of well-being have, so the less value is added by multiplying their units of well-being.

But then this view runs into worries on the back end. It seems that if two people are both being viciously tortured, it is much worse if the more virtuous one is tortured. Thus, if being virtuous diminishes the value caused by suffering, this both implies the objectionable type of hypersensitivity and also implies that when people who will be horrifically tortured get more virtuous that is a bad thing. The only way to avoid this conclusion while maintaining the multiplicative view is to think that there is also a cap on the back end such that the more badly off one is the less virtue multiplies the badness of their suffering. So, for example, if a bad person becomes very good this would make their first 1000 units of suffering ten times worse, but their next 1000 units would be only twice as bad, and then 1.1 times as bad, and so on.

This view runs into problems of its own. For one, it implies, that if the most virtuous possible person and the most vicious possible person have already suffered an unfathomable amount, then the marginal badness of adding a bit of extra suffering tend towards being equal. So, for example, if Jesus Christ and Hitler have already endured 10 quadrillion units of torture, there would be virtually no difference in badness between giving each of them more torture.

Secondly, it will almost certainly run afoul of the original constraint, implying that making a person more vicious makes things better. Even if it only multiplies the first sizeable chunk of well-being in value, it’s intuitive that the effect that would have would more than counterbalance the badness of a lot of extra units of vice. This is true unless being vicious is really, extremely bad, but that’s not intuitive—it doesn’t seem that a lot of vicious people makes the world really bad. If there were lots of vicious happy people, that doesn’t seem like a terrible world, but it would be on this account.

Finally, it’s totally unmotivated. There at least was an intelligible prioritarian explanation of why desert multiplies the value of excess pleasure. But why would, as one gets more miserable, the amount that their virtue affects the goodness of their marginal well-being tend toward zero?

No matter what one’s views are, one has to think one of the following three things; first that as one’s well-being goes to infinity—in either the positive or negative direction—the intrinsic value of their virtue tends towards infinity; second, that as one gets more and more well-being in either the positive or negative direction, the marginal value of desert on the value of their well-being tends towards zero; or third, that making people more virtuous in ways that affect no one else can be intrinsically arbitrarily bad. If one denies desert, they can easily accept the second, but if one accepts the idea of desert, then they cannot—it does not seem like the marginal value of giving an extra unit of suffering to a very tortured either Jesus or Hitler would tend towards equality as their levels of torture tend towards infinity. The other two are non-options, especially since the first one implies hypersensitivity wherein small changes to virtue make infinite differences to the goodness of a state of affairs from the standpoint of desert.

It must be one of these three things; unless two is false, the marginal value of extra virtue from the standpoint of value multiplication can tend towards infinity as their well-being tends towards infinity. Unless one is false, from the standpoint of the intrinsic value of desert, adding desert doesn’t produce value that tends towards infinity. So if they’re both false, adding desert can produce infinite disvalue and finite value, meaning it would be intrinsically bad—and not just a bit, infinitely so.

Accepting the first option is also entirely unmotivated; why would being happier make your desert better from the standpoint of desert? Maybe it makes the value of the well-being higher, but why would it make your desert intrinsically better? We don’t generally think that the value of being virtuous increases when you’re happier—maybe it makes the happiness better because you deserve it, but it wouldn’t increase the value of the virtue.

Additionally, in order to accept one, one has to think that as you get more miserable, the value of one’s desert would increase. Why would that be? Why in the world would we think that it is, from the standpoint of desert, arbitrarily good for super miserable people to have a bit of virtue. This view is just nuts—it requires holding that, as one’s misery tends toward infinity, the value of increasing their virtue by a bit tends towards infinity, but so does the marginal disvalue of their well-being loss. Thus, when one who is arbitrarily miserable gets slightly more virtuous, there is something about this that is worse than all suffering in human history and something better than all pleasure in human history, but they basically cancel out.

It seems like the only remotely viable option is to accept 2. But this is a super hard pill to swallow if one believes in desert. Imagine that both the best person ever and Ted Bundy have been tortured for 100,000,000^100,000,000 years. There are two possible states of affairs. In the first, Bundy will get tortured for an extra 100 years. In the second, the best person ever will get tortured for an extra hundred years and a random child will get a pizza topping. The person who accepts two would have to say that the second state of affairs is better—after all, the marginal value of extra suffering tends towards equality given how enormous both of their sufferings have been.

I basically think this argument disproves desert unless I’m making some basic error in reasoning. So, am I?